In late 2023, after 25 years as a registered Democrat, I changed my voter registration. In Pennsylvania, our recently elected Governor, Josh Shapiro, was horse-trading private school vouchers for increased public school funding. Internationally, the Biden administration was bankrolling a genocide. And the Keeling Curve—which registers the daily concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—showed no change in its unabated rise since its inception in 1958, regardless of which political party has been in power. Throughout my voting life, I have often felt, to paraphrase Annie Ernaux, that it is better to live in constant disappointment under the left than constant rage under the right. But with Democrats like these, I concluded that fateful fall, who needs Republicans?
In his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the writer Omar El Akkad recounts a kindred conclusion. Disheartened by the events in Gaza, and disillusioned with (neo)liberalism, El Akkad decides he wants nothing to do with any of it. At its most basic level, the book is a work of witness. But to frame it that way—as a book “about” Gaza—is to miss the point almost entirely. One Day is not a book about Gaza in the way the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land is about leveled villages in the West Bank. Across a series of ten chapters, beginning with “Departure” and concluding with “Arrival,” One Day burns with righteous anger at a political establishment that cannot, and in fact refuses to, address the atrocities inflicted on innocent civilians. Grounded in autobiographical sketches of his childhood in the Middle East, his immigration to North America, his years as a reporter for The Globe and Mail, and his present life as a husband and father, the book is not strictly an indictment of the war criminals and those who have empowered them (though it is that too). For El Akkad, Gaza also initiates a personal departure toward larger and more damning conclusions.
El Akkad’s story begins in Egypt, where his father worked in the accounting department of the Cairo Sheraton. In those years, the country was “sleepwalking” through dramatic shifts in power. The year before El Akkad was born, 1981, the country’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning president Anwar Sadat was assassinated; the strongman Hosni Mubarak succeeded him in a single-candidate referendum and ruled the country for thirty years thereafter, until he was effectively deposed during the Arab Spring. Leaving work one night in 1986, El Akkad’s father was detained by one of the young soldiers whose armed presence underpins all authoritarian regimes. The soldier asked for his father’s papers only to tear them up without reading them, tossing the shreds to the floor. It was only through dumb luck, his boss stumbling onto the scene, that El Akkad’s father escaped unscathed.
The story is foundational to El Akkad’s political understanding, an early lesson in the expendability of the rules. It frames the book’s larger “account of a fracture,” “something that, for an entire generation of not just Arabs or Muslims or Brown people but rather all manner of human beings from all parts of the world, fundamentally changed during this season of completely preventable horror.” For many, the genocide in Gaza reveals the hollowness of certain cherished “liberal” principles—e.g., human rights and the rule of law. The moment those principles become inconvenient, they become disposable. Even reality itself can be abandoned when it stands in the way of power. Once you suspend reality, moreover, you can substitute alternate realities, under whose banners up may be down, down up, and just who do you think you are, asking which way is down and which up? In time, one may not remember when the world was ever set aright.
As a teenager in Qatar, El Akkad longed for the West, where he believed he might find mobility and fairness and freedom, including “the freedom to be left alone.” He believed in his idea of the West long after he immigrated first to Canada, then to the United States. Even during the War on Terror years, while reporting from Afghanistan, he believed. In some regards, One Day can be read as an account of disenchantment with the western-style democracy that once served as a beacon. But El Akkad’s argument is more pointed than that. Whereas the conservative, he observes, “will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb,” the liberal “will just sheepishly initial it.” Liberals may dress themselves in the values of empathy and solidarity even as, in practice, they implicitly sanction murder and domination. The point is that if your conscience is “even remotely functioning,” this should not be possible.
“There’s always room on a liberal’s lawn,” El Akkad writes, meaning that the liberal’s “principal concern” is “not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.” As Guy Debord once pointed out, “the domination of the economy over social life” first leads to the “degradation of being into having,” and then “having into appearing.” That domination, what Debord calls “social power,” simultaneously subsumes one’s lived reality. A slogan may feel empowering, but inasmuch as it substitutes “appearing” for “being,” it may nonetheless reify existing structures of power. He sums up the vertiginous contradiction at the heart of this “spectacular” politics: “It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.”
Slogans are not policy, and a politics that does not enact what it espouses merely performs the gestures of conviction. Such a politics has no intention, let alone plan, to effect its putative beliefs. One thinks of Obama’s nebulous hope and change: how quickly these evaporated after 2008, replaced by a record of drone bombings and deportations. That may sound like a kind of cynicism that cost the Democrats the 2024 election, but El Akkad turns that accusation back around: “How empty does your message have to be,” he asks, “for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning?” Don’t blame those who sat out the election, in other words. Blame the hollowness of the thing they refused to vote for.
One can make the argument that whatever its failings one party is still better than the other. But this binary logic only serves to discipline us, to make us fall in line. Above all else, what it ensures, as a political system, is itself—the continuance of a status quo that fails people at nearly every turn. The narrow ways we have conceptualized our politics substitute affiliation for engagement. It’s as though stating that you’re one thing (a Democrat) or the other (a Republican) offers a self-evident gloss of your political commitments (it does not); but it is also as though such prima facie commitments are themselves active (they are not). Much as voting in any given election amounts to a baseline of citizenship, the bare minimum, to be a registered member of a political party in 21st century America only barely counts as political activity. There is tremendous passivity involved in both cases—a passivity, one might argue, that we can no longer afford.
That particular argument, however, isn’t the one El Akkad is making. One Day is not a manifesto of political engagement or active resistance; it is, instead, a paean to “negative resistance,” the refusal “to buy or attend or align.” It celebrates the act of simply walking away. El Akkad acknowledges that some, ironically, might accuse him of hypocrisy. Some might ask how, given his refusal to participate, he could possess any hope for change, let alone any moral standing. But an inability to imagine alternatives to this world, he suggests, doesn’t mean this world is defensible.
To some degree, this is the argument filmmaker Adam Curtis makes in his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation: faced with global problems seemingly too complex to solve, we have been encouraged to resign ourselves to the notion that no other world is possible, and that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. Importantly, though, this status quo is itself a construction, a pseudo-reality fashioned by politicians and financiers similarly overwhelmed by the complexity of the problems we face. It makes a certain sense, from within such a hidebound construction, to believe that one’s beliefs are political actions; after all, in a world in which no other world appears to be possible, one’s agency is reduced to performative gestures—virtue-signaling, as it were. Real action would require an actionable world, a reality in which our problems are solvable and we are the ones who can solve them. To engage in efforts to reform our pseudo-reality, from El Akkad’s point of view, is to play along with a pretense and, in a sense, to validate a sham. He refuses.
Late in life, the writer and critic George Steiner confessed that at no point had he ever been politically active. He joined no party, supported no program, voted in no election. He acknowledged that his refusal “empowers and in a sense justifies” all manner of horrific governance, but ultimately he concluded that humans, while often good and decent, are more frequently monstrous, as exemplified by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and the “undisguised plutocracy” of the twenty-first. For Steiner, who just barely escaped the Holocaust as a child, sadism predominates, and equality is nothing more than cant. All he hoped for from any political regime was that it allowed him a little breathing room. The most he asked for from any government was that he be left alone.
It’s a tempting position. But it’s a little like refusing to bail out a lifeboat, letting others keep at it while you sit quietly on your plank. If “negative resistance” has a flaw, it’s that you may wish to be done with politics, but politics is never done with you. Nobody, with the possible exception of the oligarchs, is that free. El Akkad seems to better understand this than Steiner. “I live here,” he writes, “because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles.” He lives here, he says, not because of the intellectual freedom it allows him (as Steiner claims), but because he is afraid.
At the same time, trying to suss out the book’s, or El Akkad’s, flaws—as some reviewers have done—is to perhaps misunderstand its project. “A manifesto,” writes China Miéville, “embraces contradiction. It’s unafraid of paradox. It delights in outrage. It provokes and insists and jokes and it’s quite serious. It oscillates between registers.” Manifestos are written in such a way that “analysis, provocation, warning, aspiration, and inspiration are inextricable.” They are—Miéville here quotes the scholar Julian Hanna—“a magic spell…a performative speech/act that attempts to bring a new reality into existence.” Miéville is writing about Marx and Engels’s quintessential manifesto in particular, the enduring power of which is not just that it rightly situates political struggle in its economic context, but that the implications of that insight remain contested to this day. That’s the irritating power of a good manifesto.
Read as such, it may amount to a category error to expect from One Day what one might expect from forms of discourse that seek to settle political or historical questions. The book might be seen instead as an effort to unsettle the reader out of their complacency, and their complicity. It’s certainly not without its blindspots—what text is?—but “[w]hat errors and fallacies there are,” Miéville advises, “must be counted as such, without inferring that in and of themselves they necessarily fatally wound the text.” You can poke holes all you want; just beware, lest all you see is your poking. If negative resistance has its flaws, it also has its virtues, which happen to be the manifesto’s: to warn, to provoke, to inspire.
When it comes to what a better future might look like, The Communist Manifesto is famously short on details, and One Day is similarly vague about what lies on or beyond the horizon. It imagines, by necessity, a world in which the killing has stopped. But mostly it imagines a world in which self-evident atrocity is immediately—not just from the safety of historical retrospect—acknowledged and rejected as such, a world in which post hoc moral recuperations are as distasteful as they are unnecessary. As for what one might, in walking away, be walking toward, El Akkad says only that “it’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was prepared to offer.” He’s not so much offering an alternative to our hypernormalized politics as he is saying one might begin here.
Wanting Democrats to win elections only so that Republicans don’t (or vice versa) is a zero-sum game, not a workable politics, which is what I suspect most people want: a politics that works for working people and entails a livable future. Democrats will continue to play that zero-sum game at their own peril. Or they could begin envisioning another future. The trouble is, El Akkad observes, that “the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die.” Western powers, he continues, “will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.” From within a cocoon of self-interest, from within our “imaginative desert,” how does one begin to envision just and sustainable alternatives? How does one dare to enact them?It isn’t wrong—either morally or logically—to conclude that it’s hopeless, that the system isn’t capable of delivering the kinds of changes we need. But it is predictable. It’s a prebaked conclusion, a product of the same status quo that assures us this is the best of all possible worlds. What it reveals is what it occludes: the (im)possibility of a better world than this. One Day hinges on the realization that all the Black Lives Matter signs in the world won’t make it so, that the Ukrainian flag on your lawn hasn’t dissuaded Vladimir Putin, and that the watermelon emojis on your social media profiles aren’t doing much good either. And so, the book prods, what will you do? Maybe just as importantly, what won’t you?
Erik Anderson
Erik Anderson is the author of four books: The Poetics of Trespass, Estranger, Flutter Point: Essays, and Bird. His essay about America, “Straight to the Heart,” appears in CRB 2.2.