Not everything is within our power to fix

But this is

Did you watch the presidential debate this week? Despite the fact that it required me to be up way past my bedtime, for once I watched the whole thing. I’m not here to do a debrief on the debate, though. Not really. In the ensuing days, however, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about resentment.

Why resentment? Because Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the politics of grievance and resentment that has increasingly dominated our political landscape for the last forty years. The toxicity of it oozes out of his every pore.

The difference between resentment and some of the other toxicities that seem to animate his person— racism, misogyny, xenophobia— is that resentment doesn’t actually have formal systems that keep it running without us (well, except for maybe internet algorithms designed to exploit outrage). In contrast, for instance, the systems of white supremacy have self-sustaining inertia. Meaning, even if I do the work to confront my own internalized racism, that work doesn’t undo or even necessarily address all the ways in which racism is embedded within the systems of our society. My personal work to be anti-racist doesn’t fix red-lining or the school-to-prison pipeline or the chronic underfunding of inner city schools. Those systems just keep going, like a racist Eveready Bunny.

This doesn’t mean my personal work to be anti-racist doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. But there are limits to the change it can stimulate by itself in the world around me. If I want to see a future where white supremacy isn’t the underlying systemic foundation for society, then I also have to work to confront those systems and accept that I may not witness the change I seek in my lifetime. Undoing systems is slow, complex, collective work.

Resentment, however, is a feeling. The only way it exists as a collective experience is in mob mentality, which is not a self-maintaining system. Why does this matter? Because we can actually challenge and change the politics of resentment right now by doing the work to undo our own personal resentments, thus removing that emotional juice as fuel for the leaders who would exploit it.

A couple of years ago, I set about confronting my chronic resentments. You can read about that here.

Not only was embarking on that work useful for supporting my mental health, it also inoculated me against the toxic sludge of grievance and resentment that infects our politics. When I witness it animating anyone, regardless of their side of the political spectrum (folks on the political left have plenty of their own resentments, make no mistake), I feel it in my body. My pulse races, my skin gets hot and flushed, and my thoughts start to spin in self-righteous circles. I feel how susceptible I am, how easily I can get dragged along in the wake of their over-amplified emotion, how far and fast I can be taken away from myself.

So, I reel myself back in. Because I can now.

Despite my deep ambivalence about some of Kamala Harris’s stances (her commitment to the military and unequivocal support for arming Israel, her abandoning of single-payer healthcare and the Green New Deal), I saw in her at the debate a commitment to turning the page on the politics of grievance and resentment. I hope we can all help her turn that page, transforming the emotional tone of our political landscape, by doing our own work around resentment.

If we do, I think we can see real change in our lifetime. How satisfying would that be?