Bad political habits to stop in 2023
Feel like nothing's changing? I got tips!
I used to be one of the Facebook political debate kings. Long essays. Impassioned pleas. Days spent in argument with total strangers. Jobs and relationships neglected in the crafting of a withering reply. The posting was — outside occasional volunteering and donations — the entirety of my political activism.
After Trump’s election in 2016, when it became clear that Facebook had profited massively off of the misinformation campaigns led by both the president-elect and shady foreign operatives, as the reality of what algorithms driven by negativity and controversy-driven “engagement” could do to a national debate, I began to step back.
My political beliefs have not gotten any weaker, and certainly haven’t moderated, but the strategy that myself and so many others were pursuing felt useless at best, and at worst, actively in the service of some of the darkest forces at work in our modern political world: engaging in a debate with a Nazi, after all, gives the Nazi a boost in the algorithm.
In the intervening years, I’ve found a way to still have a political life that has felt both more effective and more fulfilling off of the internet, and I thought I’d share the habits I’ve kicked here that have helped!
1. Stop arguing with your conservative family members.
I know: it’s hard. Because these are the people that you care the most about in the world, and the fact that they believe something repellent is really difficult to stomach.
But the hard truth is that people’s minds don’t change because of rational debate. People all exist inside their own reality tunnels (you do too!) and sometimes, they have to believe in a lie in order to function in the world.
Say you have a relative who fought in an American war, and was traumatized by the experience. Say they have framed this trauma in their mind as a sacrifice made in the name of a country and a set of ideals that they believe in. And say you know that said war was unjust, and was not about freedom so much as it was about the capitalist exploitation of the conquered land.
Isn’t it kind of understandable that the relative might be hesitant to throw an entire belief system out the window, especially a belief system that has given meaning to their trauma, just because you have better facts on your side?
Arguing with family members is fraught because it has all of the other baggage of being in a family, all of the personal issues and quarrels, bundled into the politics.
It’s also an enormous expenditure of energy to try and flip one single vote.
Instead of going after a specific person, find people who are like-minded locally, and think of something you can do together to make your community a better place. My pet project for the past 5 years has been libraries. It will likely stay libraries, but you could also get involved in local schools, in environmental causes, in citizen science projects, in racial justice actions, or in historic preservation, to just name a few.
You’ve got a finite amount of time and energy to spend on this. Spend it wisely: don’t argue with your family about politics. If you must try to convert them, just expose them to what you’re doing, and maybe invite them along. Seeing something positive being done may make them more open to your ideas than a “reasoned debate.”
There’s a caveat: Always speak out against heinous bullshit when you are in the presence of children.
2. Get off the internet.
This place is designed to suck the life out of you. Get off the internet. Maybe after finishing this newsletter.
I gave Book Rex on this topic earlier in the week: the internet is an attention economy, which means it’s designed to exploit your cognitive biases to keep you online as much as humanly possible. This is not healthy for you, and it’s not good politics.
The internet is only effective as a supplement to political action. It’s useful for the sharing of ideas and tactics, but none of that is useful unless you put down the phone and go outside. And it’s important to remember that much of the stuff you think is useful is actually designed to trigger your confirmation bias, or is insidiously planting misinformation in your brain to try and make you into a wingnut.
Yes. I understand the irony of me writing this on the internet. The truth about politics on the internet is it’s not useful to engage with people you don’t trust. My hope is that you trust me because of my past writing, my TikToks, my posts, our personal relationship, or whatever. If you don’t, maybe don’t listen to me? I promise you, fighting me in the comments is not going to be fun for either of us.
3. Get your news from books or longform writing.
First, I want to acknowledge that it’s important to stay updated about what’s going on in the world. But modern news media is not necessarily keeping you well-informed. This isn’t the fault of the journalists so much as it is part of the structure of modern news.
Because news has to be constantly breaking, articles, videos, programs, or whatever, tend to focus on what happened today, without putting as much emphasis on the context that the event took place in.
If you are of a left-ish bent (which hopefully you are, if you’re spending time reading this), you’ll have encountered this fact in recent years. How many white people (like myself) knew the full extent of police brutality before the George Floyd protests? How many men knew the extent of harassment and sexual violence before #MeToo? How many people knew the extent of anti-Asian discrimination prior to COVID?
It’s important to get the deeper context, the history and the perspectives of other sections of the community, if we really want to understand what’s going on in our world, and we can’t do that with 500 word articles and 2-minute videos. You’ve gotta read more in-depth stuff.
So consider taking some time off of daily news and instead reading, I dunno, The Warmth of Other Suns, or The Sixth Extinction, or A People’s History of the United States.
Also: don’t worry so much about bias. More on that in the linked article below.
4. Go hyperlocal.
A lot of what turns people off to politics is how slow it can move. I learned this in Washington, D.C. in the early 2010s, when I was working on the issue of immigration. It was next to impossible to get any sort of immigration reform passed — prior to my working in the Capital, the most recent major immigration reform had been under Ronald Fucking Reagan. We got close in 2013, but guess what! We didn’t actually get it through.
So while there has technically been national progress on that issue in my lifetime, that progress happened when I was 5 months old, and I now have two kids that are older than that, and I have gray hairs in my beard.
If you want to make change, try focusing your efforts locally. This is often still a tricky fight, but it’s one that has more victories, and more space for you to be creative and build something new. If you live in a small town, the barrier to entry is incredibly low — literally just show up. If you live in a bigger city, you might need to pay more dues, so scale it back: start in your neighborhood!
I promise, politics can be as simple as building a little free library, handing out native food seeds to your neighbors, joining a mutual aid network, or starting a local radical book club. It’s genuinely that easy.
An important aside to this is don’t assume elections are the only form of politics worth engaging in. Oftentimes, candidates aren’t chosen by the people so much as they are by connected insiders, and Americans spend a truly bonkers amount of money and time on their elections. All politics starts at the grassroots, so if your local electoral political scene is reactionary and conservative to the point where you couldn’t possibly unseat them, then find people who aren’t right-wing, and start building something together.