Have a Good Life

When your conservative friend blocks you on Signal.

A friend sent me a message on Signal last night and blocked me. I am writing about it not because my case is unusual but because it is not — because people have been losing friends and family over the past ten years in ways that follow this pattern almost exactly, and because I am one more person sitting with a phone that no longer has a name attached to a number in it. Ten years of this. Marriages ended over it. Parents and children who no longer speak. Siblings who dropped out of the group chat and never came back. Best friends since childhood who now cross the street. I share this because misery loves company, and because I think some of you are living your own version of it, and because I would rather not pretend I have handled mine better than I have. What follows is what he said, what I said back to the air after he closed the channel, and — at the end — what I think I got wrong about him.

Here is what he wrote:

Mike, you are a friend. But I cannot continue this [sic] debates with you anymore. You are a talented man and writer. But I am a conservative. I know you think my support for mass deportation is authoritarian. I think it’s protective of my country. It’s ugly watching little kids get rounded up. I can’t watch it. But enforcing the law has always had ugliness. I am sick of you making me feel like a bad person for just wanting to protect my country. Which comes form [sic] love. Have a good life Mike. You’re a different person now. You’ve become very left-wing. I agree Trump is a mistake. But the mistake [sic] was elected a corrupt man. The policy is correct. We need to have a country. That means a border. We shouldn’t have let 20 million people in, in the first place. Now they have to be rounded up. The mistake was made in the past. Not today. Now conservatives have to be hated for doing the dirty work liberals forced us into. You’re blocked now. I can’t do this.

I have read this over several times. It is the argument of the moment, in miniature. It is also the confession of a man who knows what is being done and cannot bear to see it, and who has found a shape of words that allows him to endorse it anyway. The shape is worth taking apart.

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The first move is the vocative. Mike, you are a friend. This is not a greeting; it is a permission slip. The message is going to say something the writer is aware I will experience as a moral break, and he wants to establish, before he says it, that the break is not his fault. He is a friend. He is only pointing out that we cannot continue like this. The affection is real, and it is also doing an enormous amount of work in the sentences that follow, because those sentences will need to explain why a friend is prepared to endorse policies whose victims include ten-year-old girls walking to the bus stop.

Then the identification. I am a conservative. This is the sentence that does the most work in the whole message, and it does it by pretending to do none. A conservative, in the writer’s usage here, is not a person who holds a set of contestable political views; it is a category of person, an identity like left-handedness or a birthmark, and once invoked it converts every specific policy into a feature of the identity rather than a decision made by a moral agent. If I am a conservative, and conservatives support mass deportation, then my support for mass deportation is not something I chose — it is something I am. Which means the question of whether I am causing harm is not really a question about me at all. It is a question about the category, which cannot be changed, and about the policy, which comes with the category.

I will note here that this is not a conservative move in any tradition I can find. Burke did not think this way. Buckley did not. Reagan, whatever else he was, did not. The identification of conservative with whatever the sitting Republican president is doing this week is a Trump-era innovation, and it is precisely the innovation the message is doing the work of installing. My friend was a Bush voter. He is now a man who has been told that the party he identifies with requires him to endorse the removal of fourteen million people by force, and who has decided that identification is more durable than judgment.

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Then the ledger of the ugliness. I know you think my support for mass deportation is authoritarian. I think it’s protective of my country. It’s ugly watching little kids get rounded up. I can’t watch it. But enforcing the law has always had ugliness.

This is the passage I keep returning to, because it is the point at which the message admits the thing it is defending and continues to defend it. He can’t watch it. He knows what he is endorsing. The children are real to him — real enough that he cannot look at them. And he has a sentence prepared for this, a sentence that arrives from somewhere outside his own conscience and takes its place: enforcing the law has always had ugliness.

Consider what this sentence is doing. It is not an argument about immigration; it is a general principle about law. It could be attached to anything. Enforcing the fugitive slave laws had ugliness. Enforcing the Nuremberg race laws had ugliness. Enforcing the internment of Japanese Americans had ugliness. In each case the sentence is true, and in each case the sentence is beside the point, because the ugliness of enforcement is not incidental to the law being enforced — it is the tell that the law is monstrous. A law that requires you to look away while it works is a law that has told you what it is.

He knows this. He has already conceded it. He said the words little kids get rounded up, and then he said I can’t watch it, and then he reached for the general principle so that he would not have to be the person watching it. The general principle is the block button. Not the one he pressed on Signal — the one he pressed inside his own head so that he could go on being a friend to me, and to himself, and to a policy that gathers a ten-year-old girl in the snow at 6:10 in the morning (CNN) and puts her on a plane to Dilley, Texas, and holds her there for almost a month. Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano thought the federal agents surrounding her mother’s car were there to give her a ride to school. She was one of at least six children taken from a single Minneapolis school district. This is not a story from the past. This is January of this year. This is the ugliness that enforcing the law has, and he cannot watch it, and he supports it, and I am the person making him feel bad about it.

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Then the numbers. We shouldn’t have let 20 million people in, in the first place. Now they have to be rounded up.

Twenty million is not a number that exists in any serious study of the American immigration system. The Pew Research Center, which does this counting more carefully than anyone, estimates the peak unauthorized population at fourteen million in 2023, and reports that the number began declining in 2025 (Pew Research). Twenty million is what the number becomes when the person quoting it does not care about the number and is using it to mean too many to think about. Which is the point. If it were fourteen million you might be tempted to think about who they are — the woman who cleans your office, the man who framed your kitchen, the girl in your daughter’s third-grade class. If it is twenty million it is a flood, a swarm, an emergency, a scale at which individual faces stop registering. The inflation is protective—it is the number that lets you stop counting.

And notice the passive construction that follows. Now they have to be rounded up. Not now we have to round them up. Not now conservatives will round them up, at a cost of forty billion dollars a year, with a workforce ICE is quintupling, using tactics that have killed fifty-two people in custody in the past 500 days at the highest mortality rate in twenty years (Human Rights Watch). The agent has been evacuated from the sentence. The moral question is no longer whether to do it; it is only how to feel about the fact that it is being done, which is the only question the message is actually asking me to answer.

The Brookings Institution estimates that in the first sixteen months of this administration, roughly 146,000 American citizen children have had a parent detained. Thirty-six percent of those children are under six. Twenty-two thousand of them have had every parent in their household taken away. These are American children whose citizenship — the thing my friend says he wants to protect — is being used to teach them what the country is by taking the country’s people away from them. In July of this year, ICE arrested 51,000 people in a single month, the highest monthly total in the agency’s history (WSWS reporting Fox; Newsmax). The daily arrest quota is 2,000. This is not a story of enforcement drifting toward excess. The excess is very much the point.

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Then the theodicy. The mistake was made in the past. Not today. Now conservatives have to be hated for doing the dirty work liberals forced us into.

I have been thinking about this sentence for a while, because it is the sentence I have heard some version of from perhaps a dozen friends in the last two years, and I have never quite been able to answer it in real time. Look at what it is doing. It concedes that a mistake was made. It concedes that the current work is dirty. It concedes that the doers of the work will be hated for it. And then it says: therefore, none of it is our fault. The past made a mistake and left us the mess. Liberals let the people in. Conservatives now have to remove them. The removal is dirty. The removers are hated. The hatred is the price of being the adult in the room.

There are a lot of things wrong with this argument, but the one that matters is the tense. The mistake was made in the past. Not today. This is a device for the removal of moral time, dressed as a defense of a policy. Whatever is happening now is a consequence of what happened then, and therefore not itself an event with authors. But every deportation is happening today. Every child on a plane to Dilley is on that plane today. Every death in custody is a death today. The person choosing to do the rounding up is choosing today, and the person choosing to endorse it is choosing today, and the fact that a legislature failed to pass a comprehensive reform in 2013 does not make those choices retroactive. Time does not work that way. If it did, no one would ever be responsible for anything.

The move is old. It is the move by which every regime of removal has been sold to the people who had to live with it. We would rather not, but we must. The mess was left to us. The dirty work must be done. The dirty work must be done by someone. Better it be done by people who love their country than by people who do not. This is the emotional accounting of a man who has agreed to do a thing he cannot look at, and who has decided the reason he cannot look at it is that other people have made him look bad.

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Then the exit. I am sick of you making me feel like a bad person for just wanting to protect my country. Which comes form [sic] love.

This is the sentence in which the whole architecture collapses into its foundation. He is sick of being made to feel like a bad person. Not of doing bad things, or of endorsing them, or of being complicit in them. Of feeling like the kind of person who does. The offense is not the policy; the offense is the affective consequence of the policy for him. His discomfort at feeling badly about the children is greater than his discomfort at the children. And this is the point at which he has to leave, because I have become, in the shape of the argument, the person who is causing the discomfort. Removing me removes the discomfort. Removing me removes the mirror. He can go on loving his country in a way that requires him not to look at what is being done in the country’s name, and he can do it without me in the room.

I understand this. I do not accept it, but I understand it. It is a very old human move. It is the move by which one becomes a person one would not have wanted to become, without ever quite noticing the moment at which it happened. It is the reason blocking a friend feels like a moral act rather than an evasion; the act of removing the witness is easier to justify than the act being witnessed.

But — and here is the thing I want to say to him, the thing I would say if the channel were still open — love of country does not immunize what love does. Saying your policy comes from love has never been enough. Every enforcement in history has claimed the same lineage. Love of country justified the Chinese Exclusion Act. Love of country justified Executive Order 9066. Love of country justified the Fugitive Slave Act. The category of love is doing no work here. What matters is what the love is asking you to endorse, and whether you can look at it, and whether you have to break the connection to your friends in order to keep endorsing it. If you have to, that is the answer. That is the entire answer. The friendship is not the price of the policy. The friendship is the last remaining piece of evidence that the policy is intolerable, and getting rid of the friendship is getting rid of the evidence.

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He wrote have a good life and blocked me. And here is where I have to say the harder thing, the thing the essay above has been avoiding — the thing that will, I suspect, be the most useful part of this for anyone reading who is going through their own version.

He is right to leave.

I mean that not as a rhetorical concession but as a description of the situation. Everything I have written above he would experience, correctly, as the reason he could not be my friend. I have taken his message apart in a way that treats his conscience as a specimen and his affection as a mechanism, and I have done it with a fluency he does not have and a confidence he cannot match. He is a man who wrote a paragraph on a phone at what was probably a hard moment for him, and I am a man who has spent five thousand words explaining what that paragraph really meant. He did not have five thousand words. He had I can’t do this. Between those two capacities there is not a friendship. There is a person with a microphone and a person who has correctly noticed that the microphone is pointed at him.

He is also right that I have changed. I do not think I have become left-wing in the sense he means — the policy positions I hold now are mostly the ones I held ten years ago — but I have become a person for whom the current moment is not something one can hold at conversational distance, and he is not that person, and I am no longer able to grant the good faith that would let him remain in relationship with me while he holds the view he holds. I would like to say that I am. I am not. When he wrote the policy is correct, something in me closed that will not open again, and I have to be honest that this closing is mine, is a fact about me, and is not going to be repaired by his willingness to keep talking through it.

The view he holds is held by something like a third of this country. I do not know the exact number and I do not think anyone does, but it is a great many people, and they are not, most of them, monsters. They are people who have decided, for reasons that make sense inside their own lives, that the country is coming apart, and that it must be held together, and that the holding-together will require things they do not want to look at. My friend is one of them. He is not the worst of them; he is not close to the worst of them. He is a man who cannot watch what is being done and who has found a way to endorse it anyway, and he is my friend, and I have taken the sentence he wrote at the end of a hard week and I have used it to demonstrate the moral structure of an entire political tendency. That is a thing you can do. It is not a thing you can do to your friends.

Which means I have to say what I actually believe, and I say it especially to those of you reading this because you are in the middle of your own version of it. Most people should not do what I do. If you have a friend, and your friend holds this view, and your friend is not a person who wants to hurt anyone, and you can find a way to keep talking to him — keep talking to him. Do not do what I have done. Do not spend five thousand words on the paragraph he sent you. Do not treat his conscience as a document. The country is going to need the people who can still hold this conversation across the line my friend and I could not hold it across, and those people are not going to be the ones who write essays like this one. They are going to be the ones who answered have a good life with you too, and meant it, and kept the number in their phone. I am not those people. I wish I were, and I suspect some of you are, and the country is going to need you more than it is going to need me.

I don’t write this to redeem myself. Writing it does not redeem me. The essay above is what I actually think about the argument he made, and I am not going to retract it, because retracting it would be a lie — I do think the twenty million is a lie of scale, I do think the passive voice is doing moral work, I do think love-of-country has been used to cover the same crime by every regime that ever committed it, and I do think he knows. All of that is what I think. And thinking it is what has made me a person he cannot be friends with, and he has looked at that clearly, more clearly than I did, and he has done the thing the situation actually required.

He was the friend. I was the one who couldn’t do it.

Have a good life. I mean it.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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