Quick Solutions
If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way. (*1)
Do you believe it? A majority of the country apparently doesn’t. In 2006, 29% of the country expected partisan relationships to improve, while 20% expected them to get worse. In 2010, 22% expected improvement, and 28% expected further deterioration. In 2014 only 11% were optimistic, while 34% were pessimistic. And in 2018 we had slid all the way to 9% vs 44%. (*2) The number expecting things to stay the same has… stayed the same. But every single election year of the last four made our donkey elephant war worse. Jonathan Haidt writes,
There seems to be no alternative to a political process in which parties compete to win votes and money. That competition always involves trickery and demagoguery, as politicians play fast and loose with the truth, using their inner press secretaries to portray themselves in the best possible light and their opponents as fools who would lead the country to ruin. And yet, does it have to be this nasty? A lot of Americans have noticed things getting worse. The country now seems polarized and embattled to the point of dysfunction. (*3)
If not us, who? If we don’t change the trajectory, who’s going to?
If not now, when? How much worse does it have to get, when studies already say we’re more divided than any time since the Civil War?
Let’s do a quick review at how we got into this mess, so that we can discover some ways out of it. Because of its meteoric growth, social media has changed the dynamics of communication. We can easily search out and surround ourselves with those who believe and talk the same way we do. And we can fire off snappy retorts to the other side with little caution and even less awareness of any damage. Making matters worse, foreign nations have decided that dividing the country and fanning the flames weakens us as a nation, so this isn’t even just our own internal battle.
Political conversations light up the “fight or flight” part of the brain, turning would-be scientists into attorneys and zealots who no longer seek the truth and merely seek confirmation of what they already believe. (*4) Add in our Western culture’s tendency to turn both/and’s into either/or’s, and it’s readily apparent how easy it is for politics to turn into tribal warfare. Once we forget our primary and higher identity and instead settle for secondary identification with a political party, the donkey elephant war is on, possibly being waged in our own living rooms as it was in mine. How serious is the war?
This shift to a more righteous and tribal mentality was bad enough in the 1990’s. America’s hyperpartisanship is now a threat to the world. (*5)
That quote was from a few years ago; this one a few months ago:
American politics is the biggest threat facing the world in 2020 and the looming presidential election will stress the country’s institutions, influence economic and foreign policy and further divide an already polarized electorate, with potentially huge consequences for the climate, business and investors. That’s the view of experts at consultancies Eurasia Group and Control Risks. (*6)
Quick solutions
Let’s look at a few possibilities rapid fire before diving deeper.
Image: Free-Photos/Pixabay
Do we need more Christians in political office? Maybe. Electing people who share your values is preferable to electing people who contradict your values. But since not all Christians have a biblical worldview, not all who claim the title Christian will share your values anyway.
Do we need more Christians voting? Probably. The fact that a majority of Christians opt out of the elections won’t help Jesus’ priorities become the country’s priorities. If we sit it out, we have no right to complain.
Do we need more Christians voting for solutions instead of political parties? Definitely. It’s my opinion that the donkey and elephant brass think they own us, probably because they traditionally have owned us. Our identity has been too tied to a political party. Voting for solutions instead of merely red or blue straight down the line sounds good in principle, but is much harder to pull off in actuality. The whole battle isn’t won or lost at the ballot box, however. We can live a both/and life even when it’s hard to vote for one. For instance, Abby Johnson is most well known as a former staff member in a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, who one day walked across the parking lot and joined the other side. (*7) Her pro-life (unborn) advocacy would seem to plant her firmly with the elephant tribe, yet on July 13, 2019, her Facebook page said this:
I am headed to the Mexican border with some of my awesome friends to deliver #bottles2theborder! And Then There Were None - Prolife Outreach (*8) and New Wave Feminists (*9) have partnered together to help the immigrants at the border who desperately need us to help meet some of their basic needs. 10
The Donkey and Elephant machines might be too big to stop. Do we need a third party that’s Christian? Probably not. The Church has been at its worst when it has power. Power and following Jesus are like oil and water. I’m sure you won’t all agree with that, but I believe Church history is on my side in this one. I see no reason to try it again given how well it’s worked (NOT) in the past.
Do we need more citizens to separate from their donkey and elephant parties and become independent? Maybe. For me, becoming independent was an important outward manifestation of an inward truth, that I no longer gave primary allegiance to one side of the political war. It’s helped me vote more for solutions than simply taking the easy way out and looking for my party affiliation. Interestingly enough, one of the very liberal authors I’ve read and quoted liberally (pun intended) came to a similar conclusion. In Tim Urban’s words,
Whatever the cause of my attachment to the Democratic Party (*11) , the Republicans of the 2000s… weren’t helping the situation. As I tried to rid myself of the notion that the Democrats were “my people,” the Republicans… would continually make it crystal clear that they were certainly not my people. Well good news! Over the past decade, the Left finally did it. They regressed so far that they became as “not my people” as the Republicans. They actually went insane enough to free me from my tribal handcuffs. I spent a lot of years saying I was “an Independent” while not truly believing it. Today, I can say it with a straight face. It’s amazing how much clearer your vision gets when you really—actually—separate your identity from a tribe. I can see reality better now.
Do we need more Christians in public service who are willing to step out of an old wineskin (*12) (political party) and run (and vote) as independents? This one intrigues me. If independents were free to support solutions instead of being bound to their parties, and if they had significant support from the “Christian” Americans, including financial support, the donkey/elephant war could be rendered irrelevant. Those are some gargantuan “if’s”, but I’d sure love to give it a try.
That last idea, more candidates who understand their loyalty to something higher than their political party, has often been ridiculed as unrealistic given the incredible money generated by the donkey/elephant machinery. It would be a massive uphill battle to finance an election outside the traditional R and D alliances. And since the media has shifted from broadcasting to narrowcasting, it’s harder still for independents to get their name out in front of the public. Traditional media who are aligned right or left won’t be friendly to independents. For sure, if it was an easy thing to do, we’d see more candidates doing it. But perhaps there’s hope! Maybe you saw this news story from Independence Day, 2019:
July 4, 2019
Michigan Republican Justin Amash resigned his membership in the U.S. House Republican Party Conference. Excerpts from his accompanying letter: “The parties value winning for its own sake, and at whatever cost. Instead of acting as an independent branch of government and serving as a check on the executive branch, congressional leaders of both parties expect the House and Senate to act in obedience or opposition to the president and their colleagues on a partisan basis… With little genuine debate on policy happening in Congress, party leaders distract and divide the public by exploiting wedge issues and waging pointless messaging wars. These strategies fuel mistrust and anger, leading millions of people to take to social media to express contempt for their political opponents, with the media magnifying the most extreme voices. This all serves to magnify the us-vs-them, party-first mindset of government officials… Preserving liberty means telling the Republican Party and the Democratic Party that we’ll no longer let them play their partisan game at our expense. Today, I am declaring my independence and leaving the Republican Party. No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us.” (*13)
One person making such a move is unlikely to cause much more than a temporary ripple. Indeed, I haven’t heard anything about it since the week or so after Rep. Amash became independent. But it happened, and it’s out there, and it took me all of about 5 seconds on Google to pull up Amash’s twitter feed and read his letter of resignation. Imagine if even five percent of Congress were to follow his lead? (*14) The parties are so deadlocked that a five percent block of independents whose allegiance was solutions instead of party politics would change the landscape dramatically.
The opening quote about doing small things in a great way is debatably attributed to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Undeniably attributed to him is this:
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. (*15)
I hope Rep. Amash’s friends are not cowering in silence for fear of retribution from the lead donkeys and elephants. Similarly Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke is credited with saying,
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing. (*16)
If we don’t like the war we’re in the middle of, let’s change it. Those of us who are attracted to Jesus represent 70% of the country. It’s time to stand up and be counted!
Often attributed to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, particularly appropriate as I’m writing this on the day set aside to honor him. However, it appears that the statement was written earlier by Napoleon Hill, The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons, 1928, p. 113.
Pew Research Center. 2018 and 2014 surveys conducted online on the American Trends Panel; 2010 and 2006 polls conducted via telephone.
Haidt, p. 319.
Tim Urban, https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html.
Haidt, p. 321.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/15/business/global-risks-2020-davos/index.html.
Abby Johnson, Unplanned. Her story is told both in a book as well as a movie by the same name.
At this point in his own political evolution, he claimed to be independent but kept defaulting to the party of his upbringing, Democrat.
Reference to Luke 5:36-38 (and elsewhere), where Jesus talks about new wine needing to be poured into new wineskins, because the expansion would burst older more brittle wineskins. The parable commonly is taken to mean that there are times when we need not only new content but new methods.
https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1148339804272300032?lang=en
That would mean 5 U.S. Senators and 22 from the House of Representatives.
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, Steeler Lecture, November 1967.
Though Burke, in the late 1700’s, is often attributed with the quote, the earliest known citation in anything close to this form is from Rev. Charles Frederic Aked in 1920. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/04/good-men-do/