A Reflection on Disproportionate Ire

In the wake of an event that causes outrage, people often feel a temptation to lash out. I’m a person. I think there’s a really healthy impulse to desire that others reflect for the sake of making better decisions in the future, and then there’s an unhealthy desire to want to harm those who have caused pain so they will feel pain. The latter is recrimination, a word that derives from the Latin for “to charge/accuse back.” It’s an unhealthy impulse because, while I can try to justify it to myself, if I stop and take a deep breath, I have to admit it’s not focused on healing and making the world better in the long run (though I tell myself it is) but on causing harm in the short run under the false pretense that some lasting good will come of it.

Even the philosophical, abstract tone of that last paragraph is self-protection. I fucked up, and I should own that. I’m sure this is something opinion columnists deal with on a weekly basis: I wrote too fast, and I didn’t take the time to process every point I made, and, in my haste, I screwed up.

In Dear America: A Breakup Letter, my central thesis was that the majority of American voters and non-voters collaborated to empower the Trump administration, either in spite of all its hateful promises or because of them, and that this is not an outlier but a symptom of a deep rot in the American electorate that is rooted in racism, misogyny, and an enculturated epistemic flaw which dictates that beliefs trump knowledge. I still hold that opinion, and I still feel that America is not a place where I can live safely. I don’t regret leaving. Those of you who were hoping for that particular mea culpa: Sorry-not-sorry, or at least sorry-not-yet. Maybe you will engage in overwhelming activism and deep personal change, fundamentally change America’s politics on every level, and make me regret ever leaving. Please, please do that. I see you out on the streets in front of your state capitols, and it gives me hope that you will make me wrong to leave. I would love that.

But in the meantime, I do want to partly retract a point I made in my book (and I don’t mean the SIX typos readers have found, though I’ll be eternally embarrassed by those). A friend of mine pointed out that I was “punching sideways” at times, and she’s absolutely right. And maybe I’m not alone in this and you can benefit from me sharing my error.

Here’s the thing: I am very, very angry at a tiny sliver of the electorate. Before I get to which one, I should stop there and consider what I say next, but in the book, I didn’t. I let my anger supersede the main point I was trying to make, that the problem in America is that the majority actively want or passively tolerate fascism and have, in different incarnations of that oppressive instinct, tolerated or supported it throughout the history of the United States. So why did I fixate on a tiny portion of the population? Because they are the people who are closest to me. Their betrayal hurt the most. So I aimed my ire at them. And that was wrong.

For me, that group was very-online, hyper-politically engaged Leftists. Yeah, people just like me. Many of my friends in that sliver of the electorate chose to speak out against Harris for various reasons. Because these people were so close to me, and because I told them a Trump victory was personally terrifying due to my death-threat-sending stalkers, I took every one of their statements calling for people to refuse to vote for Harris as a personal attack. I admit, I still do. I’m still angry. There’s no two ways about it: When they said, “I don’t care who wins because they’re both equally bad,” they were absolutely saying, “I don’t care about the impacts on you, Ben, or on anyone else, because I see those effects as being equivalent.” And since I know those effects to be shockingly different, both for me and so many others, I’m hurt by that statement. But my friend is right; out of a place of anger and pain, I’m punching sideways. That sliver of the electorate is so small, they are not the problem. They are just the ones who hurt me most because I was closest to them.

This election was so ridiculously close, it’s possible to slice and dice the vote in a million ways and find groups who could have swung it one way or the other. Like the 2016 election, we could rightly say, “If not for group tiny X, she would have won” and plug a myriad of labels into that variable. If you are like me, that distorts your view of the election. The more important point is this: It never should have been close enough for tiny group X to make a difference!

I’ll bet there are lots of people in other communities who feel similarly betrayed and are turning their ire on their betrayers. Maybe there are five Black trans men who voted for Trump in the entire 333,000,000 people in the US, and I’ll bet their friends are livid with them. Or one Buddhist Latina. I’m sure there are some Pro-Palestinian activists who were so disgusted with the Biden administration enabling Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza that they actively pulled the lever for Trump out of spite. And was the election so close these few votes could have made a difference, depending on their geographic distribution and the individuals’ sway with their networks? It’s possible. We’ll never know if a few more people telling their friends and family to vote for Harris, even if they said they were doing so reluctantly, would have made a difference. But that’s not the point. It should never have been necessary. A healthy electorate would have had space for people on the far left to make protest votes and for people across the spectrum to just make simple human errors and fill in the wrong bubble. The closeness of the election highlights those few votes and obscures the bigger problem: It never should have been close.

I’m still glad Dear America is out there in the world, and I stand by most of what I wrote, but I regret those angry swipes at my fellow Leftists who decided they couldn’t hold their noses this time, and I regret the angry posts I’ve made at their expense since. While I still disagree with them and irrationally feel most hurt by them because of our ideological proximity, they are not the problem I should be focused on any more than any other community’s Leopards-ate-my-face members are their real problem. I should have taken more deep breaths, done more editing, and focused more on encouraging healthy, forward-focused reflection, and I failed to do so.

If you feel inclined to take a swipe at someone close to you who may be regretting their vote or non-vote, or, worse, like me, get in a pre-emptive jab on the assumption they will be particularly stung by some horrific bit of news, I encourage you to learn from my mistake. Yes, everyone’s votes matter, and everyone should get to vote and should feel ownership of the outcome, win or lose. But don’t make my mistake. To strain a metaphor beyond its breaking point, let’s not aim our punches at the margins when a problem is systemic and cultural. I addressed the book to America because America has a problem worth addressing, and I apologize for the times I lost sight of America and aimed for a few individual Americans with whom I’m irrationally angry.