Why I Choose Politics

What can be learned from our loss?

Donald Trump won the American presidency yesterday. I’ve since been fixated on trying to weigh our loss.

How could we have been so wrong? Do we even know what we’re dealing with? What’s the appropriate response? And what, if anything, are we supposed to learn from all of this?

From one angle, it can seem like the lesson of Trump’s victory is relatively minor: we mostly keep in place our political views but we tweak both a) our assessment of political priorities (e.g. we realize we should focus more on trade policy), and b) our assessment of the breadth of the appeal of Trumpism (e.g. we realize that it appeals to ~50% of the public instead of ~40%). From a numbers perspective, this loss can’t mean that we were all that far off.

And yet that’s not how this feels. The “small tweaks needed” assessment normally does work after most electoral losses. But what’s distinctive about this loss is that it feels so much worse, so much darker, so much more distressing than a normal electoral loss. And so we feel stuck in our despair, trying to make sense of what’s different this time.

I think what we now feel we got wrong was not something within the political process — say, some particular particular issue like trade policy — but the political process itself.

We didn’t come to this election ignorant of those on the other side. We knew that not everyone was voting for our candidate, but we thought the electoral process and the corresponding political discourse ultimately works. So if we, as a country, turn our critical gaze towards an ideology that is (at the very least) unacceptably cozy with bigotry, surely the American people would see it for what it is and set things right at the ballot box.

What stings is that this should not have been a close call. This wasn’t a choice between two roughly equivalent forms of evil. Sure, our politics can temporarily fail to promote better and smarter taxation policy, but on certain key, fundamental issues, the democratic process, we thought, basically functioned in a consistent, reliable way.

In Trumpism, we discovered a disease that overwhelmed our democracy’s immune system, that didn’t whither in response the antibodies our politics produces.

Trump is many things — paranoid, narcissistic, intellectually lazy, and generally unhinged — but the trait that now sticks out more than anything else is his disdain for the slow, tedious, difficult work of politics. Trump prefers name-calling over argumentation, appeals to emotion over appeals to reason, nationalistic pride over timeless ideals which no country owns.

What now seems so threatening is that a candidate so thoroughly opposed to the process of politics won. So maybe we were foolish to have placed so much faith in that process. Maybe politics is futile. Maybe elections weren’t really ever about ideas in the first place. Maybe all we ever really had was the illusion of political agency. In reality, politics is a beast moved forward by something far more primal than reason and we’re just along for the ride.

When I dwell on this, I can start feeling pulled towards a toxic form of nihilism where I give up entirely on trying to engage with others.

We all know that politics isn’t supposed to be easy. But it’s supposed be possible. Though the process of litigating important issues via elections can be inefficient and exhausting, modest short-term disappointments are supposed to be vastly outweighed by awesome long-term achievements. Under the surface, at some deeper level that can be hard to pick up on when you’re wading through the thicket, politics makes us better people. We become more open. We become more rational.

Today, politics feels less possible than ever.

But it’s also more necessary than ever.

When we ask ourselves, “What now?”, we have two options.

One option is to put less faith in the wisdom of the democratic process. We could resort to other means that lie outside rational political discourse. We could stridently deny our opponent’s the legitimacy that politics requires. Or we could try to mimic their attempts to win gains through gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and their refusal to respect the institutional norms of democracy. Maybe our problem is that we thought we were in some grand philosophical debate, and, instead, politics is really about the acquisition of power, by any means necessary.

I prefer a second option: we could reaffirm our commitment to reasoned discourse and democratic rule. We could try, more than ever, to engage our opponents in a good faith effort to find common ground. We can fight to make a not-democratic-enough process more democratic. Organize to repeal voter ID laws. Mount a constitutional amendment campaign to address its most egregious flaws. Our opponent’s unwilling or unable to be self-critical? Lead by example. Be unflinching in your commitment to fairness, even when that involves calling out members of your own team. When your opponent makes a good point, acknowledge that. And while you may want to shout at them when they don’t grant you the same decency in return, continue to insist on decency both in yourself and others.

We will move forward, we will continue to engage, we will not take the easy path, and we won’t become cynical. Because we don’t have any other choice. On the basic legitimacy of politics, we all take sides, whether or not we want to.

And today, more than ever, I choose politics.