Why activists should take friendship seriously

This article Why activists should take friendship seriously was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

My whole life, I’ve regarded friendship as a happy by-product of activism — a reward for all the sacrifice, but little more. That view got a jolt when my friend Frida Berrigan, reviewing my new book about the post-9/11 antiwar movement, wrote: “Varon conveys that the real strength of the peace movement . . . is friendship.” Hmm. 

I met two of my best friends through the anti-Guántanamo group Witness Against Torture. Countless friendships formed in the groups I studied. Friendship, Frida claims, defied the “War on Terror,” based in fear, suspicion and racism.

The second jolt came when reading Benjamin Shepard’s terrific “On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting.” For Shepard, a dear friend of friends, friendship is essential — both the means and the end of change-making. I met my wife, Alice Meaker Varon, and another one of my closest friends through the 2004 sensation Billionaires for Bush.

Touché.

Ben Shepard takes friendship seriously, while making the case that we, as activists, should do so too. The book is hardly a systematic treatment of friendship. Instead, it is a shape-shifting account of Shepard’s own journey through the great progressive causes of the last four decades, from HIV/AIDS activism, to global justice, to opposition to war and now fascism. Studded throughout is wisdom about friendship, from Aristotle to Adrienne Rich, along with Shepard’s tender remembrances of love, loss and fellowship at the barricades. 

There is a long philosophical tradition that sees friendship, especially with virtuous friends, as itself an act of virtue. From experience, we all know that friendship — in its connection and contention, happiness and hard times — is a crucible for the formation of both our character and capacity in the world.

Shepard’s conceit is to see that capacity as a potent, if underappreciated, political force. 

Some of the book’s most arresting lines are those Shepard worked to learn, like the greeting of an HIV/AIDS activist to her staff: “Thank you for coming to work today!” That work, based in the respect of friendship, saved lives.

Ever humble, Shepard reveals himself as something of a national treasure. He seems to know everybody, in New York City at least. There must be three of him, my wife and I joke, because he’s at every protest. He always has a giant smile and kind words to match. He’s the kind of person who makes you feel good about yourself and whatever your small effort is that day. Bless such people. 

Shepard never goes so far as to say that friendship, in itself, is resistance. (J.D. Vance, no doubt, has friends; Hitler surely did too.) But he makes the political case, quoting philosopher Bennet Helm, that friendship is a “joint exercise of autonomy in defining the kind of life worth living.” Friendship, put otherwise, can be figurative. The goal of so much activism is to give the public and policy spheres a hint of the decency, empathy and compassion we privately seek. 

These recent years have been so awful, in part because too many Americans have embraced a cruelty and toughness in public life that violates what they expect from themselves and others in the realm of friendship. Friendship, Shepard implicitly argues, is a standpoint from which to reject right-wing ideology, on personal as much as political grounds.

Shepard hardly glazes up activists’ commitment to friendship. Much of the book is about the soul-destroying ploys of too many on the left to tear their comrades down. The most intense parts of the book concern what may be termed the left’s own “cancel culture” (though Shepard avoids the term). It is one thing, he argues, to disagree with the position of an ally on some specific issue. It is another thing to accuse that comrade of being a bad person, through and through. I winced, and nearly cried, when reading of an ACT UP activist, at the height of the AIDS crises, being nearly ex-communicated for taking a “safe sex” line, to the ire of ACT UP’s “pro-sex” radicals. Shepard offers plenty of dispiriting examples, surely triggering grief in the reader from their own experience. Hillary vs. Bernie vs. Trump broke close bonds. No doubt, Oct. 7 and Gaza did too. 

Shepard is a fierce fighter for all that is good and just. He has lived a “big life,” in no small part by allying with big personalities, like the legendary HIV/AIDS activist Elizabeth Owens, whose life as a Black queer woman from the Bronx is so different from Shepard’s own. But, intramurally speaking, Shepard is a lover, not a fighter. His insistent message is that people broadly on the same side share vastly more than whatever may separate them. The best play is almost always coalition, alliance. Divisiveness divides, and saps our power. Almost never do we look in retrospect at such schisms over ideology — or worse personality — and judge them worth the strife.

I have learned this all over again in a recent, terrible struggle against wicked austerity at my university, the New School, in which faculty and staff jobs are on the line.

The stress is enormous, as the stakes are high. There are power plays, stretching years back, in our spirited resistance. But there are, more importantly, fundamental issues of worker justice on the line, demanding solidarity and true efforts to listen, understand and even change one’s position.

Shepard endorses solidarity, while reminding us of the simple act of human kindness — based on shared aspirations and responses to shared hardships — that make solidarity real.

Through it all, Ben smiles. He takes the prefigurative seriously, along with the succor (and sexy connection of queer struggles of the 1990s) of the group experience.

Maybe I smile too little because I don’t value enough the friendships we create. Maybe you do too.

Thank you Ben, my friend, for pointing us to a better way.

This article Why activists should take friendship seriously was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/02/why-activists-should-take-friendship-seriously/