In or Out
Happiness, Service, MAGA, and You
I was sitting in a coffeeshop in Harvard Square last week next to two 60-something white men who seemed to be professors. They made sure anyone within earshot knew that they didn’t like Trump, but as they moved on to talking about the repercussions of the election and its impact especially on DEI, I witnessed a sort of release in their conversation.
One of them wondered about the value of trying to recruit girls into the sciences, and asked if it really mattered that boys tend to dominate conversations in his classes. The other went off about how Elizabeth Warren used all her time in the Senate confirmation hearing of Pete Hegseth asking him about his history of abuse and pressing him on his views about women in the military rather than focusing on his lack of institutional experience—the point being that he should be disqualified by inexperience, not misogyny.
As the conversation progressed, I heard a kind of gleeful abandon in their words as they pushed each other further and further away from what, during my own college years, was often dismissively referred to as “political correctness.”
And I thought: There it is.
I’m sure these two professorial gentlemen didn’t vote for Trump, but here they were enjoying the warm bath of an emboldened world view afforded them by his election. For those allowed in the tub, it’s an awfully inviting place to be.
Caring about the concerns, fears, and hopes of people who don’t share your gender, orientation, or skin color is hard work. It requires vigilance and a fair amount of vulnerability. It means being willing to say, “I didn’t think about it that way, maybe I was wrong.”
Compare the allure of all that to simply following your own interests and those of the people with whom you share the most in common. It’s no contest.
This will sound naïve, but I’m often amazed by the selfishness of our species. I grew up in a family where service was obligatory. My parents come from very different backgrounds: One grew up a privileged WASP in New Jersey, the other a working-class Jew on Long Island. But they both got caught up in the heady early days of the anti-war, Civil Rights, and folk music scenes and it changed their trajectories. My mom, the first in her family to finish college, went to Malawi with the Peace Corps in 1964. My dad turned down a prosperous job in the family business and went to Uganda and Tanzania for three years with a group called Teachers for East Africa.
Their time in these newly decolonized African nations opened their world views and eventually caused their paths to cross. They learned what genuine poverty looks like, but also what powerful community bonds and sustained freedom struggles can accomplish. It led them each to long careers working on education and poverty initiatives in “developing” nations.
I thought I would follow in their footsteps, but I made the mistake of picking up a guitar late in high school. A few years later, I brought it with me on a semester studying abroad in Zimbabwe, where I decided that music, not development work, was my calling.
I travelled a different path from my parents, but I’ve spent my life working with and learning from equally remarkable and committed people in my own field. Pete Seeger, whose music I grew up on but whose stubborn, activist life I didn’t come to fully appreciate until later, became something of a north star for me. When faced with difficult choices, I often consider what Pete would do. Or Bernice Johnson Reagon, Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone, Joan Baez, Reggie Harris, Kim Harris, Melanie DeMore, Peter Mulvey—a constellation of activist-musicians.
My parents aren’t saints, and neither am I. Neither are any of the people I’ve named above. But we all managed to learn somewhere along the way that once your own basic needs are met, working for the benefit of others is the only thing left that really matters.
Research into the correlation between wealth and personal fulfillment is mixed. Some studies have shown that happiness decreases after a certain level of wealth, others say it doesn’t. Almost all agree there are diminishing returns. But if our current crop of American oligarchs is anything to go by, I feel pretty confident that money can’t buy you joy.
Trump preaches something else. He has sold millions of Americans on the idea that life is a zero-sum game: It’s you against your neighbor and, if you don’t screw them, they’re going to screw you. Giving up anything—power, privilege, money—is for suckers. Greed is good.
Unlike most of what he peddles, this is one thing Trump actually believes. It’s why he’s so confused by and disdainful of military service in particular. In Trump’s world view, sacrificing anything for someone else is either evidence of stupidity or it’s performative.
In 2021, I declined a Grammy nomination for Best Children’s Album, along with two other acts. It was a very difficult decision for all of us, and one that caused a lot of consternation in the kids’ music field. We declined because the nominations had been so overwhelmingly white historically and because, in 2021—in the wake of the murder of George Floyd—an all-white slate of nominees felt especially tone deaf.
Some people felt the act was performative. (Certainly the many readers of Breitbart News who sent us hate mail did). But it had an undeniable effect: In the four years since we declined, nominated acts in the field have not only become more racially balanced but have actually been majority Black and brown.
Service and sacrifice was modeled and preached to me as a kid, but it’s only in the last five years or so that I began really digging into what it means to make meaningful, hands-in-the-dirt change. As I learned along the way from some of my mentors in this work, like musician Dan Zanes, external change can only follow internal change, not the other way around.
Getting deeply involved with the work of antiracism, DEI, or whatever you want to call it meant reconsidering how I make and hold space for others. It meant re-thinking what it means to participate in and benefit from institutions that create barriers, whether intentionally or not, to the inclusion of people who don’t look like me. Most of all, it’s meant being willing to be uncomfortable, making a whole lot of mistakes, and choosing to learn from those mistakes rather than following my natural instinct to defend my intentions.
The professors at the table next to me were tired. They grew up in a world where white men were fully in charge and few dared to question that hierarchy. Fifty years of fallout from movements for change—Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Disability Rights, LGBTQ Rights—have challenged that order of power. Historically marginalized people of all stripes want a seat at the table. They’re tired, too.
As I see it, we have two options. We can either move backwards or we can do the hard work of being vulnerable, hearing each other, and moving forward.
One thing I agree with conservatives about is that there’s been far too much posturing on the left in recent years. If you put a “Black Lives Matter” sign in your yard but do none of the work, and make none of the personal changes or sacrifices required to actually give those words meaning, then you’re not helping. In fact, you’re actively undermining the movement by draining it of intention. Rainbow flags, No Hate stickers, proclamations on social media: These are not work. They’re fine if they’re backed by genuine action, but they’re less than meaningless on their own.
One thing we can count on Trump for over the next few years is pulling off whatever polite window dressing is left in our country. He has no use for “niceness” and, to be honest, neither do I. We’re in a moment of action.
Your choice is binary. If you look like me and are not actively pushing back against MAGA, then you’re benefiting from it. Whether or not you voted for him, Trump has already begun the work of actively holding others down in order to make you wealthier and clear your path to opportunity.
The warm bath is waiting. Get in or make the harder choice to stay out. The time for staring at our toes is over.
this is brilliant — uncomfortably so. those who demonize meritocracy are bathing in privilege.
It sounds trite to say “well said” but there you have it! A while back I had a friend from South Africa. He died maybe 10-15 years ago. When he grew up in South Africa it was a brutal, apartheid run country and he had shirts made up that said “Let’s Share”. He told me those shirts were seized and banned by the government. Too threatening a concept to the elite!