We tell our kids to watch out for bad players. To respect all and make friends with those who do the same. We tell them to watch their manners, be empathetic, and be someone others can look up to. But when it comes to politics, a lot of us make allowances for what our leaders can get away with.
And this goes for both sides. I remember in high school, kids and parents alike excusing Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I remember one girl even saying, “I don’t care what he does with his penis, as long as he does everything else right.” This was a 17-year-old girl at an institution that spent a lot of time warning us about the sexual predation of men. What a strange reaction, I thought. Now you have people on the right defending their guy’s morality in a similar way.
Different paths, same mentality
Making a Choice
I’ve never been able to separate politics from my morality. When I vote, I first determine if I think the person is “good”—a pretty tough ask in an occupational field that seems to attract megalomaniacs and probably more than a few sociopaths. I guess a better way to say this then is that when I evaluate candidates, I look for the person who is “least bad.” I openly listen to speeches from both sides of the aisle, assess whether I believe them, and then dig into their policy stances. Using this approach has led me to vote for both Republican and Democrat candidates, which, looking back, I feel pretty good about. But voting this way has also led to an interesting trend that doesn’t feel so great—most of my candidates lose.
The political history of the last one hundred years is a game of tribal warfare. We may think that a lot of what’s going on today started with Trump, or Pelosi and Harry Reid, but the reality is that this stuff has been going on for a long, long time. It’s just way worse now because of the social media echo chambers we live in, feeding into our own wishful narratives, vilifying the other side.
Years ago, when doing some renovations on our house, we found some old newspaper in the walls that was being used for insulation. Among the artifacts was a political campaign ad for Taft saying that a vote for Taft was a vote against “socialism.” It’s fantastic. The whole ad looks like something that could be taken out of today’s playbook, but it was written in 1912!
It’s What We Do
It is human nature to pick a side and develop loyalty to it. Like rooting for a sports team, once we’ve picked “our guy,” we want him to win, and ourselves as an extension of that. Unfortunately, we seem to be doing the same thing with policies. Debates on the issues refuse to see the gray in between, or hear the other side out, and we start believing the talking points being thrown at us by some of the bad actors we warned our children to stay away from.
Tribal morality, where your allegiance is, first, to the group, and you are willing to overlook immoral behavior, comes from a need to belong and a fear of making the wrong decision. I’m sure you’ve met someone in their adult years who still seems trapped in a middle-school mentality, worrying what people will think of them, hoping to be with the “it” crowd. At a less obvious level, we do this with all of the life choices we make: what car to buy, where we should raise our kids, what careers we should choose.
We do this because we want to be right. It’s nature, judging what’s right vs. wrong. The same impulse that leads us to form opinions on what we think others should do with their free time is also what helps us decide who we should vote for. Unfortunately, I think it’s also nature to pick a path, get comfortable there, and refuse to get off of it even when the path is clearly leading us off a plank into a deep, dark ocean.
What Works for Me
When it comes to politics, the only way I’ve ever been able to see my way through this design, is to vote for the person above the tribe. The tribe forgets itself and the other side, while the individual, standing apart, has a better chance of seeing the fuller picture. With Congress always in deadlock, I lean towards the rational individual who wants to work with both sides of the aisle. I just wish there were more of these types of candidates to choose from.
Alas, maybe I’m just crying into the wind. I’ve been told this is a foolish way to vote. That it will lead me to vote for people who can’t win. But I don’t care about that. My vote is my conscience, and if I sacrifice that, what am I even doing here?