Free Radicals

It's Tuesday afternoon, one week after the 2024 presidential election. I greet my next patient, Steve, and brace myself for yet another hour of holding someone else's terror while also silently holding my own. But this session starts differently. “I'm bothered by the fact that my partner voted for Harris,” he confesses. We both know it's not because a vote for Trump would have been preferable. Rather, as a leftist, Steve is registering his frustration with the act of voting for any mainstream politician. “Voting for Harris conveys an okayness with the world. I can't be okay with the world, because then I would be on the wrong side.” He pauses, then says: “I'm having trouble locating myself, politically. I feel like some of my friends are too radical—others aren't radical enough.”

“Radical”: I feel like I could write a memoir just on my personal relationship with that word. I was inspired as a teenager when I came across Angela Davis's famous declaration that radical just means “grasping at the root,” and took it on as a kind of identity. In a college French class I proudly proclaimed to my conversation partner, “Je suis un activiste radical.” Even then, it was more aspirational than true. Over the years, “radical” as a leftist political stance has tempted and haunted me. I was and am inspired by the wildly creative visions of a different world, without racism, without violence, without prisons, and yes, even without police. Yet many of the ostensibly radical leftist spaces I've been in did not feel creative at all. Rather, they felt stifled and ossified: everyone vying to show how much they conform to ideologies that verge on dogmatic, out-quoting each other to burnish their credentials, scared of being on the “wrong side”—like Steve, and like me.

In such spaces, it can feel risky to disagree about anything, even word choice. A conversation with an old friend turned sour when I took issue with describing the climate crisis as an “apocalypse,” because that word evo