Want a nation
We want our candidates, and rightly so. But maybe it's a nation that we need.
Just to be clear, this is not a post saying that Trump is our president now, so we should rally around him for the good of our country. It’s more saying what I would always say, given the chance: I think America’s problems have more to do with its social fabric than any one political outcome. Even this presidential election. And we should act accordingly.
When Biden won in 2020, I was ecstatic. I cried. I didn’t gloat, but I did celebrate. Loudly. I posted a cover of “My Boyfriend’s Back” on Facebook and addressed it to Vladimir Putin. I posted a lot of things on social media.
And then later that week, I saw one of my dear friends, my one Republican neighbor, in front of her house in DC. She looked like she’d been dragged by a horse.
“I’m not hopeful for the country at all,” she said.
“What do you think should happen?” I asked.
“Just . . . more Republicans,” was how she put it.
“You think so, huh?”
“I don’t want to hear it, Matt,” she snapped, starting to walk away. That was it. We’d been friends for over a decade, but she unfriended me on Facebook later that week, and she moved shortly after that. We haven’t communicated since.
I noticed a couple of things in that interaction. One, in 2016, I had felt at least as bad as my neighbor did in 2020, and I had made space to listen to every last thing she said about Trump for four years. In my pain, I had been able to hold her point of view, and in her pain, she wasn’t able to hold mine. I think there’s a larger pattern in those kinds of asymmetries.
And two, I noticed that, as far as the culture war goes, there’s no victory at all in being right about that kind of thing. None. In my experience, roughly half the electorate has been increasingly devastated by every election since 2004. I think we have to understand how unsustainable that is.
Yes, there’s asymmetry. Yes. Yes. I think it’s hard to compare Bush’s war in Iraq — based on lies, likely involving the punitive outing of an undercover intelligent agent — with anything that Obama did. Or to find analogues to the Obama era obstructionism. Or the dark refusal to hold hearings for Merrick Garland for SCOTUS, only to ramrod Amy Coney Barrett four years later. Today, the disinformation on the Right, and saturated hatred of the Left is more toxic, way more institutionalized, and regularly based in shoddier argumentation, than the animus generally being directed the other way.
Trump lies and demonizes. He’s self-centered; he’s mean-spirited and vindictive, and it seems that the only thing that restrains his political power from being used against his perceived enemies is those around him restraining him. The last time he lost a presidential election, he lied about it, tried to create an alternate electoral college, tried to get Secretary of State Raffensperger to “find” votes in Georgia, and fomented an insurrection that killed seven people and injured hundreds of others. Few of the people who worked in his first administration want anything to do with him anymore.
Also, it’s hard to argue with the numbers. Trump won the poplar vote this time. As far as I know, he won bigger with every demographic except trans poeple. (And you can see why he didn’t win with trans people, because the way he speaks about trans people is appalling.) By some estimates, he won a third of the vote of people of color.
And, again, nobody’s going anywhere. When more than half of the electorate supports a candidate, no matter how terrible, I think it’s time to completely chuck out the idea that one side or the other is going to win this thing, or that MAGA is going to die out by being voted out.
It’s not going to die out.
To me, January 6th, 2020 bore one key message which, tragically, seems to mostly have gotten lost. To me, the main message wasn’t that the MAGA movement has consumed the Republican party, and that MAGA is evil. It definitely wasn’t that Trump had the election stolen from him. To me, the key message of January 6th was this:
A country has to be a certain amount of a nation in order to maintain a functional democracy.
Without that much nationhood, its ability to have a functional democracy is genuinely in peril.
The United States has been drifting toward that kind of peril for at least a decade — and it is now currently in that kind of peril, and it is likely to remain that way, unless we can figure out a solution.
No doubt, you wanted your candidate to win. So did I; I wanted my candidate to win. (And she didn’t.) But I think there’s probably a deeper thing that all of us should want.
We should want a nation.
What do I mean by a nation? I’m using the Google dictionary definition, provided by Oxford Languages: “a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.” Not so much the Dictionary.com definition, which allows for a mere pluarlity of cultures culled together into a state by whatever glue or force.
Days after the election, pundits have taken to the mic to explain what we can learn from Trump’s second victory. I think the truth is that we have to admit that we don’t really know what we have to learn yet. But I think the most important approach is this:
We should not dither about false equivalencies. Sometimes right is right and wrong is wrong.
We should be thinking in terms of a dialectic, where disparate elements are beginning to be integrated with one another — and where, at the very least, they can coexist without feeling like whenever one side wins, it’s the End of Days.
How can we possibly do this? How can we possible integrate? I don’t think anybody knows. But I do think we have to. And I think two basic first steps emerge:
Conservatives have to stop fighting both the war against liberals that doesn’t exist and the war that doesn’t need to exist.
I am adamant that we need a strong, sane conservative movment in America, even if it takes positions that make me uncomfortable. I will defend that to the end. Also, if we are going to be a nation, the saturated, hate-filled demonization of the political Left has to stop. Period.
The conservative resistance to the Left is in no small part a resistance to a movement that doesn’t exist. A bizarre, and airtight narrative has been woven for years that strawmans liberalism and makes its point through consistently shoddy argumentation. Democrats are supporting a network of pedophiles. Hatian immigrants are eating dogs and cats. Democrats and Antifa are the same.
It’s not just the strawmanning, though. It’s also the saturated bitterness. On Mother’s Day this year, Mark Levin casually asked on his show, “Do Democrats even celebrate Mother’s Day?”
How does one even get there, psychologically? And once therre, how do they get to the heights of partisan celebrity?
Now, in the days since Trump’s win, pundits throughout the conservative world are gloating about “liberal tears.,” and the “liberal cryfest” following the election. This is not how adults talk. It would be shockingly ungracious, except that it’s so usual. The Right has just won. Big time. What drives the need to also grind spitefully against fellow countrymen who lost? How can that be seen as anything other than a desperate woundedness that desperately needs healing?
We cannot be a nation if the sort of demonizing and saturated hatred remains normalized. We just can’t. The folks on the political Right who participate in this rhetoric, or who quietly appreciate it, have to be persuaded that it is in their best interests to stop — which I think it clearly is.
I have a student who is Jewish, who is part of a group that goes from one high school to the next, holding assemblies in which they teach about Judaism in plain, open language for the sake of combatting anti-semitism. I don’t know that this exact kind of thing would help here, but I think something with this kind of spirit might.
I hear, again and again, that there’s just no talking to MAGA people. I understand why. I’ve unfriended Trump supporters myself because I feel like there’s no reaching them.
But now I feel like I have to re-think that. I think that we really have to get much more serious about trying to reach people.
The strawmanning and demonization simply has to stop. And I suspect it probably won’t unless folks who don’t connect now start connecting.
Liberals have to stop pretending that being right in their own minds, without listening to the other side, is going to solve anything, and get serious about building a “Third Space.”
I think liberals are also tasked with realizing that the culture war can’t be won by one side or the other. They need to listen to what’s being said by this election. But I think the Left — perhaps the moderate Left — has an even greater tastk. For the moderate Left, I think the task is to actively figure out how to build the “Third Space” — i.e., the place where all good-seeking people can meet and talk, and where nobody is holding too much of the power. Harris was leaning hard in this direction when she promised — plausibly, I think — to be the president for everyone, including floating the idea of having a Republican in her cabinet. This is a direction that the American Left needs to continue to go, I feel.
Why should the Left be charged with greater responsibility for cleaning up in this way? Because the Left trusts the virtue of plurality so deeply. No G7 nation is undertaking a greater experiment with plurality than we are. American liberals have a harder task, because they’ve embraced a greater challenge. Not just to imagine the America that works for their current vision of plurality, but to imagine the America that works for plurality that includes the majority of voters who just very loudly rejected the current liberal vision of plurality.
There’s a meme being passed around about the paradox of intolerance — i.e., that tolerance can include tolerance of the intolerant, which then permits an intolerant movement to rise and subsume the culture of tolerance. This is a real danger, which I think can be addressed by realizing that it’s not simply a generic, reflexive agnoticism we’re aiming for. We’re aiming for a tolerance that enables a dialectic — which then leverages us all toward better and better management of more and more complex truths.
I’m sure there are folks who might think that talking about building national unity now is crazy, because we’re on the verge of an authortarian takeover and the loss of all our rights. But I’m persuaded by David Brooks, who wrote insightfully about the election this week. Trump isn’t a fascist; he’s a sower of chaos. The response to fascism is resistance. But the response to chaos is cohesion. Now is actually a good time to talk about nation-building, I feel.
And I have known people who have see this sort of tasking of liberals as a kind of victim blaming, and a kind of bowing to the abuser. I can understand that. There are going to be people on the Left who need care and support right now. And rightly so. We should attend to it — honoring the wounded, loving, uplifting, dignifying, and helping.
But also, I think there should be folks on the Left who realize that they are able enough to stand, and who see the merits of this larger effort of space-holding, across-the-aisle-reaching effort. We need folks who can muster the courage to run towards the smoke. Now. And to stay there until the good work is done.
This is particularly important because, I think, truth be told . . .
The Left is stronger
When Trump lost in 2020, there was an insurrection. This year, while folks on OAN and Newsmax are crowing about “liberal tears,” all of the Democrats I know are basically turning into the Whos in Whoville. They’re shedding some tears, yes. And they’re having Christmas anyway. They’re singing to each other, cheering each other up. Gearing up for what’s coming next.
They’re not storming anything. They’re not lying about anything. They’re not trying to cheat, This is in no small part because Democrats lie less, and they cheat less.
I think it should be clear which of the positions is spiritually stronger. The spiritually stronger side is the side that is strong and supple — and I think there’s more evidence of that capacity on the Left. And I think it should be clear which of the ideologies is politically stronger, too. Because winners don’t lie or cheat. The Democrats have absorbed all kinds of punches in order to preserve the santifty of our institutions — and they’ll likely have to keep absorbing them. And, I think, they will keep absorbing them, because they’re strong.
Here’s the real trick, though, in my opinion. I think folks on the Left have to see that that strength can’t just be used exclusively toward partisan victories anymore. Instead, they need to also rally that strength also for the sake of building a nation — and, perhaps, toward teaching conservatives how to do the same.
It has to be possible to hold at the same time that Trump says and does things that no leader should AND that there’s something fighting for life that selects him as its champion, and it needs to be understood better. I think it has to be accepted — embraced, even — that to say, “Well, whatever. I’m right and they’re wrong” is simply lacking in both the maturity and wisdom that is currently demanded of us.
Read Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russel Hochschild. Read The Conservative Heart, by Arthur Brooks. I even encourage you to read The Right Side of History, by Ben Shapiro — which about the only Ben Shapiro content that I can stand. Read David French whenever he writes. Find some other good conservative voices to listen to.
Also, take a deep breath and listen to some of the shitty voices sometimes.
Commit to attending one event held by Braver Angels — a truly wonderful Red/Blue bridging group. It Starts With Us is another good group to connect with. Get involved. Trust me, once you feel the energy of one of these groups, you’ll feel differently than you do now. I’m not kidding.
Schedule a call with a MAGA person you know. Connect with them personally, talk to them about something other than the election. Then talk to them about the election. Somewhere in there, ask them openly, vulnerably, “Also, now that you’ve won so big will you please stop demonizing me? Because someday your side is going to lose again, and you’re going to hate that, I think it’s important that we try to be one nation, somehow.”
Be encouraged that there are conservatives who are going to want to join in on this. There are sane conservatives who will rally around the idea of becoming a nation. But I think the effort may start primarily need to be led from the Left.
Integral Theory is powerful
If we’re going to connect in a “Third Space” it’s helpful to have a framework for parsing the situation that isn’t the inherent domain of one side or the other. I think Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and its neighbors and precipitates offer excellent tools for this. One of its key principles of Integral is Clare Graves’ theory of Spiral Dynamics, roughly summarized below, through which some of the best parsing of the culture war has occurred, I feel.
I strongly encourage you to read the section of the American culture war in Ken Wilber’s most recent book, Finding Radical Wholeness. It’s soon to be a somewhat dated analysis, I suspect, because I think things are going to start to move fast. But it’s also great. Wilber talks about the necessity of creating “conveyor belts” that tolerantly help people make the transition from lower-order thinking to high-order thinking.
I think that the loss of permission to inhabit lower-tier patterns of thought, and that absence of healthy, life-giving modes of conveying from lower patterns to higher, is one of the main drivers of political polarization today.
I encourage you to read Wilber’s new book. Or, at the very least, that section. It’s useful.
I don’t know about you, but I am hard-wired for hope. Sometimes hope is a hope in things unseen — as it is now. Then, perhaps, it’s called faith.
Sometimes it’s hope that underlies a persistent, queasy feeling that is continually a part of daily awareness — as, for me, it is now. But the hope is still there.
These days, I can only believe that we live in within a mechanism that ultimately leverages the good. Not our democracy, but our cosmos, and the ground of reality that I think lies beneath it. If things are not going the way we think they should, we need to look more closely at how everything is operating. Look, listen, learn. Then build, weave, and tell the truth.
You know, well now, that times of crisis have a way of bringing out the builder, the weaver, the truth-teller in many of us.
May our course be sure, strong, and, as we go, eventually, illuminated by the brightest light.
If you’re interested, I’ve written more about how conservative perspectives can integrate into a pro-social cultural fabric here, about Integral Theory and the culture war here, and about the recent surge in Christian nationalism here and here.