What's possible.

At the margins, we get to choose.

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

A few months back I was having drinks with some folks at the Pluralism Summit and we were discussing pluralism and difficult relationships. One woman brought up her difficult relationship with her mother. She shared how her entire relationship with and attitude toward her mother changed with a single sentence from her therapist:

“You don’t get to have the relationship you want with your mother. But you can have the relationship that is possible.”

I’ve thought about that comment a lot over the past couple months.

It applies to parenting and a range of other human relationships. And it’s the radically moderate middle ground between the current binary that I see all the time on social media. That binary says “If I can’t have the relationship I want with this person, they’re toxic and I don’t want any relationship at all.”

What Community is Possible?

But now, in the wake of a bruising, surprising, and for some people absolutely devastating election, we have to do some serious internal reflection on the nature of human social living. Given last night, what kind of relationship can we have with each other moving forward?

As the hope of a shared vision for America faded, people on my social media feeds quickly collapsed into the other extreme, arguing that they can’t live with the other half of the American electorate.

Last night certainly made it clear that we don’t get the relationship we want with other Americans just as we don’t get the outcome we want out of an election a lot of the time.

But then the question becomes: do we cut them off? Do we pull ourselves further into our partisan nests, increasing polarization and echo chambers and the resentment and zero sum thinking that got us into this mess in the first place?

Can we even cut the “other side” off when “these people” are our neighbors and co-workers and relatives and sometimes our friends?

If it’s both harmful and unrealistic to cut off 50% of the electorate but we also can’t have the kind of relationship we want with them (i.e. one where they agree with us and vote the way we want them to vote), what options do we have left?

Only one: we work to have the kind of relationship that’s possible.

We don’t get to choose between the binary of “ideal community” or nothing. Whether we see it or not, we keep living together, whether we like it or not.

Intentionally Creating Possibilities

More optimistically, we can intentionally craft (an admittedly complex and complicated) relationship with our fellow Americans.

It certainly isn’t the one we would build from scratch, but it’s one that we actually can build.

It’s one we can live with.

And sometimes that’s all that we can ask for.

Notice, I’m not being Pollyanna-ish here. In fact, I’m trying to be deeply realistic.

Now is not the time to ask for people to come together and hold hands across differences. People are genuinely and legitimately concerned about extreme policies and crumbling political norms and those fears are important and justified, at least at present.

But when it comes to how we live with the people around us, people who voted in a way that shocks our conscience and creates fear about the future of our fragile democracy, we need to jettison hypothetical hopes and fears and instead think about what is possible.

And what is possible starts with our choices, together, at the local level.

It starts with how we treat ourselves and each other.

It starts with how we operate in and think about our communities and shared spaces.

We often idealize human social life or at least we idealize the concept of “community”. But it’s rarely a consensus based collection of people with shared values and vision building lives together. It’s very often people bumping into each other, making tradeoffs, giving in a bit on some things and pushing back on others, making space for things they care about and putting up with encroachments on others. It’s people with limited knowledge making hard decisions without enough time to figure things out. It’s people who can’t see - because no one can - the full consequences of their actions. And it’s other people who can see some consequences but feel strongly that other values outweigh those effects. And it’s some people who don’t care interacting with other people who care so very deeply.

On an even more narrow level, people vote or don’t vote for lots of complicated reasons and people vote for specific candidates for lots of complicated reasons. They’re scared. They feel threatened. They’re defensive. They’re hopeful. They have a single issue they’re passionate about. They have a lot of issues they’re passionate about in different ways. A specific experience shaped their view on a particular issue. They like the personality of a particular candidate or don’t like the policies of another candidate. Sometimes they’re not paying enough attention. Other times they’re paying too much.

Human communal life is complex, messy, sometimes ugly, often fragile, and always profoundly meaningful. Our neighbors run over our garden and then later help us dig out of snowbanks.

But there’s a real danger in lumping people who voted for someone you loathe into “the other” and that danger lies in the fragility of human communities.

The more we categorize people by who they voted for or who they didn’t, the more we feed polarization. We feed fear. And we destroy possibilities for living together before we even know they exist.

Crafting Possibilities

Last night I offered some ways to engage with others in non-political ways. I would encourage everyone to do as much of that as possible for the next four years.

But there are other things we need to remember if we’re going to craft a community that’s possible.

We need to remember that people are much more than the sum of their votes for national office and it’s the non-political parts of them that matter most.

We need to remember that our communities are so much more than the office of the president, but that this too is a fragile balance. The more we categorize people by who they voted for the more we create two tribal identities that make any possible peaceful community impossible.

We need to remember that how we think about the “other side” will dictate how the next four years goes, how much conflict we experience, and what the next election looks like.

We also need to remember that human history is long and that our current space - while challenging - is actually progress. Moreover, maintaining our hard fought progress toward a relatively peaceful liberal democracy will depend in large part on whether we can stay in conversation with each other long enough to prevent irreversible damage to our political norms, our policies, and our relationships with each other and the broader world.

We get to decide what’s possible, but how we behave determines whether our possible future is one where we can live together or whether it’s one where the entire framework crumbles under our anger, fear, and resentment.

We get to choose what is possible. And how we treat each other is another decisive vote for or against the future of liberal democratic communities.

Practical Steps to Take Today:

1. Be kind to yourself and others.

2. Find a social but non-political space to occupy, even if just for a little while.

3. Think about the kind of community that’s possible in your specific part of our shared landscape.

4. Stay local, as much as possible. National politics will likely be a dumpster fire for the foreseeable future. Disengage unless you have good reason to think your voice is actually needed. Otherwise, stay local, stay engaged, and stay connected.

As always, let me know what you think. Leave a comment and please share if you like what you read. Reader shares are how I find most of my readers.