Activism in the Age of Punishment

The parameters of our identity define the borders of our freedom. The narrower the role we assume—CEO, mother, activist—the smaller the sphere in which we are permitted to exist. Expand outward—woman, queer, person of color, religious believer—and the walls shift, but they remain. Never before in history has mental health status been incorporated into these identifiers, yet today, it is treated as yet another realm of control, another line in the fine print of our social contracts. Each identity we adopt comes with an unspoken agreement: abide by the rules of the collective, or risk expulsion. And herein lies the true currency of power in our time—not wealth, not even ideology, but the ability to decide who belongs and who does not.

The fundamental fear that governs human existence is not death, but exile. Death, to most, is a long anesthetic sleep. But to be cast out, to be erased from the human circle, is a slow and public undoing. We are social animals; we survive through connection. The great cruelty of the world we live in is that belonging has been weaponized. The cult of exile has become the governing force of political and cultural discourse. It is no longer enough to disagree with someone—they must be humiliated, ruined, made to disappear. There is no process of redemption, no room for evolution. The threat is clear: conform, or be cast out.

The structure of this coercion is simple: you are either in or you are out. You are either wholly on board with the ideological script handed to you, or you are against it. This is not a game of nuance; this is not a system that allows for inquiry, complexity, or evolution. Once, politics was a place where ideas were debated, refined, tested. Today, it is a place of rigid fundamentalism. Once, being liberal meant questioning authority; now, it means memorizing a script.

Nowhere is this shift clearer than in the fate of figures like Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—all of whom were once regarded as stalwart liberals and are now persona non grata. But the most absurd and revelatory moment was the expulsion of Marianne Williamson, a woman whose entire ethos is forgiveness. Forgiveness, it seems, is no longer permissible. The only acceptable posture is vengeance. The only permissible feeling is resentment.

This is not just exile; it is public execution. We have lost the concept of actual religion, but we still seek the rituals. The cross has been replaced with the algorithm. The crowd gathers, not in a town square, but in a digital coliseum. The condemned are made to suffer, and we call it justice.

But would we rather be righteous or liberated? Would we rather be self-satisfied or free? Because those two things are not the same. The left, my political home, my family of origin, has become a space where the only currency is grievance, and the only permissible tone is rage. Where once there was innovation, there is now only mourning. The center has collapsed, and all that remains are warring camps, each accusing the other of being the true enemy of progress. And yet, what progress? What has been built?

I know this cycle well. I have lived inside it before. As an activist during the AIDS crisis, I saw what happens when righteous fury curdles into something darker. In the beginning, it was necessary. We were living through a plague while the world ignored us. Our friends were dying in the streets, and the grief was unbearable. And so, we acted. We stormed department stores, shut down bridges, demanded to be seen. At first, it was powerful. At first, it worked. But then something shifted. The movement ceased to be about liberation and became about punishment. Resentment took root, and from resentment came the desire not just for change, but for vengeance.

This is the trap that movements fall into. It is intoxicating, this righteous rage. It feels good, for a time. But it is not a strategy. It is not a path to anything but exhaustion. Eventually, I burned out. I was living on the fumes of fury, depleted in every way, until I stumbled into a Zen center, entirely by accident. I sat there, raw and exhausted, and something in me changed. Not all at once. It was like walking through fog—one moment I was in the thick of it, and the next, I was drenched.

I had spent years believing that activism meant burning myself to the ground, that the only way to prove my commitment was to sacrifice my own well-being. But here was a different way. Here was a break, a pause, a moment to breathe. And in that stillness, I realized that change—real change—is slow. That transformation is not a fire that burns everything in its path but a glacier that carves the world in its own time. That activism without self-reflection is not activism at all, but another form of destruction.

The truth is, no one has ever been converted by shame. No one has ever truly changed their mind because they were berated into submission. Shame might force compliance, but it does not create transformation. And yet, we have built an entire political and social ecosystem around the premise that if we can just humiliate the opposition enough, if we can just make them feel small enough, they will finally see the light. This is not only false—it is catastrophically counterproductive.

Real change happens through connection, not coercion. This is something that those who are truly skilled in the art of persuasion—those rare individuals who have transformed hardened ideologues—understand intuitively. Daryl Davis, the Black jazz musician who spent years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan and persuading them to renounce their beliefs, did not do so by yelling at them. He did not stand outside their meetings with signs calling them racist scum. He sat down with them. He spoke to them as human beings. He made himself someone they could not ignore. And because of that, because he created a relationship before demanding a transformation, hundreds of former Klan members turned in their robes.

That is the level of skill required to create real political or social change. It is a craft. It is an art. And it is the complete opposite of what activism has become. Today, we trade in grievance. We weaponize pain. Social media has turned activism into an arms race of moral purity, where the goal is not to create dialogue but to assert dominance. The problem is, dominance is not the same thing as power. Power is the ability to move people. And you do not move people by making them feel backed into a corner. You move people by creating a space in which they can actually hear you.

But we have built a culture in which listening is itself seen as a form of betrayal. If you even acknowledge the perspective of the opposition, you are accused of validating them. If you humanize them, you are accused of sympathizing. If you do anything other than meet them with contempt, you risk being exiled yourself. And so we get activism as social sorting, as moral hygiene, as an ongoing process of purification rather than persuasion. And yet, persuasion is the only thing that actually changes the world.

It is worth asking: what do we actually want? Not what do we oppose, not what do we condemn, not who do we want to punish. But what kind of world do we actually want to live in? And more importantly, how do we get there? Because if we continue down the path of ideological purges and purity tests, we will not build a freer, more just world. We will build an echo chamber of fear, where everyone is too afraid to say the wrong thing, and so no one says anything at all.

If the goal is true, lasting change, then the only viable model is one based on dignity. The first principle of this model is simple: if you want dignity for yourself, you must offer it to others first. Even, and perhaps especially, to those you consider your enemy. This is not a call for naivety. It is not an argument for passivity. It is an argument for efficacy. Because the truth is, if you want someone to hear you, you must first convince them that you see them.

Consider what happened when rappers and formerly incarcerated people went directly to Donald Trump to advocate for criminal justice reform. It was under his administration that some of the most radical sentencing reforms in decades were passed. Why? Not because Trump suddenly had a moral epiphany, but because these advocates understood the game they were playing. They walked into the room, not with the expectation that he would already agree with them, but with the awareness that their job was to make him listen.

This is what effective activism looks like. It is not about whether you feel good about your approach. It is about whether your approach works. And it does not work to treat people as irredeemable. It does not work to insist that they must be humiliated into change. It does not work to create a political culture where the punishment for stepping out of line is social annihilation. What works is connection. 

This is where we have failed. Resentment is a terrible foundation for any movement. It is seductive, yes. It feels powerful. It offers the illusion of momentum. But resentment cannot sustain itself. It eats everything in its path—including, eventually, the people who built their politics around it. This is what has happened to so many progressive movements in recent years. #MeToo launched on a profoundly important premise, but became a weapon of punishment. And once a movement is primarily about punishment, it begins to erode from the inside. It stops being about justice and starts being about retribution. And the problem with retribution is that it always demands escalation.

So the question remains: do we want to be righteous, or do we want to be free? Because true activism is about knowing what you want and crafting a plan that will actually get you there. And that requires discipline. It requires patience. It requires being willing to hold space for people who might never agree with you, and trusting that over time, through dialogue and dignity, they just might change their minds.

We do not need more moral crusaders. We need skilled practitioners of change. We need people who are willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of actually moving the dial—not through outrage, but through rapport. There is a reason why the most effective activism in history has always been based on these principles. The Civil Rights Movement did not win by screaming at its opponents. It won by creating an undeniable moral force, by showing the world the dignity of the oppressed in the face of their oppressors. It won by forcing people to see that they were not fighting demons, but human beings.

And so, we are left with a choice. We can continue down the path of exile, of ideological purges, of activism-as-punishment. We can continue to insist that anyone who disagrees with us is beyond redemption. We can continue believing that if we can just make our enemies feel small enough, they will finally submit. Or we can build something different. We can build movements based on unity, rather than intimidation. We can commit to the difficult, disciplined practice of bridging understanding rather than just declaring who is right. We can replace resentment with strategy, outrage with effectiveness, purity with real power. We can stop demanding shame and start demanding transformation.

We can decide that the goal is not just to be right, but to win together. And if we do that, if we truly commit to it, then and only then, will we be able to create something that actually lasts.