What radicalized you?

Never cede the framing

I’ve seen dozens of iterations of the same meme since Trump won the election. Each one is some version of “What radicalized you? Uh… empathy, duh.”

And I get it. The impulse is a good one, it contains a significant truth. Holding fast to our empathy, caring about people we don’t know, and having compassion for those who are struggling are all immensely important in this increasingly cold and harsh world. But it isn’t radical. Framing empathy as something bold and transgressive is reacting to the fascist onslaught we’re facing rather than taking the time to stake out our own position and perspective.

In a world where the powerful, and many of their supporters, are louder and louder about not caring for people who don’t look like them, and even many people who do, proclaiming that you value other people does matter. It matters a lot, but it’s not radical. And, on the one hand, that’s okay. Something doesn’t have to be radical to be good. I value empathy, both yours and mine, regardless of whether or not maintaining it is a radical act. At the same time, I value clarity around what constitutes a radical approach and outlook. I value it right now, as we engage in an increasingly overt and all-out struggle against oligarchy, more than ever. And so I want to draw a line and help ensure that we orient ourselves toward real radicality in our thought and action.

The first reason to push back a bit on this ubiquitous meme is that it cedes more to the right than we might initially realize. In labeling empathy a radicalizing force we frame it as abnormal, and imply that the absence of empathy is the norm; it’s not. People are social creatures, we are communal creatures, and although capitalism and the weakening of communal ways of living and the many factors that have contributed to the spread of a highly individualistic mentality have led to a decline in the practice of empathy, it’s still in all of us.

The norm in human affairs is, still, giving a shit about one another. People care about each other, it’s built into us on a deep level. Sometimes propaganda succeeds in promoting scapegoating, in delineating certain people who should be cared about and others who should not be, and we’re certainly in one of those spots right now. Generations of racism and individualism and more have found success in their anti-social efforts, but caring about the people around us remains the norm. We just need to look at our day-to-day lives to confirm that our basic empathy remains.

When I walk around New York City I see strangers carrying strangers’ strollers up subway stairs, holding doors for one another, even giving directions to tourists when they don’t particularly feel like it. I’ve gotten stuck in other countries and had people help start my car, I’ve lost my luggage in Colorado and had strangers help me find it, I’ve seen mutual aid efforts pop up like wildflowers during the first weeks of the covid pandemic — those with more rushing to help out those in need. And all of that is just a fraction of a fraction of how empathy persists and flourishes everywhere, every day.

During and after the now all too frequent climate disasters we see empathetic behavior on yet another scale, and we see it consistently. Take the hurricane and massive flooding in North Carolina and across Appalachia last fall. When the waters receded towns came together to build roads with one another, transport food to neighbors who were cut off or immobile, and help one another survive and rebuild. Take the LA wildfires and the thousands of volunteers who leapt into action across the city. Look at the aftermath of hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes and you’ll see the helpers everywhere.

In the wake of these disasters, empathy translates more than ever into the radical action we’re all, ultimately, looking for. But empathy alone is not sufficient to produce radicality. In fact, if we step away from framing that cedes ground to the right, we can see that the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others is the barest minimum. It’s something we can all do, and that most of us practice in one way or another, but it’s just the beginning. Empathy helps people help their neighbors in the aftermath of floods and fires, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle.

What take us far beyond that initial puzzle piece are relationships. The word community is thrown around a ton these days (by people like me) and for good reason. The physical, material, and geographic foundations of tight-knit communities have been fractured, defunded, intentionally abandoned and discarded by the state and the rich. We are more alienated and disconnected than ever, but even in this context we seek out and forge relationships everywhere we can. That is our nature, and even when the landscapes of our lives isolate us people still deliberately foster community.

These relationships are the foundations for radical action, the sinews that tie communities and organizations together and enable us to act collectively. And it's only collectively that we can truly be radical. Because the radical goes after systems rather than individuals. As Angela Davis said forty years ago, “Radical means grasping things at the root.” And the context within which she laid that out matters.

Here it is:

“In the aftermath of the Reagan era, it should be clear that there are forces in our society that reap enormous benefits from the persistent, deepening oppression of women. Members of the Reagan administration include advocates for the most racist, anti working-class, and sexist circles of contemporary monopoly capitalism. These corporations continue to prop up apartheid in South Africa and to profit from the spiraling arms race while they propose the most vulgar and irrational forms of anti-Sovietism—invoking, for example, the ‘evil empire’ image popularized by Ronald Reagan—as justifications for their omnicidal ventures. If we are not afraid to adopt a revolutionary stance—if, indeed, we wish to be radical in our quest for change—then we must get to the root of our oppression. After all, radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’ Our agenda for women’s empowerment must thus be unequivocal in our challenge to monopoly capitalism as a major obstacle to the achievement of equality.”

Getting down to the root means getting down to systems and that which upholds them. And we have to orient our goals towards those systems. It is never enough to simply change individuals and their mindsets. That is necessary for change, but not sufficient. Improving conditions is likewise necessary, but not sufficient to constitute radical change. We must get down to the systems that dominate us, and replace them. As the Combahee River Collective stated directly and unequivocally, “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”

Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

Fostering our empathy is part of this process, but helping people shift internally must be paired with external action to move us toward radical change. “Being radicalized” is not something that can happen inside our heads. It’s not something that can happen alone. You cannot grasp the systemic roots by yourself. Without collective action we remain Schrodinger’s radicals. Anything could be inside that box: a radical, a moderate — the truth can’t be known until the rubber meets the road.

If we remain content with an individualized, watered-down conception of radicality, weird things can happen. In Malcolm Harris’ book Palo Alto, he gives a compelling reason for making this definition a site of real contention. In the ‘60s in the burgeoning Silicon Valley engineers and the like began taking acid. The people encouraging this venture were convinced it would help with productivity, and some bosses were fully on board. In some cases, it seemed to work. People thought up brilliant ideas and transformative concepts. They thought they were generating breakthroughs, they thought they were building the future, they thought they were being radical. There was just one problem — most of them were working for the Pentagon. Not directly, of course, but their early computing software was mostly for missiles. They were subcontracting with Raytheon and IBM who in turn had huge military contracts. So these supposed radicals were not getting to the root of anything, were not politicized, and were deludedly thinking that their individual insights could be radical even when they served to make the United States more effective at bombing the global south.

Needless to say, these engineers were fundamentally wrong. There was nothing radical in visualizing a more perfect circuit that would eventually help guide a bomb to a town in Vietnam. And yet the belief that internal change is enough to constitute being radical has persisted in multiple ways. It’s time to break that cycle. Shifting our hearts and minds has always been necessary, but never sufficient. To be radical is to work in concert with others. To be radical is to take action and organize with others. Our empathy alone can’t radicalize us, we must march with coworkers on the picket line or stand with our neighbors to resist a landlord or lock arms with others as the police advance. That’s the only way we have any real shot of getting down to the roots of what ails us.

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

None of this is to say that the ability to put ourselves in others shoes doesn’t matter. It does. I want to understand other people. But more than that I want to understand how to effectively be in solidarity with them. Empathy is powerful, and will, I hope, keep you from joining the ranks of the far-right. Caring for others can and should prevent you from abandoning your neighbors and joining a political movement based on certain populations being disposable. But empathy is no guarantee that you’ll dig down, grasp the source of what ails us, and join the legions of people yanking up systems of oppression by their roots. It’s no guarantee that you’ll take the action necessary for liberation.

Throughout history plenty of people have wanted life to get better for their neighbors, for the downtrodden, for the exploited. As Richard Wolff writes, “Critics of slavery often defined their objectives as improving slave conditions: achieving better diets, clothing, housing, integrity of slave families and so on.” These people meant well. They wanted the enslaved to not starve, to not suffer from cold and deprivation. And it’s hard to argue with that. None of us want people to suffer. But, Wolff continues, “Other critics took a very different approach: they demanded abolition of slavery.” And there we have the radical approach. The first group was surely empathetic, but the latter group went on to grasp the problem at the root. And, in time, they and enslaved people took radical action, fought, and ultimately destroyed the system of chattel slavery.

Now it’s our turn. I know it’s tempting in this moment to move toward and respond to the dominant arguments, the dominant framing, even when it’s fascist setting the terms of those conversations. Often it happens without us even realizing it. It feels natural to respond to the claims that those in power make, even when they’re not made in good faith. Liberalism tells us that this discussion will improve society, but when we’re up against fascists who wield discourse dishonestly and seize power under a shroud of lies our calculations must change.

One of those urgent changes is no longer letting the Overton window be shifted to the right. We cannot let societal norms be dragged so far towards a fascist worldview that basic compassion becomes the left end of our political horizons. And we are under no obligation to shift our understanding of the world in the direction fascist push us in; in fact we're obligated to resist it. That doesn’t mean we’re not trying to reach people, it means we’re no longer allowing the framing of important questions and topics to shift further and further away from our principles. It means firmly holding to our positions and not allowing the worst elements on the planet to control the conversation. Right now, more than ever, we need to stake out clear, radical positions premised on justice and actual democracy and compassion and not allow the ruling class and the far right to unilaterally set the terms of the political conversation.

Our resistance to the rightward march of the window can ultimately be enforced only if our convictions are paired with action. We have to form ourselves into collectives that can grasp our vast problems at the root. Oligarchy, fascism, white supremacy, these systems run distressingly deep, and changing as individuals is just the very beginning of how we radically address these plagues. Ultimately, it will take masses of people getting educated, organized, and taking action collectively. That is the radical, necessary answer in these times — and it’s the only answer that promises the change we need.