If you need to prove how cool you are, this community and movement thing might not be for you

Nobody cares how good you are at pretending not to care

Finnish Socialist Picnic. Astoria, Oregon, 1922 (Oregon Historical Society)

I am writing this a week after election night 2025 (a fun one! for a change), but it already feels like years ago. That’s the thing about momentary bursts of hope. The sun sets on a raucous party and rises the next morning and we are left to reconcile a familiar incongruity. The good news was real, but also the world hasn’t changed. We can, in fact, elect exciting long-shot candidates. But also: ICE is still terrorizing American cities, our nation’s paper of record continues to publish articles with titles like “You know who’s the worst? Every Single Woman,” the Democratic Party remains, in aggregate, a bumbling disappointment factory, and too many of us are some combination of broke, sick and hungry. That’s what life is like, when you’re a hope alchemist. You organize hard, celebrate victories and then realize, for the millionth time, that the work is not done.

So forgive me, for a second, for a story that simultaneously feels like it happened one week and a million years ago. It’s not even a rah rah story. It’s about a small, silly thing that distracted me in the moment and which, truth be told, has continued to distract me.

Like a lot of us, I enjoy giving myself a treat on good news nights. While I usually try to avoid unbridled scrolling (lessons learned the hard way, wild and precious life, etc.), does it really count as an evening on social media if it makes you feel good for a change? That’s my calculus, at least. I love watching victory speeches, especially from candidates who can really pull them off. I love sending and receiving excited texts and telling my wife “you know what, tonight you should check the news! It won’t make you feel like garbage!” I love watching strangers celebrate and clicking those silly little heart buttons because that’s the easiest way to say, “I see you, and I feel it too!”

I did all that last Tuesday, the scrolling and the liking and the high fiving. No regrets. But then, I noticed a trend. The same term kept popping up, from people whom I admire deeply. Smart people. Committed organizers. Aspirational figures. Writers far more acclaimed and beloved than me. Activists whose resumes include time spent on all the best campaigns. People living in what I imagine to be better decorated homes than mine. Not Joan Didion herself (on account of her not being alive, and also the Goldwater of it all), but the kind of people who could probably pull off the iconic Joan Didion Stingray photo if they wanted. Some of them friends of mine, some of them the kind of people I’d love to have as friends.

The term? “Libbing out.” Deployed, it seemed, as a form of self conscious apologia for enjoying the night, for celebrating Mamdani’s victory in particular. Once I saw it the first time, I couldn’t stop seeing it. My own personal one-night-only Baader Meinhof phenomenon.

I feel sheepish for admitting that a jokey little phrase managed to bum me out when the incoming mayor of New York City was quoting Eugene Freaking Debs in front of an adoring crowd. Of all the hills to die on, in the year of our Lord 2025, this was the one I picked?

But it did, in fact, bum me out. And I know why. It’s not because I’m mad at any of the individual “libbing out” posters. There are plenty of good reasons for us beleaguered leftist dreamers to feel ambivalent about electoral politics as a general exercise (Exhibit A: The Democratic Party, and what it is and it is and isn’t doing this week. Exhibit B: The fact that Exhibit A is so evergreen that I don’t have to worry about what particular week you might encounter this essay). I was in my twenties during Obama’s 2008 campaign. I know what it feels like to put your faith both in a candidate and the promise of a political movement, only for the candidate to swerve to the center and the organizing infrastructure they built to be demolished. I get why we’ve learned to protect our inner Charlie Browns from yet another football pulled out from under our feet.

I’ve been there. We’ve been there. But still, I recoiled. On a night marked by a collective (and therefore potentially connective) exhale, it was the unnecessary distancing that got me. “Sorry for libbing out” may not have been intended as “I should know better than to feel what millions of other people are feeling,” but that’s 100% how it read. “Sorry for being like them.” That and “I read Adorno and Fanon and Gramsci, oh my God you haven’t?" or “I wouldn’t say no to a guest spot on one of those ostensibly leftist podcasts where they make fun of everybody for being stupider than them; contact info in bio.”

Again, just some silly posts. But it stuck with me, because I’ve been in and around liberal-left politics my entire life, which means that I’ve both seen (and affected) that pose hundreds of times. I’ve marched in protests where the cool, radical activists snickered at the families, retirees and the gorgeously outraged masses of regular people. I’ve sat in meetings that devolve into what presents as ideological or tactical debates, but are really just chances for one to two guys to show off how smart they are. I’ve sometimes laughed and sometimes bristled at punchlines about “suburban wine moms” and “MSNBC grandpas” and “the resistance” writ large. It’s not just that the objects of derision have slightly different politics than the jokers, you see. It’s that they’re corny. It’s that they haven’t learned how to pretend like you don’t actually care.

Not all cool kid distancing is mean-spirited. Sometimes it’s just puffery, a chance to prove our bonafides by debating what is essentially a bunch of intra-movement gossip. An activist lifetime ago, I had multiple, passionate arguments as to whether anarchists in a specific neighborhood in Eugene, Oregon in 2003 were gadabout posers or misunderstood vanguard revolutionaries. And that was before social media. I can’t blame algorithms. I just wanted to prove that I was simultaneously punk and, I don’t know? Good at praxis? Which is definitely a useful, descriptive word and not itself just a gatekeepy secretly handshake, mind you.

The neighborhood was Whiteaker, if you’re curious. I’d never been. Still haven’t. I have no idea what the anarchists there were like, though I imagine they cooked with too much nutritional yeast.

I'd claim that I don’t know why I pretended to care about another city’s disaffected punks, but that’d be a lie. Part of it is the same insecurity that shows up in all aspects of my life (your’s too?). It doesn’t matter how many times people do, in fact, show up for my birthday party. My operating assumption is that next year the bottom will finally fall off that charade. Just you wait, the dumbest parts of my brain reassure me.

Part of it, though, is unique to the work of building a better world. God, it feels so quixotic, the beloved community we’re trying to create. I have no idea if I’m doing any of this right. So of course I want to pre-empt any and all critiques. Of course I look to other people’s opinions (imagined or real) as proxies for whether I’m mucking it all up. Of course I doubt my own instincts, particularly when they’re the most earnest, the most cringey, the most naked.

And listen, movements should criticize each other. They should hold us, as participants, lovingly accountable— for whether we’re upholding our values, whether we’re getting anything useful done, whether we’re actually building a better world or just papering over the worst excesses of the current one. But movements also need to be movements, which means that they need people. More people, every day. People who won’t join our movements (or come to our potlucks, or Marxist study circle, or canvassing shift) if they’re constantly worried about being judged, about being deemed too square or moderate or poorly read to sit in the circle.

When I hear activists sneer at normies and “libs”, though, it doesn’t feel like accountability. Increasingly, it’s not even rooted in reality. Have you seen what’s happening in Chicago? Do you know who's putting their bodies on the line against ICE? Yes, the punks and the commies, but also the recently radicalized suburban moms and MSNBC grandpas and Lutheran ministers and regular people who shop at Costco and shuttle kids to soccer practice and don’t have time to follow the latest DSA gossip but who are now texting rapid alert hotlines and tailing ICE in their minivans and getting roughed up by the gun thugs at Broadview.

Perhaps you’re a better emotional multi-tasker than I am, but I just can’t do it. My attention runs in one direction at a time. And at every stage in my life, when I’ve cared primarily about proving something about myself— that I’m smart enough, cool enough, eloquent enough, sophisticated enough in my politics— that obsession eventually wraps around me like an ouroboros. It traps me, but it also keeps other people out. Because when I’m so obsessed with proving that I’m doing this right, what I don’t notice is all the people around me who are wondering “is there a place for me, Garrett, in your life, in your community, in your politics?”

The reason why those “libbing out” jokes stuck with me, why they felt like the perfect encapsulation of something much bigger, isn’t because the people posting them are epistemically wrong. It’s ok (good even!) to be skeptical of the limits of American electoral politics, to say nothing of individual charismatic politicians. This isn’t a call for watering down critiques, or meeting in a fictive middle.

But last Tuesday night, there were a lot of people who were earnestly joyful. Joyful about a socialist in New York. Joyful too about more moderate candidates in Virginia and New Jersey. And what a potential gift, that shared joy. It’s such an earnest emotion (as is rage and heartbreak and numbness and burnout). And it’s those moments— when we notice that a wide variety of people are expressing the same wellspring of feeling at the same time— not an opinion or an ideology but just a wellspring of feeling— that offer the best opportunities to reach out to one another. Those moments are magic. But not if we’re blinded by our own insecurities, by our need to puff and preen, to win the debate with the cool kid in our heads.

You all, I can’t stress this enough. There’s nothing cool about activism, community, or movement building. As any social movement theorist will tell you, that work, when done right, is prefigurative. It imagines a better future, and tries to embody it in the present. And all that— the hope of it, the unbridled sentiment of it, the childlike wonder-making of it— is the opposite of cool. It isn’t cynical. It isn’t self-conscious. It doesn’t offer the satisfaction of intimidation. It asks that you admit mortifying feelings out loud (feelings like: “I care”). It asks that you sit at folding tables and risk having nobody sign your silly little petition. It asks that you canvass in the rain and have doors slammed in your face. It asks that you show up at the same meetings with the same frequently annoying people until you realize that you’ve actually come to love them

None of that is cool. But it is the absolute best. Because you, like me, do actually need other people. You don’t need their admiration or their jealousy. You need them to open their door on your worst day and say “come in, we’re glad you’re here.” I don’t care how cool she looked. You don’t want to be Joan Didion in front of the Stingray. Not forever at least. She’s alone in that picture. And we’re not meant to be alone. We were meant to hug and yell and cry and occasionally gather in a ballroom together with thousands of friends and strangers and shout, to everybody and nobody in particular, “we did it!”

End notes

1. Last week, I told you that the most surprisingly precarious moment for somebody in my line of work (reader supported independent media) is the one year anniversary of when you got a lot of new subscribers. For me, that’s November (also February, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there). Thank you to all of you who took the baton from some of last year’s subscribers who needed (understandably) to take a year off. All together, we are currently still down nine subscribers in November (meaning nine more people have paused their paid subscriptions than started new ones). Could nine of you say yes to a new subscription? Doing so doesn’t make me rich (not the goal!) but it does help with sustainability month to month. And yes, I’m still giving out cool shirts and hats as thank yous (just email me after you subscribe). THANK YOU!

2. I also know that many of you are in rough spots right now (food insecurity, healthcare premium disasters, etc.). I also know it’s a vulnerable thing to email a stranger on the internet for help, but I’m at garrett at barnraisersproject.org. If you’v got nowhere else to turn, we can figure out an anonymous fundraiser for you (I’m not using the term mutual aid, because I worry about the buzzwordification of something that does ideally involve direct relationships, but you get the vibe).

3. Barnraisers Project fall classes! Enrollment closes TODAY (November 11th) at NOON CENTRAL TIME. Yikes, that’s soon (or maybe in the past, depending on when you read this). So register if you’re interested, but also don’t fret. More coming soon.

4. Last week, I did a very cool live event with Lisa Sibbett (by the way, do you read The Auntie Bulletin, you should!) about public and private schools and it ended up being really rich and interesting and jeez Lisa’s just so smart (also, forgive me for some self consciousness, but apologies that my go-to filler words— “um” and “right” showed up way more in this one than I’d like).

5. Speaking of listening to me, I really am proud of the podcast that I do with Sarah Wheeler. It’s called This Week in Breeders and we both think that last week’s was our best yet (it’s about “straight men don’t talk to their friends about their feelings so just dump on their partners” discourse and also Sarah’s favorite TLC songs).

6. That reminds me. I haven’t done a song of the week in a long time, but this essay is essentially about quieting the part of you that cares about impressing an imagined version of a 20-something Brooklynite who only exists in your head so, for a washed white millennial dude like myself, there’s only one choice. And yes, to any actual 20-something Brookynites reading this, I agree. You’re “actually, really nice.”

Also: Please behold this perfect Youtube comment.

7. In case it’s not clear, I’ll always love Didion. Goddamnit those sentences. One of the best to ever do it.