This election is about our humanity
In this era of extreme division, we can agree on one thing: The upcoming national election represents the starkest choice, the most polarized emotions, in our history. However, in this era of supreme persuasive sophistication and outright inversion of the truth, it is nearly impossible to recognize the true nature of the debate. In other words, we are separated more by the ways in which words can be manipulated than we are by actual, tangible facts.
In the real world, people cannot be separated so easily into pure types, into heroes versus villains, as we prefer to have our TV shows and our movies tell us they can. There’s good and bad in all of us, and it takes constant vigilance and energy to manifest our better side.
Similarly, ideologies can’t be reduced to conservative vs. progressive, as those who wish to divide us for their selfish ends desperately want us to believe. Obviously, there are valuable traditions that need to be retained, and there also is new knowledge that we must learn to put to use – and fast.
It follows that “American values” are not a monolithic set of commandments; they are tendencies that can be claimed in the service of the dark or the light. So far in our history – to our credit – when we have seen the balance shifting the wrong way, we managed to correct it, if always with great effort and pain.
When in the 1860s we had to face off in war, brother against brother, to shake off the evil of slavery, we did it. When at the end of the 19th century we saw that the economic system, unregulated, would quickly result in a new aristocracy of the superwealthy, we had the will to correct it. When during the economic disaster of the 1930s we had to reach out a hand to sustain the suffering poor, we came together to accomplish that. When in the ‘60s we saw that the military-industrial complex could be mobilized, not only in the service of defeating tyranny but also toward a campaign of forceful expansionism, we finally turned away from that ill-conceived venture before we lost our collective soul. When shortly afterward we learned that our president had subverted our cherished political system to his own selfish ends, we ejected him in indignation.
The multiple crises of our own time – not just the coronavirus and not just climate change – contain elements of all these earlier ones, and for that reason they are exponentially greater and more alarming. In fact, they are more immediate because the stakes are higher than ever, and the margin for error has shrunk virtually to zero.
American values of rugged individualism, domination over nature, and pursuit of personal happiness have served us well up to a point; but history does not hold still while we cling stubbornly to bad habits. Now, any sustainable social order also has to account for another set of American values that we claim to hold as self-evident: the right of every person to a meaningful life, not just a hollow existence as an economic statistic; the right of every group to dignity, as opposed to prosperity and privilege for one, the prospect of mass incarceration and political suppression for another; the rights of everyone, all species in fact, to survival and to a protected place in the natural order.
With the unique yet vulnerable power of our democracy, we need to concentrate on these issues between now and November as we have never focused on anything before. Whatever happens, we are, for any foreseeable future, going to be facing challenges that test our humanity and stretch our spiritual resources to their limits. However, if we decline to make one basic change at this juncture, if we fail to shake off the growing tendencies toward bigotry, despotism, greed, insensitivity, arrogance, aggression, cynicism and willful ignorance – beginning with the so-called leaders who intentionally inflame those tendencies in us – then we are unlikely to get another crack at it down the road.
This time around, it isn’t about Democrat or Republican “values.” It’s about the endurance of values that we can still claim as human.