There Is No Worst

Opposition in the age of accommodation

The storm is here

This is an updated version of a piece I wrote last February. In light of the rather stunning amount of backsliding that’s occurred in the last six days, I thought it was worth revisiting and expanding in order to take into account our new circumstances. I honestly don’t remember what the impetus for the original piece was, but I thought it was appropriate to examine the original premise in the context of our current reality.

Of course, Donald and the Republican Party wasted no time taking a hatchet to the rule of law, anti-discrimination legislation, the Constitution, and a plethora of other things. The onslaught of changes is designed to keep us off balance, but let’s keep an eye on the ways in which, regardless of the empty rhetoric, the actions of the new administration will negatively impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans, while destroying the lives of many undocumented workers who came here simply because they wanted a shot at a better future. None of the executive orders, changes within the executive branch and government ages will improve the lives of the poor, working, and middle classes. And none of it should be surprising.

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In Henry James’ The Bostonians, published in 1885, only twenty years after the Civil War, Basil Ransom, a southern conservative, and his cousin Olive Chancellor, a Bostonian feminist, battle for the affections of (and control over) the heiress Verena Tarrant.

The fundamental problem with the novel, however, is that Ransom sided with the Confederacy. He supported secession because his family owned other human beings and they wanted to continue to be able to do so.

Ransom has lost his fortune and he comes north after the South loses the war in order to jump-start his career as a lawyer. Early on in the novel, it becomes clear that, as distasteful as his northern counterparts might find his politics, Ransom is going to be welcomed into their drawing rooms and at their dinner parties despite the fact that he is both an unreconstructed racist an enemy of America.

I love Henry James’ work in part because of his innate and deep understanding of the complexities and limits of human relationships (including our relationships to ourselves), but once Ransom is accepted and normalized, I had to put the book down.

This man was an unrepentant monster who believed thoroughly in The Lost Cause. He regrets the war not because he has an epiphany about the egregiousness of what he willingly participated in, but because he and his family were ruined by it.

The failures of Reconstruction are legion—or, more accurately, the failures of white mostly Republican northerners to fulfill the vast promise of Reconstruction are legion—and one seed of those failures was the ostensibly simple act of allowing these serial killers a place at the table without question or consequence after the Civil War ended.

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I grew up with my own serial killers (using the term loosely and metaphorically, of course), and even if I didn’t know that’s who they were, I had inklings from a very young age. I didn’t know what the racism, and the homophobia, and the misogyny were at first, but I did see the cruelty and I made myself as small as possible so I never became a target of it.

There was no need to bother, of course, because as a girl and as my father’s daughter I was of no consequence to them. (That of course is its own kind of cruelty.) As I got older and recognized the extent of my family’s bigotry, I still said nothing. I pretended it was all just fine because they were my family and what else was I supposed to do? I even allowed myself to become close with a couple of them long after I knew better.

And that’s how the accommodation starts. We grow up with the unacceptable and the unbearable and accommodation becomes a tool we use to make our lives easier. Accommodating the unacceptable and the unbearable is more often than not easier than doing the right thing—and then it becomes habitual. Eventually, we use it to let ourselves off the hook, because that’s easier, too.

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Maya Angelou made doing the right thing look easy. “[The negative] lives,” she said, “And if you allow it to perch in your house, in your mind, in your life, it can take you over. So, when the rude or cruel thing is said—the lambasting, the gay bashing, the hate—I say, ‘Take it all out of my house!’ Those negative words climb into the woodwork and into the furniture, and the next thing you know they'll be on my skin.”

She would not allow, “poison and vulgarity” in her house. Any racial or sexual pejorative is designed to make a person less than, she said, and that kind of hateful disregard seeps in, leaps from one person to the next.

“One isn’t necessarily born with courage,” Angelou told us, “but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”

She counseled us to do one courageous thing in a small way. From there, do another, and then another until, finally, you can say, without hesitation, to the bigoted and the cruel, “no, not in my house you don’t.”

This country is our shared home. If right now it feels as though it’s been invaded by vandals, it has. The serial killers aren’t just the people who’ve been pardoned and released from prison—they’re the people currently occupying the seats of power and doing the pardoning.

It’s inexcusable for those who know better to normalize them, but it’s unconscionable to accommodate them. Too many Democrats are playing that game and what we need to do, what we need to admonish them to do, is start saying, “Take it all out of my house!” And then we can move forward.

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Like the Boston socialites and suffragettes who invited Basil Ransom into their drawing rooms, we know exactly who these people are. If we remain naive enough to give them the benefit of the doubt or extend them any grace, we will continue to be punished for it. For over a year, our leaders told us how dangerous another Trump administration would be. They warned us about the encroaching fascism that was poised to throttle our democracy. But as soon as our side lost, many of these people relinquished much of the power they still possessed or exited the stage or chose to become accommodationists to one degree or another.

I’ve been calling Donald and his followers, sycophants, and enablers fascists publicly since the 2020 presidential election. It is deeply depressing to have been proven right, but so much worse that over 74 million Americans either did not believe the evidence right in front of them or simply didn’t care. But here we are.

Those who understand the gravity of the situation, who acknowledge that the leaders of the party in power are indeed fascists, should never accommodate them, never lift a finger to make their lives more comfortable, never make their dark work easier.

You would think that the least we could ask of them is that they never shake their hands, never invite them in, and never, for the sake of human decency, validate them. I never would.

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I was listening to one of my old playlists this afternoon and “Everybody Gotta Know,” from her 1983 album The Key, by the great Joan Armatrading, came on. I hadn’t heard it in awhile, and now I can’t get it out of my head. I’m not entirely sure if you’ll know what I mean, but makes me feel understood:

Sometimes
I think I've told it all
So plainly
But there's no one there
To hear the words I say
Sometimes
It all sounds so crazy
Your version of the story
That I know
Oh when your memory
Fails you

Everybody
Gotta know this feeling