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Well, hello, hello.
Things are getting worse and they are better and then getting worse again, and who can really tell these days? A lot is happening, and people are rushing into danger to come to the aid of strangers, teens are walking in demonstrations against frozen water, and so much is happening and changing every day.
I am your Cassandra and your Mule of Memory, so it falls upon me to remind us all that we should absolutely exult in all the forms of solidarity and resistance we see all around us—but there is a real danger that we will become addicted to a mode of crisis and to constantly separating people into worthy and unworthy recipients of our efforts. As I’ve written often, our constant craving for a state of panic is what might actually define the left (at least in the U.S). It’s partly what I address in my current book in progress, Strange Love: How to Kill Social Justice and Make It Work Again, and it’s a lot of what I will be writing about in the coming months.
I am a child of several social justice movements, so I don’t write from a position of ignorance and certainly not out of cynicism. But I do think that one reason we never seem to get out of the eternal rut in which we find ourselves, and why the forces of oppression seem to be multiplying every day, is that there is a large and overly influential segment of the left that really does think we need crisis to define ourselves and that it is necessary to divide people into the deserving and undeserving. There’s a certain religious fervour in this attitude.
Take immigration, for instance: it’s incredible that we are seeing so much pushback against raids and worse, but we are still mired in narratives about good and bad immigrants, the criminal and the innocent, the abuelas and the gang members. We should, by now, have distanced ourselves from that kind of rhetoric and yet here we are, in 2025, and it’s as if we never left 2006: still crying over innocent people being kidnapped instead of screaming at the unjust systems that make all this possible. I long ago stopped referring people to the immigration orgs that are now receiving massive influxes of funds: people were turned away because they did not have families. Organisations shrugged and told them, “You’re not a winnable case.” So, yes, we are here because we made it okay to disappear people who don’t count.
If frozen glaciers are freezing the most vulnerable amongst us, it’s because we on the left long ago gave them the implicit permission to do so.
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To be clear: we should be documenting the different kinds of people who are being brutalised and that so many are not even “illegal” in the sense of the state’s definition of the word, as ProPublica has done with its excellent report on the number of American citizens rounded up so far. But we, on the left, have to be cautious about using such facts to reinscribe a politics of exceptionalism. And we have to ask: how is it that immigration got so much worse over the last twenty years, despite several years of Democratic rule? We can keep blaming everything on the right, or we can start to acknowledge that the left—whether the Marxist left or the broad left—has failed to even visualise its own agenda.
You may well call me foolish or overly cynical, but I will remind you that I (and others) pointed out that DACA was doomed to failure and would in fact place thousands in danger, and that is precisely what we see now. I (and many others) pointed out that Gay Marriage was a useless, neoliberal campaign, and I accurately predicted Kamala Harris would lose.
Some news about the Against Equality website: it got hacked, and is slowly being resurrected but in the meantime, here’s a version on Internet Archive. You can, of course, also peruse the book, Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion! (Which does not include all the essays on our site, but is a great anthology to have.)
As with left radical politics in general: I always find it fascinating that whenever I tell people I’m part of a group called Against Equality, they’re usually surprised and even shocked (as they should be, if they don’t know me!). As soon as I explain, “We’re a queer radical group that questions the gay mainstream’s politics by, for example, asking why marriage should be the only way for people to access healthcare, or why gays should be supporting wars abroad,” the response is always, “Oh, yes, absolutely, I see that and agree with it.”
There is always, always space for radical alternatives. The problem is not that people are averse to such, but that the mainstream keeps drowning out our voices, but I think even that is changing as more people grow tired of the usual liberal/mainstream left politics.
Speaking of political predictions: my essay on Graham Platner was picked up by Current Affairs, and I have some new work out. This last fortnight was incredibly stressful, and I am only just beginning to catch up on my sleep: I share this condition with millions. I am, alas, too exhausted to compile too much of a list of links from around the web. I know I said that last week, and then posted quite a number of them, but this time I mean it! Do follow me on social media if you’d like to keep up with my posts, especially the ones on current events. I post a lot of news items and commentary (mine and that of others) on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and occasionally on LinkedIn. I can be found on Twitter (@NairYasmin) and Facebook (Yasmin.Nair), LinkedIn, and Instagram (Bekargyan). I am not accepting new friends on FB, but you can always use the “follow” option there. Facebook tends to stay static, so it’s best to refresh the page each time you visit, to make sure you’re seeing all my current posts.
Onwards, I guess. I’m so tired, all the time.
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NEW WORK
Is the Left Addicted to Crisis?
You Cannot Separate Identity from Class and Economics
Graham Platner and the Left’s Masculinity Crisis, now out in Current Affairs.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Kamala Harris and the Art of Losing
Mr. Holmes and the Case of the Aging Sleuth
Abortive Reasoning: What’s wrong with the reproductive rights debate, with Eugenia Williamson.
ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB!
“Journalism as a public good has always been an exception,” by Andrea Faye Hart.
“It’s Our Time,” Lily Sanchez on how “capitalist society is organized around theft—of wealth, wages, resources, and, of course, our time.”
The Times, the British one, published what turned out to be an interview with a Bill De Blasio, who was not actually the Bill de Blasio. Here’s Semafor on the non-story, and Deadline with more.
Here’s Rilo Kiley’s “Paint’s Peeling”: “It’s a hard day for dreaming, again…”
I’m feeling both hopeful and somehow deeply pessimistic: here’s something that expresses all my ambivalence. Only cats can save us.
I will see you when I see you. Stay safe.
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Image: J.M.W. Turner, “Approach to Venice,” 1844.