What now? With the election behind us, here are five ways forward
If our goal is to protect and preserve our republic, chaos cannot be what we choose.
The morning of the presidential election, I tweeted that whatever happens in the coming days and weeks, one thing is certain: All our work will still be ahead of us. Our constant culture-warring is unsustainable, and our inability or unwillingness to communicate will end us.
Whether you’re reeling or rejoicing over the results, the critical question before us remains: “What now?”
How do we intend to engage, mobilize, and advocate in our culture? How will we contribute to and participate in our discourse? How will we choose to be, and be with each other, now that the contest is over?
Our answers will determine whether the next four years will lead to cohesion or further chaos. And if our goal is to protect and preserve our republic, chaos cannot be what we choose.
Here are five guidelines for moving forward which can make things easier—for all of us, regardless of our politics—if we heed them.
1. Don’t divide any further
The worst thing we can do right now is engage less with people who don't think, believe, or vote like us. If you’re convinced that your friends or family members are wrong about important issues, or that their beliefs and behaviors are perpetuating harm in the world, don’t give up on them.
Love them. Talk to them. Listen to them. Try to approach them and their views with compassion.
And have some humility. It’s entirely possible that you may be the one who’s mistaken. At the very least, there may be something about them or their perspectives that you don’t understand or haven’t considered. There is absolutely nothing—and no one—you can't learn from, and we’re always going to be wrong about more things than we’re right about. Discovering this is a good thing.
The only solution to our social, political, and ideological divides is to bridge them, and the only way to do that is to communicate more effectively—not with the choir, but with our prospective converts. These conversations can be difficult, but they are not impossible. You’ll be surprised how far a little self-awareness and intentionality will get you.
Skeptics tend to think, "This isn’t complicated. I know better, so they should, too." But this is a kind of moral solipsism. It doesn't account for how much our experiences and exposure to information—as well as how we receive and interpret it—can differ. We’re all the products of our environments, educations, upbringings, parents, peers, and psychologies, which leads us to being who we are and believing what we believe. That can’t all be undone in a single conversation, or by simply presenting someone with “the facts.”
Just imagine what it would require for you to abandon your most deeply-held convictions. How difficult would it be? How much time would it take? Is it even possible? Why would it be any easier for anyone else to do the same thing?
This doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying, however. There’s no telling what kind of effect even one productive exchange can have, let alone many conversations over time—especially when they’re grounded in a deeper human relationship rather than a clash of opposing sides. Just as you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, you convince 0% of the people you don’t engage with.
When you justify giving up on others, you're also justifying others giving up on you. That leaves us nowhere good.
2. How we communicate is just as important as what we communicate
One of our biggest culture war misconceptions is that the stakes are too high and our opponents are too dangerous to waste time on civility. In fact, many believe civility itself is a weakness our enemies will exploit to destroy us.
Wrong. Civility is not a weakness. It is the most powerful tool we have to effect meaningful, lasting change.
Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this well, which is why his principles of nonviolence were grounded in those ideals. King recognized that to successfully advocate for and achieve our goals, we must avoid becoming mirrors of what we’re opposing. This is why he said, “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”
No one can tell me that the movement King led was a failure, and that what we’re dealing with today is more difficult than being hosed, beaten, and having dogs sicced on you. If King and his compatriots could hold to principle in the face of that, we can certainly face our modern challenges with equanimity and poise.
Contrary to the canards we often hear, civility does not mean becoming a doormat or relinquishing our strongly-held convictions. Quite the opposite. It’s how we become the best possible advocates for what we believe in. The simple act of not being the monster or caricature that our opponents expect can be incredibly disarming. It’s also powerfully persuasive. We need look no further than the example of Daryl Davis—who led more than 200 white supremacists away from their heinous beliefs by simply being their friend—for proof of just how effective this approach can be. If he can do that, we can do this.
3. Our opponents are not morons or monsters
Too many of us have convinced ourselves that those we disagree with are more than just wrong. At best, they’re hopelessly stupid. At worst, they’re evil. Otherwise, they’d agree with us—because, of course, we are sensible, good people who value facts and evidence and care about the truth.
But that’s part of the problem: Everybody thinks that, and we can’t all be right all the time. Condescension also rarely convinces people to consider your point of view.
The reality is that very few people are consciously attempting to make the world a worse place to live. Most people, most of the time, are doing what they believe is good, right, and just—or at least justifiable, given their goals. If you can’t see that, you aren’t looking hard enough.
This recognition is the basis for a rhetorical tool I call star-manning. To star-man is to engage not only with the strongest and most charitable version of our opponent’s arguments, but also with the strongest and most charitable version of our opponents. We do this by locating and explicitly acknowledging the fundamental human values and desires motivating their positions, informing their perspectives, and undergirding their arguments—values we share, as human beings, despite our differences.
Star-manning allows us to argue in truly good faith and make progress in a way we otherwise can’t, because it lets us see clearly not just our opponent’s arguments, but also their humanity. This is the only way I know of actually being effective in persuading or opposing those we disagree with.
4. Dishonesty and hyperbole are self-defeating tactics
Honesty and integrity are often difficult principles to uphold. This is especially true when it feels like you’re the only one doing it, and when it seems like your opponents are blazing ahead through treachery and deception.
But those moments are precisely when these principles are most important. Lies—even noble ones—don’t last forever, and trust is a very difficult thing to regain when it’s lost. Many of our institutions are currently reaping the consequences of this behavior, and it’s easy to see how devastating the resultant lack of trust is for our society and culture. We shouldn’t follow suit.
It’s tempting to score easy points and chase instant gratification. But when we are so convinced we’re right that anything we do in service of our rightness is justified, we are wrong. The means we employ to achieve our end matter deeply.
If our cause is truly righteous and the stakes are really as high as we imagine, we have even more reason to be allergic to hyperbole and dishonesty in our efforts. Every brick we lay on a foundation of lies or half-truths will come down on us eventually. Any gains made in the meantime will be pyrrhic, at best. At worst, they will unravel everything we hoped to build and defend.
Honesty and integrity may be the slow, hard road, but they’re the only surefire route to where we’re trying to go.
5. Reject simplistic narratives about “us” and “them”
My friend Alma Valerio once brilliantly observed, “‘Only God can judge me’ really rolls off the tongue. ‘Only God can judge you’ is a little harder for us to squeak out for some reason.”
Most of us are operating in a media ecosystem that incentivizes polarization and discord, feeding our worst tendencies and making constructive engagement nearly impossible. But there is a way to counteract this: recognize and remember that nuance abounds. Life, and the issues we’re dealing with, are often complex and multifaceted. Even if an issue is simple on its own, how people feel about and respond to it is often far from simple.
Propaganda, on the other hand, lacks nuance by design. We must train ourselves to be deathly allergic to any “they are not like us” rhetoric that coincidentally frames “us” as heroes and freedom fighters, and “them” as morons or monsters.
If a notion about people or ideas you oppose makes you feel good, mighty, and righteous, give it the side-eye. It is probably at least half bullshit.
This principle applies to our behavior, too. When satisfying an urge for justice just so happens to satisfy other urges too, we should pause and make sure justice is really what we got—or what we were after—at all. If we don’t hold to and embody our ideals, we’ve lost everything before we’ve even begun.
We’re in this together, whether we like it or not
Years ago I heard the quote, “Right Wing, Left Wing, same bird.”
I loved it. The line perfectly encapsulated my cynical, scornful feelings about the state of party politics. At the time, I was an idealist being mugged by reality, and my way of coping with the ugliness I saw was to adopt a condescending detachment. The quote quenched my thirst to be hostile in equal measure to what I saw as leaders that didn’t care about their people and caused more problems than they solved.
But in all my cynicism, I forgot about the bird.
Birds need both wings, working together, in order to fly. If either or both are broken, they’re hopelessly grounded. If any one wing takes total control, as Pat Paulsen once quipped, they’ll just fly in circles.
Forward flight requires balance and a unity of purpose. For us, that requires communicating across divides, acknowledging our common humanity, and recognizing that for all the difficulty that comes with living together, our fates are and will always be intertwined.
Our flawed but beautiful American experiment hinges on these realizations. That’s why the quote should really be, “Right Wing, Left Wing, one bird,” for better or worse.
It’s up to us which that will be.
This is an essay for our 2024 Election series. Submit your article to submissions@fairforall.org.
Watch FAIR Board President Angel Eduardo and Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels Mónica Guzmán on Village Squared discussing how we might think and act anew in the days, weeks, and years after the election.
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