Transcript: Ryan Zickgraf

My interview with the UnHerd columnist

One of the problems with increased polarization is that everything gets politicized, including simple acts of charity. My guest on the program this week is an American journalist who’s been tracking this trend in liberal and leftist circles. He’s published an essay making the argument that helping your neighbour is an affirmation of our shared humanity — not a “radical act of resistance.”

Ryan Zickgraf is an American journalist and a columnist at UnHerd. His Substack newsletter is The Third Rail.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: I subscribe to UnHerd and I always really enjoy your work there. You recently published a smart and funny piece that I wanted to discuss — it’s essentially about helping others. In your piece, you examine how our views about giving to others, particularly in American liberal circles, have taken a turn. What is “mutual aid,” and when did you start noticing this in the public conversation?

RZ: Well, yeah, that’s tough. What isn’t mutual aid, I guess is a better question. You know, I’ve been living in very liberal neighbourhoods for a while. I started noticing mutual aid probably 10 years ago when I was living in Chicago. It was something that radicals would talk about a lot. I had tried to figure out, at first, what they meant. Because mutual aid could be all sorts of things. It could be going down to the homeless camp and giving them food or cooking for them. It could be having a community tool chest where you pay a small fee and everybody gets to share tools. Or it could just be distributing left-wing pamphlets. That was more in the small activist groups.

But it has really exploded. During the COVID pandemic, when everybody was shut inside, there was talk in liberal circles about mutual aid and what that looked like. Helping people … what was the term? See, I’ve forgotten already. Five years ago, for frontline workers, they were the …

TH: Essential workers.

RZ: Essential workers! At the time, we got to do stuff for the essential workers and then six months later everyone forgot what essential workers are — including myself. [The mutual aid movement] really picked up since this ICE operation started in Minneapolis, and then especially after Renée Good was shot. Suddenly everybody in a lot of these very liberal circles was talking about mutual aid.

TH: Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a lot of the actions that you have described. I think going to a homeless camp is a nice thing to do. But you’re talking here about how we’re looking at this, how we’re thinking and talking about it. You write, “Mutual aid is a woke rebrand of two very old human impulses, charity and neighbourliness” and that “the act of helping can’t simply be helpful, it must be subversive.” What do you see as some of the downsides of politicizing charity and neighbourliness?

RZ: Yeah, that’s one thing I wanted to mention. As far as I can tell, a lot of what people say is mutual aid is just old-fashioned charity. But that is seen as an old, fuddy-duddy way of talking about being good to your fellow humans. And it is sort of coded as conservative, to some people, to talk about charity. So, a lot of people use mutual aid to talk about a type of charity that is political, that has some left-wing values to it.

I mentioned the tool shed, the community tool shed, because there’s one that’s starting up here and it’s actually opening this month. I’ve noticed — I walk by this storefront that they’ve got — there are pamphlets for fighting ICE in this tool shed. So, they really tied together [several things]. [In the past] charity wasn’t necessarily about signalling your political side or virtue signalling. I feel like this is what a lot of this is about. Also, it is true that a lot of charity is through these big NGOs and these organizations that you donate money to, like Habitat for Humanity. I think there is a way in which, when they’re talking about mutual aid, they mean not the big NGOs. They are talking about organizing on a local level, like local charity.

I think politicizing that [does] a few things. Number one, again, for somebody to go to a homeless camp and give them food is good. But to say that you’re fighting capitalism or you’re fighting Trump by doing that, I think confuses the issue. It’s good to encourage people to do this. That’s what Americans do. That’s what humans do — be good to each other. But there’s a danger that by politicizing it, when we’re out of this political mood that we’re in …

Right now, with Trump reelected, everybody is going insane again. There’s a danger in that there is this hyper-political mood. And then, when that passes, that giving spirit, or these projects, will just go away. Meanwhile, when you’re just a good [person] — when you’re just neighbourly, when you care about your neighbours or strangers — that’s something that is a lifelong commitment. Politics change all the time. Actual neighbourliness and charity endure.

TH: You point out that the history of neighbourliness and charity is quite a rich one in the United States. Tell us about that background that you cover in your piece.

RZ: I think it was in the 1820s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed democracy in America, and a lot of it was small-d democracy. He noticed that Americans were always organized. They formed groups, they formed organizations, constantly. There was a thick web of communities helping each other, organizing politically on small scales. That was just part of what defined what an American was back then.

Often throughout [America] — especially in cities — you had European immigrant communities coming together. They formed these very tight-knit neighbourhoods. This was before a welfare state. So, you would have, say, German immigrants, Polish immigrants, Irish immigrants, and they would settle into these cities and have what you would actually call mutual aid. If somebody in the community would die, they would come together and pay for a funeral, often in ethnic cemeteries. Or if somebody got sick, people would help out.

I used to live on the South Side of Chicago. In this Czech neighbourhood called Pilsen, there are these beautiful buildings called Sokols, which were really fascinating to me. What I found was that back in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, they operated as community centres where there would be gyms and there would be libraries, there would be performances, and it was all free for people that lived there. It was a hub of where a lot of this neighbourliness and charity would take place.

As cities changed over time, a lot of those ethnic neighbourhoods went to the suburbs. The suburbs have been a place where a lot of neighbourliness just doesn’t happen as much. Usually small towns still have that spirit, but the suburbs do not. But a lot of the spirit, a lot of that sense of duty to people around you, I think still exists in America. It just doesn’t look quite the same.

TH: We hear so much about living in an age of isolation and how everybody is feeling quite alienated. What forces do you think dull this impulse in us to connect with others and do for others?

RZ: I think it’s a lot of forces that have accumulated over the last hundred years. I mean, you could look at everything from cars, everyone having cars and driving all the time, to suburbanization, to air conditioning, to just the hyper-individualistic spirit that a lot of us have. The Internet. We tend to stay inside more and be on screens. Entertainment, infotainment — there’s just more to watch on screens.

You saw during the pandemic, when everybody was inside all of the time, this measurable decline in organization and charity. I was reading statistics during 2020, 2021, that giving was way down. People stopped going to church. People stopped having their kids in the Boy Scouts. That has slowly recovered some but has never quite gone back to the 2019 days.

You can see it when you’re walking around in public. People are often in their own worlds. They are on their phone, they have headphones on, and they just aren’t as engaged in the public realm as they used to be.

So yeah, it’s the spirit of the age. It’s the spirit of the 21st century that there’s hyper-individualism and we don’t have that sense of connection to our neighbours. People on the Internet talk a lot about community, which I find funny because it’s often just a group of people online. A lot of your actual community is the people right around you.

Something that I talked about [in the essay] was that I actually did see a lot of what I would call mutual aid in the past month. And that was the reaction to the snowstorm, where neighbours would get out and they would dig each other’s car out, shovel sidewalks, check in on their elderly neighbours.

Sometimes we’re so involved with ourselves that it takes a crisis. You see this all the time when there’s disasters — when there’s hurricanes or tornadoes or floods or even snowstorms — that’s when people become a little less self-involved, like, “Hey, I need to help my family. I need to help my friends. I need to help my neighbours.”

TH: Remind listeners where you are in the United States right now.

RZ: I’m in the capital of Pennsylvania, which is Harrisburg. I live in a very dense old neighbourhood. My wife and I intentionally chose this neighbourhood, partly because there is this really tight-knit community here. And so, I’ve gotten to see a lot of mutual aid, helping each other, in action. It’s really cool to see. Over Christmas, a community group came and sang Christmas carols. I felt like I was in the 19th century.

TH: That part of your essay [about the snowstorm] really hit home for me because in Toronto we’re having one of the worst winters in recent memory. Snow is a massive issue. I have seen my neighbours on my street do the same — help each other, help strangers. It’s been beautiful to see.

Circling back to something that you had talked about earlier, this NGO-ing of America, I want to drill down on that. There is a bureaucratization of volunteer work that’s taken place. Rachel Cohen from Vox came on the podcast a while back, talking about the power of volunteering, which I wholeheartedly agree with. But I will say that when you want to volunteer somewhere, you have to now apply as you would apply to a job, with résumés and cover letters and multiple interviews. The last time I went through this — it’s embarrassing — I couldn’t get any takers. I was on a waiting list for a year before I got a volunteer position. What do you think all of that is about?

RZ: That’s a good question. I mean, in a certain sense, there’s a lot of bureaucratization that’s happened all over contemporary life, from dealing with city governments and taxes to everything else. There’s a lot of red tape for almost everything we do. I’ve criticized the mutual aid movement a lot, but one thing that I do think that they have their pulse on is that we don’t need some of these very formal bureaucratized organizations to do good work in our community. Sometimes you could just go out there and do it. It doesn’t have to be political.

I’m part of a volunteer organization here that’s very open. I just showed up to a meeting and then all of a sudden I’m in. We do work where we are trying to campaign to make better neighbourhoods, as far as public trash cans, bike lanes, things like that.

But yeah, we don’t always have to form NGOs. The old spirit of America, like I was saying, would be “just go do it.” Meet up somewhere, and if something needs to be done, you just make a plan. I think that we sometimes add too much complexity to our day-to-day lives.

TH: Absolutely. Returning to the politicization element here. You write, “When mutual aid is framed as resistance, ordinary acts of care risk being devalued unless they’re politicized. Helping your neighbour move a couch becomes morally thinner than helping a stranger as part of a branded campaign called something like Seat Your Community.” [Laughs] I loved that. Valerie Stivers at UnHerd, an editor there — she’s also been on the podcast recently — when she tweeted out your piece, she included a great anecdote. She was talking about how, before she came on full-time at UnHerd, she did a volunteer spot weekly serving soup to homeless ladies at the Catholic Worker. She said a significant problem with the experience was “the Leftist and, sadly, anti-Catholic outlook among the organizers.” Stivers wrote: “Every day before the ladies came in, we would hold hands and pray, an explicitly non-denominational prayer extemporized by one of the organizers, often along the lines of ‘higher power, whatever that means to you, save us from Donald Trump.’” She was saying that if you want people to get involved, maybe it’s a good idea not to alienate people, particularly by assuming that everybody has the same politics, that everybody thinks about things the same way. Maybe don’t make people feel politically unwelcome. What was your response when you saw that tweet?