What are we saying yes to?

Saying no to extremism isn't enough

“SAY NO TO REFORM UK”.

So said a poster that I got sent by a campaign group last week, which they wanted me to put up in a window ahead of the local elections next month.

I felt a bit uneasy.

Part of it was the tone. With its bright yellow background and huge capital letters, it felt slightly finger-waggy and ‘we know what’s best for you’ — the opposite of a curious conversation that starts off by listening.

But more fundamentally, it left me with a question. I keep seeing campaigns that want me to protest, resist, stop, defy, or otherwise say no to things. Each time, they make me think: fine, but what are we saying yes to?

It feels like an important question, for a couple of reasons.

One is the sense that people are deserting mainstream parties out of a mixture of despair, disgust and desperation with politics. To re-engage them, I think there needs to be more than just an admonition about whom not to vote for.

The other is how many movements we’ve seen fizzle out without really achieving anything, because they couldn’t make it beyond protest. Both Occupy Wall Street and Extinction Rebellion are cautionary tales about how hard it is to make lasting change unless you’re proposing something.

All of which begs the question: what *is* it that we should be saying yes to?

Love is all you need

Here’s the answer I keep coming back to: Love.

Not romantic love, obviously, or the kind of love we feel for our family. I mean the sort of love that transcends self-interest or in-groups; the kind the Greeks called agape.

I like (love!) this framing for three reasons.

One is its universality. A week after Trump’s election win last year, I wrote about how we need to rally for values like kindness, tolerance, wisdom, looking out for the vulnerable, looking out for the planet, the common good. But at the same time, I argued,

Let’s not fall into the trap of saying these are the values of ‘the left’. It would be a truly terrible idea for us to claim that these values belong only to people at one end of the political spectrum.

Because now more than ever, we need to stand up for why these are universal human values.

Values that all of us should be able to sign up to, against which all of us should be held to account.

Love is the most basic, foundational human value there is. It’s the core of all the world’s great faiths and wisdom traditions. It’s absolutely not just a value of the left. And that really matters right now, when we need to be building ultra-broad coalitions that span the whole width of the political spectrum.

Second, having love as the thing we’re saying yes to asks us to be better versions of ourselves, and demands that we expand our circles of compassion.

Because once you’re talking about love, it becomes pretty hard to say you should care about some people but not others.

JD Vance came unstuck on exactly this point when he tried to use the theological concept of ‘ordo amoris’ to argue that America should care about its own people more than immigrants.

He was immediately smacked down by the Pope, who observed that love “is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups” and that instead it’s about “a fraternity open to all, without exception”. (Preach!)

Finally, I like the fact that while there’s a clear dividing line between love on one hand and fear or hate on the other, this is not the kind of dividing line that ‘others’ anyone.

Love isn’t the kind of framing that sets one lot of us up as the good guys and another as the villains; there are no ‘deplorables’ here.

Instead it distinguishes between good and bad behaviours, or motivations, or intentions, and uses kindness — something we all know when we see it, and can all tell when it’s absent — to tell the difference.

I also really like the fact that when it comes to driving change in the world, love has as much to say about how as what.

How matters. You can’t fight for love by firing up fear and hate. That would be an obvious contradiction in terms.

And because how matters, love comes with a natural toolkit of change-making strategies. Lots of them are the ones we work on at Larger Us: things like building connection, bridging divides, the power of encounter, refusing to play the game of scapegoating that populists want to draw us into.

These are powerful approaches — as plenty of real world case examples show.

Here’s my favourite. It’s the story of how a campaign called “Radical Love” took on populist authoritarianism, and defeated it in a landslide. If you don’t know it, it’s a gem.

Radical Love

Back in 2019, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party narrowly lost the Istanbul mayoral elections to the centrist, moderate CHP party, led by the charismatic Ekrem İmamoğlu.

The CHP’s win was a huge upset. It was the first time the AKP had lost Istanbul in 25 years — and came right after Erdoğan had said “whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey”.

But then, shamefully, the result of the election was annulled, after the AKP alleged irregularities and used its influence over the courts to have the result overturned.

CHP supporters were furious. But İmamoğlu saw the trap that had been set for them, and refused to walk into it. He told his supporters, “They want conflict from us. But we, the people who do not want this nation to fight, we will insist on embracing each other.”

This, it soon emerged, was something he meant literally. “Find a neighbour who doesn’t think like you do,” he continued, “and give them a hug.”

Which is exactly what he proceeded to do, all through the re-run election campaign.

The whole gameplan was to subvert polarisation by refusing to be polarised. The CHP did not retreat into their secular support base. Instead, İmamoğlu toured mosques and Islamist districts to make a point of showing respect to the AKP’s religious voters. “We are showing that walls can be torn down with love,” he said.

All of this was pulled together in an extraordinary campaign playbook called Radical Love (you can download an English translation of it on the Larger Us website here). Its key principle: “Ignore Erdoğan, but love those who love him.” (Mic drop!)

At its heart was the responsibility that each of us has to manage our mental and emotional state and embrace the struggle to love each other even under the most challenging conditions. (“We saw that we cannot change Erdoğan, so we fight by changing ourselves.”)

As sociology professor Arlie Hochschild put it, this approach is about “mastering a temporary suspension of self — not… of moral commitment, but of self — in order to surrender to the deep act of curiosity about others… a form of ‘emotion work’ that is hugely important in politics”.

For instance, the Radical Love guide invited CHP supporters to imagine a scenario like this: “A young man who you would normally get along with may come to your party kiosk and provoke you. What to do in this situation? Should we get into a fight as he wants us to, or should we let love win like we want it to?”

There’s nothing woolly here. The playbook says again and again how hard this strategy is, how much patience and self-mastery it requires. It’s fundamentally about having the self-awareness to choose how to react, rather than sliding into amygdala hijack and kneejerk fight-flight-freeze responses when things get difficult.

The playbook also had clear-eyed recognition of how, in the past, the CHP and its supporters had belittled and looked down on the AKP’s supporters, many of them farmers in the countryside (“Some arrogant people… even called the hardworking workers and villagers of Anatolia ‘belly scratching men’”).

And there was huge emphasis too on focusing on what voters had in common with each other, instead of what divides them: “We may speak Turkish, Kurdish, Laz, Georgian, Arabic or English, but the most important thing is to speak ‘the human language’”.

What happened next

The result of all this when the re-run elections came around in June of 2019: İmamoğlu’s CHP party won a landslide, handing Erdoğan’s AKP a historic defeat in the process, and sweeping İmamoğlu to power as the new mayor of Istanbul.

The story is still unfolding, too.

Right now, as you read this in April 2025, İmamoğlu is locked up in Istanbul’s Marmara prison on charges including extortion and support for terrorism — having been arrested on the same day he won the primary to be the CHP’s candidate against Erdoğan in Turkey’s next presidential election.

Millions of people flooded the streets in response, expressing their support for İmamoğlu and demanding that Erdoğan resign as President.

What happens now is anyone’s guess.

But for me, the fact that Erdoğan imprisoned İmamoğlu rather than face him in an election only serves to underline the sheer power of the Radical Love campaign that defeated Erdoğan in 2019.

So maybe the rest of us should take a leaf out of their playbook. Maybe, rather than just saying no to Reform, Trump, or whoever, we need to make a point of being clear about what it is we’re saying yes to. And maybe that thing is Love.

Links I liked

For a much more expert breakdown on what’s happened in Turkish politics since İmamoğlu’s win in June 2019, this piece on Persuasion by Ayca Alemdaroglu is excellent.

Elsewhere around the world: fewer than half of Brits now see the US as an ally. Commonwealth leaders — Canada’s Mark Carney, NZ’s Christopher Luxon, and Australia’s Anthony Albanese — are all seen as more trusted allies than European leaders like Macron, Scholz, Tusk or von der Leyen.

Why is it that so many well-off Brits who privately think that collapse is coming stay silent about it? Rob Harrison-Plastow has done a deep dive and has fascinating thoughts.

In related vein, lots of food for thought in this piece on resilient communities as the key to surviving the “Chaoscene”, by Extinction Rebellion veteran and now Climate Majority Project co-founder Rupert Read.

In glass half full news: I’m really appreciating Fix The News, which Steven Pinker called “by an order of magnitude, the best source for positive news anywhere on the internet”. (In the latest edition: clean power just surpassed 40% of global electricity for the first time since the 1940s.)

Also seeing the bright side: Micah Sifry is always excellent, and his piece on not giving in to doomsayers in the US is a welcome blast of hopefulness and steely resolve.