Love Is Never Going To Be A Popular Movement
Love is not going to poll well. It never has.
It’s so much easier and more expedient to be an awful person. This is the tragedy of politics.
To be bad is easy. To be good is difficult. Of course this is true, you might say. But consider the ramifications of such a dynamic: There is every incentive to engender hatred for human beings who are not like you, who are not part of the tribe, whatever that means to you. And worse, there are incentives to ignoring this nurturing of hatreds – both petty and vicious – or becoming ambivalent to those who keep their hatred churning at a hundred miles a second.
Love is a loser. As a political strategy, love is the heaviest lift, requiring vast and unending effort to convince people to be good, to not choose the easy path, which is hate or complying with those who hate. It is far easier to follow people filled with pain into the void of destruction than it is to stop their momentum and convince others to turn away from the void. You might tell them there are other options beside the void, other destinations, and they might turn to you as if they had never considered this.
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So yes, love is a loser, but only when love is abandoned, and only when it is not combined with power. And what could better define our current political moment than that: The abandonment of love in the face of the void and those determined to steer us there by any means necessary. Fascism, after all, can be defined by its "intoxication of destruction as an actual experience, dreaming the stupid dream of producing the void.”
Elected Democrats are lost right now. That's the most generous way to interpret their inexplicable non-response to the civic emergencies we face. I wish there was another way to interpret the party’s total inaction in the face of a fascist takeover of the United States government, but there is not. Democrats at every level of government are operating at a different, much slower speed than Republicans; they either do not or cannot comprehend this new political reality, which requires rapid responses to unfolding crises. Party elders like Senator Dick Durbin are politely asking the public for more time to fully understand how to counter the anti-democratic henchmen who have grabbed the levers of power, and in some cases, ripped the levers clear off.
There is no time, Dick. The president has stripped Congress of its primary function – controlling the nation’s purse strings – and has seized dictatorial control over the federal government. There is no more time. Time is out. We face a full-blown constitutional emergency – the most acute of the entire Trump era – and there is no organized resistance from the Democratic Party.
Instead, we get feckless House leader Hakeem Jeffries – a man who has never uttered a single inspirational word – telling the press that congressional Democrats are going to sit tight, allow Trump and his foot soldiers to run roughshod over the rights of immigrants and transgender people, and wait until 2026 to make a case that Republicans have failed on so-called kitchen table issues. That the Democratic Party has no leadership of which to speak is hardly a secret: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said this week that there is no party leader, but rather a confederation of governors with presidential aspirations. Apparently these presidential aspirants have no will to lead an organized resistance against the most dangerous administration in American history, an administration clearing a path to the void: Economic calamity, wars, civil strife, whatever else that might linger outside the constraints of my imagination. The void can take many forms.
Denny Carter
As Trump’s deportation forces storm into churches and schools and terrorize entire communities, as the civil service is purged of those insufficiently loyal to the fascist cause, as LGBTQ folks see their rights eviscerated by the day, as Trump’s insurrectionist henchmen emerge from prison, having conquered law itself, promising swift vengeance against their myriad enemies, Democrats will point to utility costs and the price of eggs and tell Americans they have no choice but to vote for them in the ‘26 midterms.
Trump told you eggs would be cheaper and they aren’t. Gotcha! Checkmate! This is the Democrats’ strategy. This is their approach, so toothless as to be comical. This is the elected opposition to the man seizing total control over all three branches of the American government.
It seems Democrats are waiting for love to poll better. They have pored over election data and found that the so-called Obama coalition – the one that was pieced back together in 2020 after faltering in 2016 – crumbled under the strength of the Trump/Musk fascist propaganda machine that controls all political discourse on earth. The machine – the algorithm – showed folks how easy it could be to hate LGBTQ people and migrants and anyone else who could be sacrificed to Trump in exchange for slightly cheaper eggs. American voters in 2024 were urged to hate, and they did.
Love will never poll well though. It never has.
“Love has never been a popular movement,” James Baldwin, the writer, philosopher, and Civil Rights advocate who spoke eloquently of America’s original sin, said during a 1970 interview. “And no one’s ever really wanted to be free. The world is held together by the love and the passion of a very few people.”
When one gazes upon the sorry state of the world, Baldwin said, one must understand what they are seeing, and that there is no disconnect between these terrible images and the self.
“What you’ve got to remember is that what you’re looking at is also you,” he said, his eyes searching for understanding from his questioner, his urgency burning through the screen. “Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide for yourself not to be.”
Standing up for desperate migrants being hunted by deportation agents or trans folks who have lost legal rights to exist as a transgender person is never going to be popular. It’s never going to poll well, just as pushing back against the nation’s vociferous segregationist forces was deeply unpopular fifty and sixty years ago. Love by itself may be a loser, but combined with determination and political power, it can be wielded to protect those who need protecting and to stop those who long for the void, the final destination in the all-consuming nihilism at the center of fascist thought. That momentum can be stopped, if we want it.
Denny Carter
People are not going to roll out of bed one day and decide for themselves that it's now time to love thy neighbor. People don't tire of hate because it is easy. It requires no effort, no thought, just an embrace of the tribalistic instincts deep within our lizard brain. If Democrats are waiting for polling on the defense of marginalized groups to change, they will be waiting forever.
“One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1967. “Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
Strategically, this is the only way forward in our new unreality. My hope – my plea – is that elected Democrats recognize this before it's too late.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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