Why You’re Politically Homeless: The Stages of Political Grief

Your party is gone and you’re traveling through the five stages of grief.

Many Americans call themselves politically homeless. Some were once Republicans. Others were once Democrats. Now they have no idea where they belong.

Something they loved has vanished, taking with it their sense of personal identity. They mourn their former party like the death a cherished loved one. Some have moved from heartache to anger, raging at the injustice of this ouster from their home. Others wallow in despair, believing they’ll wander forever alone in this new bewildering America. They fear they’ll never again belong as everything spirals downward until the foundations of America come apart.

I understand all these feelings because I’ve felt them. I’m politically homeless too.

Once I was partisan. I became disillusioned. I wandered for years through the political wilderness hoping to find my footing. While hacking through this wilderness, I immersed myself in American political history and party realignments to better understand our current moment. I came to understand how political change happens in America, why our parties are transforming, and how we can chart a course through this chaos back to the solid ground. Let me share something that will help my fellow political drifters through this desert.

Your party is gone and you’re traveling through the stages of grief.

Step One: Your Party is No Longer Doing Things You Care About (Denial)

The journey of politically homelessness has five steps, each of which mirror a stage of grief. This makes sense because losing a cherished political party is a kind of death. It’s the destruction of a world in which you absolutely knew where you belonged. You knew what you believed, what you had to do, and who was the enemy working to stop you. Most of all you, you had a purpose. You also had fiends and allies at your back who would sacrifice to support you. Such a loss is devastating.

Your first step to political homelessness was when you realized your party was no longer advancing the things you cared about. You joined the party because it stood for the ideas, policies, causes and people you supported. Your personal identity and the party’s overlapped. You didn’t just say, “I’m a member.” You said: “I’m a Republican,” or “I’m a Democrat.” Then one day you noticed, while your party was still saying the right things on paper, it was no longer doing the things you joined it to do. Surely, you thought, this will pass.

If we can just get better candidates, you thought, things will turn around. If we can inject some new energy, ideas, and fight, things will right themselves. If the other party will just get out of our way, everything will be fine. Isn’t politics always chock full of careerists interested in advancing their re-election instead of getting real things done? Stop being naïve! Things will get back on track.

You’re in denial.

Step Two: Your Party is Doing Things You Can’t Support (Anger)

Your next step was when you noticed your party wasn’t just failing to advance the things you believed. It’s was actively doing things you couldn’t possibly support. It was saying things you detested. It was floating policies contradicting the ones you cared the most about. It was representing ideas you hated. It was embracing people with whom you intensely disagreed. This was too much. You became upset.

You could live with your party failing to advance the causes in which you believed. Adopting people and ideas that conflicted with your most important values was a step too far. Your believed your party had been twisted into something unrecognizable and ugly. Staying would mean integrating ruinous ideas into your own identity, something you simply would not do. You struggled to understand how the party you loved for so long long had changed so fundamentally. Bad people had stolen your party from you.

You could no longer wear its label. You told people your party no longer represented you. You went online and changed your party registration. You left home.

Now you’re angry.

Step Three: You Try On the Other Party’s Clothing (Bargaining)

Your political identity shattered, you were alienated and lost. At first, you thought maybe you could save your old party or fight to take it back. You and a few stragglers in tattered old party uniforms readied yourself for a rearguard action to drag it back to what it used to be. It didn’t take long to realize that was never going to happen. The home you remembered was gone and this new version wasn’t going anywhere. You decided to try on the other party’s clothing to see whether it might fit.

At first, this felt good. You read things from the other side with a mind open enough to listen. They had some good ideas! Some of what they supported you agreed with too! Political figures you once detested suddenly seemed like flawed people trying to do their best. You no longer felt so alone. Maybe when your party left you, the other party had moved closer? Maybe you could find another home?

You were bargaining.

Soon, however, you realized the other party was undergoing the same turmoil as your former party, just in a different way. This party also didn’t represent what you believed. It also included in its coalition people you found crazy. It too advanced ideas you detested. It supported things you absolutely couldn’t accept. There was no new home to go to. You fell into despair.

Step Four: Despair (Depression)

Step four was when you surrendered. You resigned yourself to being a wanderer. There’s no room in the system now for reasonable people with reasonable ideas. There’s no room for you. A pox on both major parties, you said! As your mood darkened, perhaps you even started to flirt with some radical ideas. You gave up on ever finding a new home.

Engulfed in this despair, you believed the situation permanent. America is doomed.

You’re depressed. You don’t yet realize there’s one more stage to come.

Step Five: A Barn Raising (Acceptance)

There’s a final stage to your political homelessness, wanderer. You move past the denial, the anger, the bargaining, and the depression to reach acceptance. Acceptance means accepting our old political parties are gone. The entire political framework of liberals and conservatives that framed our entire lives is gone. Our old political identities are gone. Most important, it’s good.

It’s good that the twentieth-century political world of liberals and conservatives is crumbling because it’s out-of-date. We constructed these coalitions and ideologies to fight over industrial-twentieth-century problems, pitting Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal against Buckley’s Conservative Movement. It’s a fight over how to address problems of an America that no longer exists. We now face new problems in a new version of the world amid a technological revolution. We need new ideas to address this new America, and it’s foolish to think the parties and coalitions and ideas of the middle-twentieth century were ever the right tools.

What’s happened isn’t a tragedy. It’s an opportunity. You’re free.

We politically homeless must move past grief to acceptance so we can get back into the game. I’m not saying we need a new political party. I’m saying we need to cast off our old identities and become a new political community. All politically homeless are welcome, no matter from where you hail—the right, the left, or somewhere radically different. We must all start talking, sharing ideas, and working together as a common bloc committed to exploring ideas about how to go about rebuilding. The details don’t yet matter.

Maybe we grow into a new party. Maybe we become a powerful movement of ideas like the Progressive Movement or the Conservative Movement. Most likely, I think we grow into intellectual pirates that raid the empty shells of our broken parties and revitalize them from inside—a boarding party of ideas. We might not even stay as just one movement. We might become a seed that grows into multiple movements, organizations, and parties. Perhaps we’ll split into various wings representing alternative approaches and ideas. We can worry about that later. What matters is we work together now.

None of us have a home. Nobody will build one for us. We must build a home for ourselves. What we need is a barn raising. A barn raising is when a community comes together to build a new shelter where they aren’t alone. All of us politically homeless must build a new political home together. That’s how we transition from wanderers to the proud new owners of something better, more vibrant, and more suited to this moment in America. It’s how we cast off despair for hope.

The first step is to find each other. If you consider yourself politically homeless, I hope you’ll subscribe to this newsletter and share it with those who feel the same. If you’re a writer working on this problem, I hope you’ll sound off in the comments so others who feel the same can find you and follow you. Our goal should be to read, share, and discuss ideas as we slowly form a new community.

I’ll continue exploring my ideas about the source of our era’s troubles and how we can solve them here. I intend to keep track of your ideas as you work on the same problems. We must figure out together how to weave all these exciting ideas—left, right, and otherwise—into a compelling agenda to revitalize America.

It starts by moving past our grief and accepting this brilliant opportunity to rebuild something better than before. America’s future won’t belong to those riding our dying parties into dust. It belongs to us, the politically homeless. I know this because that’s how political change happens across American history. It’s how our system is designed to work. We’re not discarded remnants of America’s past. We’re the vanguard of it’s future.

If you’re a writer or a thinker working on these problems, or you know someone who is, sound off in the comments so we can follow one another’s work as we become a community to renew America.