Why the Line Matters

In the (admittedly very limited) social media interactions I have these days, there is a pretty common dynamic. It goes:

• Gavin Newsom does something that antagonizes the Trump administration. It may be a legit attempt to stand up against some blatantly unconstitutional behavior, it may just be trolling.

• Someone on bsky will position Newsom as the presumptive nominee for the presidential election in 2028.

• People will point out that he sucks.

• The original poster will talk about why “this is why Dems” cannot win, we have purity tests, etc etc.

This cycle is tiring. I’ll get into more details later, but it is a fact that Gavin Newsom is awful and I certainly hope he isn’t the presidential nominee in 2028. He may be less awful than a lot of other people, but that does not make him not awful. So, having put my one card on the table, let me introduce The Line.

The Line is the thing that separates People from Not-Really-People. You can think about it in a lot of different ways, maybe it’s “people I care about” vs “people I don’t”. In the small and personal world, consider how you would react if you saw a loved one sitting on the street asking for charity, or how you react when you see someone you don’t know. It usually isn’t a clear boundary for most people (although a lot of white supremacists do have a pretty clear line) but the line exists in the personal for just about everyone.

This is kind of a digression here, but this is also my blog so I get to digress. I’m agnostic. Or maybe atheist. Who knows. I don’t believe in any God; I’m not convinced that I’m right about that, maybe there is and I’m wrong. Whatever. But the important thing here, is I was raised Catholic, and the thing I never understood about modern Catholicism is how it doesn’t really line up with Jesus’s teachings about the line. Jesus was super clear about this, over and over: he had no line. If he saw someone asking for charity, he gave what he could. The radical thing about early Christianity is that they loved everyone as much as they loved themselves, or at least that’s what seems to be the message in the Bible. These days, with evangelicals and bullshitters like our vice president talking about why empathy is a sin and why Christians need to learn to hate again, well, you can understand why (a) I’ve turned from organized religion and (b) I honestly don’t understand most people. Anyway. I think it’s a thing I strive for but can never reach- to love every person with the urgency and empathy that I feel for my family. Back to the line thing.

The problem is that any formulation of politics has a Line in it. These are people we care about, and those are ones we do not. Do we, as Americans, care about Brown and Black people? Politically: no. Did you know that San Francisco has about 130 miles of “unaccepted streets”? These are streets that have always been there, but don’t get maintained by the city. Due to a quirk of history, they’re just kind of there. San Fran Fucking Cisco, which is a square of land seven miles on a side, has a hundred and thirty fucking miles of unmaintained streets where people can (and do) just dump garbage and the city charges residents of the street to clean it up. Guess, just guess, what the neighborhoods that have the most unaccepted streets are like? So yeah, roads that lead to Black homes? Pff, maintain them yourselves, the city does not maintain them.

Okay, so the Line in politics can be pretty obvious when you start seeing it. There is a sustained effort to make sure Americans put Gazans on the “not really people” side of the Line, since that way we will not really care about the ongoing genocide. We already did this for the Sudandese, we don’t seem to care at all about that genocide. Go watch the latest Lindsay Ellis video if you want to learn about all that. Black people in Africa? America already puts pretty much all of them on the “not really people” side of the line, so we can call it that. Gaza? There is ongoing Ontological Warfare being waged for our minds.

What does all this have to do with Gavin Newsom? I want to just point out two issues with him. I’m not going to be taking arguments on these points, but here we are. Gavin puts both transgender people and the unhoused on the “not really people” side of the line. He has made repeated comments where he talks about transness as an issue for “fairness” bla bla bla. Personally, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t give a single shit one way or the other about transgender people, but he’s willing to sacrifice them by chucking them over the line in order to reach some segment of the population that might vote for him, banking on the fact that his more left-leaning constituency will still vote for him.

He may not care about trans people one way or the other, but Gavin Newsom hates the homeless. He’s actively pursued super-regressive policies that actively make the unhoused population less safe, because he cares about making them invisible. Homeless sweeps don’t help anyone, they just take away the few resources that are all in the world that some unhoused person has, and what, makes them move somewhere else and start over. Out of sight, out of mind, left of the line, not really a person.

I should point out my earlier essay about Singapore here. Singapore has a fraction of San Francisco’s unhoused population, both in absolute numbers and per capita. Singapore just gives homes to people. It is a big truth in our modern world that our most complicated problems have very simple solutions, they’re just simple solutions that make us have to re-evaluate some fundamental things. The simple way to help the homeless is to fucking give them homes. Please refer to my earlier paragraph about Jesus and stuff for the rest. I mean, sheesh, just take care of people. It is not complicated. It is just difficult.

So now we come to why I will not be voting for Gavin Newsom in any election. “But Pfooti,” you may say, “you have to admit that Gavin is better than Trump! An annoying neoliberal rich dude who is willing to throw the transes under the bus is still better than an actual fascist!”

The answer here is no. He isn’t. In fact it only looks to you that he’s better because you have also put trans people onto the “not really people” side of the line. You have prioritized getting things for you “back to normal” at the cost of the actual lives of some other people you don’t love.

The problem is not “fascism from Trump” vs “neoliberalism from Newsom”, but it is instead just “blatant fascism that I notice from Trump” vs “still fascism but nicer to White people from the Establishment Democrats.”

The problem of 2028 is not for 2028, or for the Democratic nominee for the presidency (or the midterms, or gerrymandering, or anything like that) is not going “back to normal”. We cannot as a society blame all our worst tendencies on the Trump administration. Everyone was complicit here; ICE as an entity is a post-9/11 thing. Democrats and Republicans worked together to build an unaccountable police force that can do all kinds of things to oppress Black and Brown people. It is just that recently the mechanisms of that power were used to also strip rights from women and the LGBTQ community. Abortions, Gender Affirming care, Vaccines, cheap fast fashion from Shein, that’s stuff that matters to us, because we’re on the “people” side of the line.

The problem is the fucking line itself. Political power presumes the line, they can oppress some people and the population lets them, cheers for them, votes for them, lets them use that oppression as a distraction from corruption. I hate that everything comes down to capitalism, and I hate that this means I’ll probably eventually have to read some fucking Marx but here we are.

The line that separates humans into “actually people I care about” and “people who can be exterminated” categories exists in each and every one of us. It is our duty (and again not to be too religious here as a neopagan agnostic but this was pretty fucking clear in the new testament) to erase that line from our own thinking, feeling, and loving, and to feel empathy and love for every human. We have to get rid of the line in politics as well, even selfishly because hey, maybe one day I’ll find that me and my family are on the wrong side of that line in society. But we have to get rid of the line in politics because it’s the right thing to do.

And that’s why, even though I am not trans, I stand in solidarity with my transgender comrades. I am not a Palestinian, but I am in solidarity with Gazans. I am pretty much the whitest, straightest, dude, but I recognize that just because fascism might take a while to notice me in particular, I give a shit about the fact it has already started to chew on a lot of people, and I will not have that.