Tag: Op-Ed

Some Thoughts In the Wake of This Week’s Election

Results of Tuesday’s election were not conclusive enough for anyone to feel particularly triumphant, nor entirely defeated. We must move past “us” and “them” if we are to move forward as a country. How do we do that?

While it may not have been a resounding victory for either of the country’s two major political “tribes,” I consider the 2018 election to be about as positive a result as we could have hoped for. We remain a deeply divided country. The election results reflect that. Any result that went farther in one direction or the other would have been seen by the other side as unjust.

Even so, the current status quo satisfies no one. Both of our major ideological camps suffer from groupthink and blind spots, and both sides view the other as not dealing with reality. I see that both sides use critical thinking, but selectively: only to question the opposition’s narrative, never the one they subscribe to.

President Trump manufactures a constant string of lies (6420 untruths documented in his first 649 days as President.) He uses anti-press rhetoric as a smoke screen. It’s a strategy that’s proven effective with those that already agree with him. Trump does have a point about the press, yet completely obliterates it with his deliberate lying. Still, the mainstream press is not innocent, and is subject to the wishes and demands of its corporate ownership.

The charge “fake news!” resonates because there’s some validity to it. The media exhibits pro-corporate bias, constantly offers up false equivalencies, oversimplifies complex issues, and ignores important stories that contradict the accepted narrative the media is at pains to keep intact. Over the years, the press has done enough damage to its own credibility that the president’s protests fall on some sympathetic ears, even though he sources much of his information from a television news outlet that falsifies information more than almost any other.

Not that the competing opposite-partisan cable news outlet fares all that much better when fact-checked.

No wonder trust in the news media is so low. Yet those who consume news invariably choose sources that confirm their biases rather than posting the complicated and sometimes even contradictory truth. The cost of this is as we see: a democracy that functions less and less well, and a population that increasingly fails to realize that we are all in the same leaky boat.

We shut each other out when we should be listening most intently to the voices we disagree with. We decide that those who can’t even accept what we know are facts are just not worth talking to. Without the ability to reason with each other, we subject those we disagree with to dehumanizing ad hominem assumptions. The only response we see as valid in these circumstances is force. We have to win our victories at the polls, and when we don’t win there, we don’t accept defeat, we just become more bitterly entrenched, because they won’t see what we maintain is simple common sense. How can anything but tragedy result?

My suggestion is that we try something new… well, actually old, as old as the age of reason, as old as Socrates, as old as the Buddha. Let’s try dialogue. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s look for the ways we agree rather than the ways our position is superior to those we disagree with.

Dialogue begins with humility and compassion: two things sorely lacking in our current environment, and which we desperately need to cultivate. It’s important to understand that dialogue isn’t surrender, it isn’t weakness. Dialogue actually requires great personal strength and integrity, along with a willingness to be vulnerable. Dialogue has a lot in common with love. You could say that it’s a way of loving humanity, because it seeks uplift in a dynamic way, as opposed to debate, which seeks to declare a winner and a loser.

I think we’ve had enough of picking winners at others’ expense.

Election Jitters 2018

A meditation

As a transgender person and a Green, I’m viewing the trends in US culture and politics with increasing concern. In the days leading up to next week’s election, I monitor polling at FiveThirtyEight and elsewhere, looking for signs of what’s to come.

That FiveThirtyEight was less than accurate in the 2016 election cycle means that  I can’t trust what I see in those maps and charts. I honestly have no idea what this country will wake up to this coming Wednesday morning. Like many of my friends, I can neither look away nor stop fretting about it. It’s difficult not to feel that the future of this country — that my own future — hangs in the balance.

My hunch is that things are going to go a little better than expected for the left. I’ve seen signs that point in other directions: I also recognize that living in Massachusetts puts me in a liberal bubble; things in Texas or Indiana may fail to conform to my expectations. The polling aggregators show the conventional wisdom, that the Democratic party will retake the House of Representatives, but that the Senate is most likely to continue in Republican hands. That’s not the best of all possible worlds, but it would at least slow down the rapid slide towards fascism the country may currently be in.

Many of the more vulnerable folks in this country won’t fare well, even under the stasis of a partial Democratic victory, but the status quo is better in the short run than the regression towards darkness that I fear. The problem is that the status quo is not nearly good enough. Protecting and uplifting our most vulnerable citizens will still not be done as it should given the best possible results of Tuesday’s vote.

I have a sneaking hope that the Democrats will take back control of the Senate as well as the House, because the effects of recent events may not be showing up yet in current polling. There is some Republican backlash against the Trump contingent, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the establishment media overemphasizes this.

Should the Republican Party maintain control of all branches of government as a result of Tuesday’s election, I fear that some Americans may not be safe. There have been threats made, and recent events have underlined those threats: for instance the MAGAbomber attacks on prominent Trump critics and two racially-motivated mass shootings, all in the last week. Trump himself has said that there will be violence if the Democrats should fare well instead, though he falsely claims that leftists will instigate it.

I’m trying to keep my optimism, and hoping we all find our way past the delusional tendencies of these times. May the country move towards justice come Tuesday.

Arrogant

In a recent thread on a social media site, I posted a link to an article on The Intercept which includes a recording of House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer trying to brow-beat progressive Democratic primary candidate Levi Tillemann into getting out of the of the race for the Colorado’s 6th Congressional District in favor of the DCCC’s preferred candidate, high-powered corporate lawyer Jason Crow. I offered it as evidence that the Democratic Party is anything but democratic.

Anyone who has noted the behavior of the DCCC and the DNC for the last few years knows of any number of instances where the party leadership has quashed (or attempted to quash) progressive and leftist voices from prominence within the party, all the while demanding that all progressives fall in line with their centrist views and preferred candidates. For many, including myself, this pattern of behavior has been disturbing as well as alienating. Some of us have begun organizing within the party under the banner “Justice Democrats,” others have left the part altogether, some for the Green Party, others for the Democratic Socialists and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, publicly questioning the motives and actions of the Democratic party leadership inspires many rank-and-file Democrats to shout down any criticism of the party and/or its methods. Two years out from the 2016 election, woe be to anyone who has the temerity to mention that they supported Jill Stein, as I did and still do, or, in some circles, brings up Bernie Sanders.

I have been told that I am personally responsible for the Trompe presidency. I’ve been called a self-centered child. No matter that my gender is female, I have been called a “Bernie Bro” more than a few times. I’ve been told repeatedly, as I continue to stand up for myself, that I am arrogant. I have recently been told that the country is “in flames” because of my support of, and vote for, the Green Party’s presidential candidate.

At the point where any discussion of non-support for the Democratic Party and/or its leadership reaches this level of rhetoric, the possibility of further reasonable discourse would appear to have been trashed. You will almost certainly be told, as Steny Hoyer helpfully explained to Levi Tillemann, that you don’t understand “how the world works.”

I created this post in response to such a discussion. The first draft of it was filled with the hurt and anger I felt, mixed with amusement when the person I was having an exchange with concluded their final post in the thread with “Up yours!” My assumption, based on prior experience, was that I would be unfollowed and/or blocked. I also assumed that it then wouldn’t matter what I said or did, there would be no way to reach yet another centrist Democrat, and that political discussions of any sort are no longer worthwhile: everyone is so wrapped up in narrative that an actual discussion of the merits of any particular point of view aren’t productive: either we already agree or I won’t be listened to because there is no incentive to go beyond one’s tribal viewpoint.

But the person I had had the argument surprised me: they reached out via private message, explaining their point of view, and when I sent a thoughtful response, they thanked me for it. I found that hopeful.

We are still very far from being on the same page in our opinions, but I think that at the end of this minor crisis in our long-distance friendship, we found that the friendship is still intact, and we are also more likely to hear each other’s views without perceiving them as an attack or threat. The risk turned out, in this case, to be worth taking, and neither of us has had to back down from our positions in order to move forward.

What this means for situations like the Hoyer/Tillemann exchange above is less clear. My hope is that Levi Tillemann stays in the race for the Colorado 6th. I believe that he will, but I say that from clear across the country and from outside the Democratic Party. I’d be more willing to support Democratic candidates if I knew that the DCCC and DNC were allowing the voters to choose their candidates rather than the party leadership dictating to those voters who their candidates should be.

In truth, I believe that the party would be stronger, the country would be stronger, the candidates the party picks will be stronger for having earned the voters’ support through cultivating a more direct and authentic connection with the voters, rather than fishing for advertising $$$ via the DCCC and the DNC.