My Revolutionary Exodus

The most tepid endorsement of Kamala Harris, borne of a confrontation with my own motivations and limitations

You can tell where you are on the journey of life by looking at the kind of people you hate. You hate people who are below you on the ladder of growth, people who are where you were until recently, failing and flailing in a way that reminds you of what you used to be and what you could be again if you screw things up. You also hate people who are above you on the ladder of growth, whose existence reminds you of your shortcomings and weaknesses, whose excellence feels both obligatory and unattainable. 

I didn’t come up with the above framing, but I found it to be really helpful as I take stock of myself this election season. 

The people I resent this election cycle are the revolutionaries, who remind me of who I used to be, and the conventionally successful, who remind me of what I could have been had I never been a revolutionary. 

Here’s an extremely brief biography: I was a revolutionary in 2008, when I cast my first-ever vote for Barack Obama, certain that his victory would bring with it the eternal triumph of reason and justice. With him in power the broken world as I knew it in my childhood - 9/11, the Iraq War, the crushing recession - would end as my adulthood began. Obama was proof to me that my life was a special one. 

Then 2016 happened. In the intervening years my narcissism and impulsiveness had ruined my life, and I was 2 months sober when Trump was elected. I saw his election as vindication of my misery. Everyone could see by his success that the world was evil, and no good person could be happy in an evil world. 

Then 2020 happened. 4 sober years had added up to a better life, a better self, than the one I’d had in 2016. When the Floyd riots swept the nation I shuffled along in support, but I didn’t feel the revolutionary anger anymore. 

Now we are in 2024, 8 sober years of growth behind me. I have perspective about what I can survive, and also what I can not. I know that living in a liberal democracy means finding some way to peacefully coexist with people who are very different for me, and means submitting to their authority when they win elections, and that doing so is not literally the end of the world. I know that the world will not end when my life does, that I hold no privileged relationship to history or reality. I have been confronted with my limitations, as a person and as a human being, and have done a lot of work to make peace with them. 

Self-hatred, I came to see, was my biggest limitation to confront. I hated myself, urgently and totally, and through hating myself I hated everything that could be blamed for creating me. The deepest source of peace and prosperity for me has been the exact opposite of that disposition, openness and gratitude towards the sources of my life and my growth, sources which by definition transcend me. I owe my life and my growth to my family, my country, my spiritual community, my cultural heritage. Turning towards them has elevated me far beyond anything I could ever have conjured by collapsing into myself.

I’m glad that I did not get my way when I was an angry child, when paradise meant a world of state-sponsored self-indulgence, when Fascism was when anyone expected something of me or when anyone told me No. I’m glad that I survived my desire to burn the world down, or at least burn my life down, to prove that I was significant. I’m glad that I survived a vision of freedom as a complete absence of obligation. I’m glad that I survived a vision of virtue centered around contemplating and feeling as much suffering as possible. I’m glad that I survived a vision of wisdom and worth centered around precious victimhood, where those who suffer the most are entitled to the highest deference and compensation. 

Put simply, I’m grateful to have survived my youth.

What has replaced it? The opportunity to see myself as worthy through contribution to that which is beyond me. My desire for passionate connection is perfected through contribution to a relationship that transcends me. My desire for prosperity is perfected through contributing ten times that prosperity to other people, on their own terms. My desire for significance is realized through what I make possible for other people, regardless of whether or not those people ever know my name.

I’ve gotten everything I wanted, once I stopped worshipping my desire.

Now, in 2024, I voted for Kamala Harris, not because I think she’ll save the world but because I don’t think she’ll try to. I voted for her to continue to cool our political passions, to honor my country by honoring its capacity to expand its self-image, to protect non-interference in individual moral life, and to keep the right-wing revolutionaries out of power. 

My vision of heaven on earth is - among other things - one where people are free to destroy themselves like I did, and to suffer the consequences like I did. I’m glad that I learned that some people might be right to reject me. My life is richer because of it. My only regret is that it went on for far longer than it had to.

I resent the revolutionaries of today for reminding me of me, and for creating a cultural space where I could destroy myself and injure those connected to me for longer than I had to in order to get the message. In turn, I resent the people who figured their lives out much earlier than I did, who prosper without long-term scars. 

Who will I resent in four years time? Will I have forgiven myself for my youth? What will my political beliefs look like, informed by my own life as they inevitably are? I can’t really say. A lot of history, for my country and for me, lies in between then and now. What I do know is that the one thing I want from government is the one thing it cannot directly provide - the opportunity for everyone, including myself, to figure out how to grow up.