If the Left Wants to Win Again, They Need to Think Like a Youth Group Leader

Writing on his Substack today, Freddie DeBoer declares “As much as it annoys me, I have concluded that perhaps the most powerful force in politics is people’s resentment at being talked down to.”

This line is part of a long and interesting piece about identity politics and its discontents, all from the pen (or fingertips) of one of my favorite writers. Freddie grasps something that at least helps explain last month’s election results – and also explains much of Donald Trump’s much-noted success among young men. Freddie is also articulating a corollary to a fundamental principle I learned in my years as a church youth leader.

I spent seven years leading the high school youth ministry at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California. Early on in my volunteer service, I learned a motto of wise youth leaders everywhere: “Affirm, and Redirect.” I used that phrase so often that it became a joke among the kids; when Katie wanted to sit on an already crowded couch, she might say to Matthew, “I affirm you, but can you redirect your butt to make room?” It was a marvelously flexible slogan.

Whatever your religious faith, if you work with young people, you want to help them discover something important. Speaking very generally, if you are in a conservative church, you might think the most important thing for them to discover is an absolute truth that is external to themselves. Perhaps you want them to know Jesus Christ and accept Him as a Savior; once saved, you want these kids to do their best to live according to God’s rules. If you are in a more liberal church, you want each teen to develop their own sense of what it means to live as a follower of Jesus. Youth leaders in these different churches might disagree strongly about the goal of their teen programs. They might measure success differently. Yet across the vast theological spectrum, every successful youth leader affirms before he or she redirects.

You cannot invite people to grow and transform unless they first know you love them as they are. Whether you’re coaching a teen to put a ball in the back of the net or helping them navigate the stormy seas of hormones, kids will not trust you if they know that you care only about what they might someday become. If your focus is only on their potential and not on their present, they will sense it instantly. They will tune out. Before the initial redirection, there must always be an affirmation: You are loved exactly as you are. There is nothing more you need to do in order to be worthy of love. Convince the kid you mean that, and then you can start to share with them some tips, tools, and wisdom that can improve their inner lives, their relationships, or their soccer skills.

Of course, you can also bully, hector, lecture, browbeat, and shame young people into transforming. They may even, for a season, do as you please – or at least stop doing what doesn’t please you. But once out of your sight or free from your control, they are likely to revert to old behavior – or take their anger and resentment and channel it into overt or sublimated rebellion against everything you preached.

Building on Freddie’s argument it seems likely that one of the reasons the left lost was that they decided that young men and white folks did not need any more affirming. In the post-2016, post-#MeToo, post-George Floyd world, the left decided that those with privilege (straight men and whites) could use some much firmer redirecting. Enough with the kid glove treatment! Enough with the listening tours! Enough with the validation of error and bigotry! To use youth group language, what young men and white folk needed was a full-on, fire-and-brimstone, “Come to Jesus” sermon. Whether the issue was race or misogyny, the fierce urgency of the moment meant that “affirming” was a patronizing waste of time. We’re tired of asking. We’re telling you that you need to change.

Sometimes this was an implicit message. Sometimes, it was explicit. (Google the phrase White People Need to Step Up. There are dozens of pages of results using that exact phrase.) The message that now was a season for atonement, reflection, and reparations was forceful. The message that it was time for the privileged to take a seat, defer, and listen was ubiquitous. Some of my friends on the left may protest that this is a straw man; surely, I’m exaggerating the vehemence and force with which the progressive movement has spoken over the last eight years. Perhaps. What’s worth remembering is that in politics, as in teen youth groups, what matters most is not what is actually said, but what is heard. Perception is everything. And the defection of so many young men from the Democratic Party in the Trump era is a function of what those young men hear. They hear a lot of redirecting. They hear precious little affirming.

You may not like the way that MAGA affirms young men and white folks. You don’t have to like it. You just have to acknowledge it and figure out how to do better. Scoffing — and declaring that a truly decent young man shouldn’t need any more affirming — may align with your priors, but it ain’t gonna help you carry Pennsylvania.

Anecdote is not evidence. Yet taken in aggregate, the “anecdata” suggests that a great many folks on the left are more comfortable than ever before in severing ties with friends and family over politics. Many of my friends on the left love to quote a line misattributed to James Baldwin: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” That sounds so… thoughtful! So… moral! So… self-evident! Except, of course, that “denial of my humanity” is an extraordinarily elastic concept. It can quickly expand to include almost any serious disagreement, and often does. It is an article of faith for many progressives, for example, that a willingness to vote for Donald Trump is irrefutable proof of a former friend’s “denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

Puritanism is also an elastic concept. Used informally in the political sense, puritanism is the instinct that says we need to stop worrying about changing hearts and minds on the other side, and just turn out more of the voters on our side. We should stop trying to evangelize, and frankly, we should probably stop talking altogether to the unwashed, the unsaved, the deliberately dishonest and the vile. Not only is there not going to be anymore affirming, but there also isn’t going to be much redirecting either. Mom is lost to Fox News, brother is lost to Jordan Peterson, and sister is lost to the wellness and the woo. Best to cut them all off, and when they ask you why you’re not coming to Christmas dinner, tell them they should already know.

Are you asking me to affirm racists, Hugo? Are you asking me to love the obtuse, the peevish, the delusional? I’ve kicked them out of my own life for my own sanity. If they want to repent and be received back into my good graces, they know where to find me. Until then, I’m sick and bloody tired of being nice to people who shit on me.

I hear that one a lot. And I affirm the feeling of exasperation and rage. It’s hard to love people who seem to inhabit alternate moral universes, and who decide what is true based on very different standards of evidence. And yet. My redirection to you is simple. What you hold in contempt will never be transformed by your derision nor redeemed by your disgust. You cannot redirect what you will not affirm, and if you are unwilling to do the latter and focus only on the former, then I suggest you get very, very accustomed to losing elections.

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