Love me like it's the end of the world
Is there room for a politics of love in our modern world?
Written by Victoria Pearson
A few years ago, when I was pregnant with my son, my husband and I would imagine his future — writing mental lists during our conversations about the traits we hoped he would inherit from each of us (both of our appetites, neither of our anxieties), and the things we hoped he would be (happy, healthy, curious, kind). But one hope felt more urgent, or fundamental than the rest: I wanted him to feel part of something. To grow up with a sense of belonging; of being held by a community – a sturdy and unyielding fabric of relationships that could carry him through uncertainty.
The idea was earnest but simple enough. Now, two years on from all that languid hypothesising, it feels almost radical. We are living in a time shaped by rupture: political polarisation, the collapse of institutional trust, a spiralling climate crisis and the quiet brutalities of a life built under late capitalism. At the time of writing, we’re watching the devastation in Gaza in real time. Antisemitism is resurgent across the globe. Violence against women continues, unfathomably, to escalate. First Nations peoples in Australia remain structurally disenfranchised, despite national conversations that promised better (and one shambolic referendum). Add to this a cost-of-living crisis, the hardening of global borders, and deepening digital echo chambers, and it becomes difficult to imagine what kind of future any child might inherit — let alone one in which community, care and love could serve as a political compass.
And yet, love persists. Not only as private emotion, for some, but as public ethic; a connective tissue in times of collapse. Lida Maxwell, an American political theorist and feminist scholar professor at Boston University, is one of the thinkers helping to articulate what this could mean. Maxwell has written about truth-telling and dissent in her book, Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling, and, most recently, published a book about the environmentalist Rachel Carson (Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love). Carson, Maxwell argues, wasn’t only motivated by ecological concern when she wrote about the unregulated use of pesticides and insecticides, and their effects on the earth and on human health, in her 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson was galvanised by love — the love she shared with her partner, and the natural world that nurtured that relationship. Love, in this framing, is catalytic, driving political risk and animating dissent.
“People who are standing up for their rights or against injustice are people deserving of care and compassion,” Maxwell tells me, noting that historically, many of the most resilient political movements have emerged from communities already excluded from mainstream power: queer, feminist, Black, disabled, Indigenous. Within these collectives, love has functioned not just as balm but as ballast – an infrastructure for survival.
And yet, love persists. Not only as private emotion, for some, but as public ethic; a connective tissue in times of collapse.
Louise Tarrant, former union leader and the co-founder and chair of the Australia reMADE Secretariat, echoes this thinking. In her 2020 essay “What if We Centred Radical Love at the Heart of Our Politics?”, Tarrant writes: “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression.” Quoting the activist and writer bell hooks, she reminds us that “when we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.”
This kind of love — radical, mutual, relational — is already at work in our lives, even if our politics doesn’t name it as such. During Australia’s bushfire summers and catastrophic floods, it wasn’t government departments but neighbours who showed up first. “Australians weren’t acting as consumers, as value-maximisers, as market players,” she writes. “We didn’t necessarily know each other, but we still cared and helped.”
Millie Rooney, executive director of Australia reMADE, frames this plainly: “Knowing your neighbour is disaster infrastructure,” she tells me. Rooney’s work involves building new civic narratives that prioritise care and belonging over productivity or profit. And Australia reMADE’s vision of a love-based politics isn’t utopian, she explains – it’s deeply pragmatic. It means ensuring everyone has enough to eat. That people have time to volunteer, to participate in civic life, to show up for each other. “There is nothing efficient about love,” she says. “And that’s its beauty.”
At its core, this is a feminist politics, one that values interdependence and relationality over domination. One that insists, as Hooks does, that love is not just a feeling but a practice: an ethic of care, of solidarity, of shared responsibility. In this vision, love becomes both the method and the end-goal of politics.
It’s easy to deride such language in a climate as cynical as ours. But as Rooney tells me, that cynicism is a design feature — not a bug. It’s part of a neoliberal story that casts us as consumers, not citizens, and teaches us to shrink the circle of care to ourselves and our kin. We can, in part, thank the Iron Lady for that. “When Margaret Thatcher very famously said, ‘There's no such thing as society – there's just the individual and the family’, I think that puts up a massive wall between how far we are allowed to love,” says Rooney. And it’s an attitude that continues to render the language of love as too emotional, too feminine, or too unserious for political discourse.
Maxwell, similarly, is clear-eyed about the risks. Love can be co-opted. Nationalistic rhetoric often disguises exclusion with affectionate terms (“love of country” becomes a proxy for racial or cultural conformity). And there’s a danger, particularly in her country (and our own) of cultivating a narrow idea of what love looks like: “heteronormative, getting married, having kids, buying into this kind of consumptive lifestyle.” “I think it teaches people to stay in the private realm, to not engage in politics, to blame all their unhappiness on the private realm.”
This is where self-love becomes essential — not as a wellness cliché, but as a form of political clarity. As Maxwell puts it: “I'm not going to engage in a politics that makes me hate myself, right? I'm not going to [engage in] a politics of violence that makes me not just hate myself, but see myself as unworthy, as shameful.”
It’s easy to deride such language in a climate as cynical as ours. But as Rooney tells me, that cynicism is a design feature — not a bug. It’s part of a neoliberal story that casts us as consumers, not citizens, and teaches us to shrink the circle of care to ourselves and our kin.
What historical events give Maxwell hope? The civil rights movements in the US, championed by Martin Luther King, for one. “He forthrightly spoke about love and love for each other,” she says, explaining how he did not allow love to drift into abstraction. Instead, he anchored it in the specific: love for people, not ideals; love for place, not profit. “Caring for each other is a principal part of the politics he was after. And I think that the people engaged in that politics — they saw all of their actions as outgrowth of that kind of caring for each other and, not coincidentally, it was a politics of non-violence.”
More grassroots efforts also offer studies of what a politics of love can look like in practice: mutual aid networks, Indigenous governance led by relational principles, community independents mobilising through listening. These aren’t flights of fancy.fanciful. They are strategies. Love, when taken seriously, is a political tool. Rooney puts it simply: “Love involves obligation. Not transactional obligation — but the kind that keeps the door open. That says, ‘You helped me. Now, I’m here for you.”
To talk about love in politics isn’t wishful. In a time of climate upheaval and cultural fragmentation, it may be the only reasoning vast enough to hold what’s left to come.