In the 1960s, the American writer James Baldwin argued for a new politics of love. It was a brave call at a time when freedom riders were literally being lynched in cold blood and hot rage. Hannah Arendt wrote Baldwin a letter in response arguing that politics and love must be strangers. She saw in it a slippery slope to sentimentalism and the banishment of reason. When you leave the door ajar to love, she argued, you also leave it open to its opposite, hate, and she had experience of that, brutally, of course, in Nazi Germany. Baldwin—black and gay—disagreed:

'Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.'

Loving each other means that we have to be fully ourselves with all our vulnerability, and learning that to be heard we also must learn to listen. Kindness is not weakness. It's a different type of strength, what Baldwin described as

'the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth', and it's in that spirit that I'm glad to support the call for a new kind of politics where love is our motivation, our ideal, our virtue and our common goal.