A Helpful (Anticipatory) Strategy

I’ve been aligned with and financially supportive of a couple “depolarizing America” organizations, but the wisdom nugget for the day here comes from Starts With Us, which I learned about when preparing to speak with a new rabbi friend, Elan Babchuck: “Four Reasons You Should Distinguish Politicians From Their Voters.”

The start of the piece: 

No matter who wins in the upcoming election, many Americans will feel angry, fearful, and frustrated. This will likely fuel further political toxicity, which can spill over into our personal and professional relationships. One reason politics grows more toxic is that we often take our negative emotions about disliked politicians and direct those emotions toward their voters. But if we want to build a healthier political future, we should see an important truth: political leaders are not their supporters.

A quick summary and personal paraphrase of their points, then. The reasons to distinguish "voters" from “their politician” are many, but fourfold in this piece. 1. Political groups are complex, so we cannot assume the worst about voters because we have a strong aversion to their chosen politician. People vote for a wide variety of reasons–principled policy reasons, gut-sense, emotional history, simply to oppose what has been, and more. Our world hones us to sound-bites and simple views of a world overwhelmingly complicated and complexified by culture, economics, glocalization and more. Take a breath every time before you speak or assume. 2. Our views of one another are distorted. Each party tends to see the worst extremes in ‘the other,’ so we are mirroring one another almost precisely. Each of us actually overestimates the extremism of the other (in the majority of cases). These misjudgments fuel all the fear, anger, distrust. 3. Many vote to oppose ‘the other side.’ Many are voting to prevent “what they fear most,” not willing or able to relinquish fear and truly listen to one another. We may not like any knee-jerk ‘other-side-ism’ and yet it doesn’t make a voter inhuman or ignorant. Political parties change over time and we can easily miss it in a sense of fidelity and loyalty to party, family, etc. Shoot, the Democratic Party over a hundred years ago was pro-slavery, remember? And 4. A vote doesn’t mean agreeing with every policy. We live in an era of single-issue voters, shaped to focus only on that issue, whether it is abortion, gun rights, healthcare, or the economy. Most often, voters feel like they are choosing the least-bad option, not a perfect-fit one. Remembering this can help prevent us from sweeping assumptions about any of us.

I was so appreciative of friends who commented on a blog I wrote yesterday on my Reconsidering Citizenship site. I hadn’t written there in a while, spending my energies here, but I also didn’t want that piece on this personal blog, for some reason. What I was blessedly reminded of, all day as I checked in to see if anyone had commented, was standing in prayer for the persecutors as well as the persecuted.

I DO stand with an Energy and Teacher whose soul-message was love your enemies. I can feel that in me today when I was struggling to yesterday.

How we do that matters in these next days, weeks, months. We may not control outcomes, but we can be the love and change we want in the world, one day at a time.