After the counting is done and the music stops, you still have only one life to live, one country to live in, and one world to share with both those who agree and those who disagree. You need to find a way to continue onward, hopefully upward.
I believe I’ve passed the age
Of consciousness and righteous rage
I found that just surviving was a noble fight
I once believed in causes too
I had my pointless point of view
And life went on no matter who was wrong or right.”
- Billy Joel, “Angry Young Man”
Believe it or not, I wrote this post yesterday before the results were in, figuring it was unlikely we would know the winner for several more days. I was wrong. My preferred candidate won, and I find myself amazed, jubilant, hopeful, and dazed after getting too little sleep. There will be plenty of time for me to cover why the once and future President Donald Trump’s victory is the most epic of all time and what I think it means for America. In the meantime, I stand by sentiment before knowing the results.
Whenever the counting finally ends and a winner is ultimately declared, half the country is going to be deeply dissatisfied with the result, transforming an election into a massive game of musical chairs. We criticize, we debate, we taunt, we vent, sometimes we even fight, but once the music stops on election day, there can be only one winner. In a zero sum game, that means everyone else goes home a loser. In a hyperpolarized country, when every election is now seen as the most important in our lifetimes for whatever reason suits the moment and political concerns have been elevated above the cultural or even the personal, losing can be accompanied by frustration, desperation, and a feeling of hopelessness that life will never be the same again. Winning, on the other hand, is frequently accompanied by the hubris that this is your rightful state in life, you’ll never lose again because you and your fellow travelers are ascendant somehow, and must remain so forever. While it’s certainly no secret who I want to win and I’m not immune to either scenario, both are deeply misguided. The reality is simple: After it’s all over, you still have only one life to live, one country to live in, and one world to share with both those who agree and those who disagree. You need to find a way to continue onward, hopefully upward. Even in history’s biggest landslides, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Teddy Roosevelt in 1904, about 40% of the country voted against the winner. Even in the deepest red and blue areas of the country, chances are you have a neighbor or two that voted for the other side. Even among the closest group of friends, there will be at least one person who refuses to conform. Even in the most committed conservative or progressive family, someone is an outlier who votes the other way. This is the reality of a world that values individual opinions and a diversity of thought. If your candidate wins, half the country’s candidate lost, and this half doesn’t simply disappear until the next election. Likewise, if your candidate loses, your life doesn’t stop until you vote again. You might not like the leader that your neighbors chose, but your neighbor is still there. You still have to get up in the morning, go to work, care for and love your family and your pets, spend time with your friends, enjoy the present, prepare for the future, and all of the million things that define a human existence.
It certainly doesn’t seem like it these days, but politics, up to and including who occupies the Oval Office, is an extremely small part of most people’s lives. It doesn’t compare to the big moments, good or bad. Weddings and divorces, births and deaths, graduations and retirements, so overwhelm political concerns that no one who isn’t a step away from the insane asylum gives the slightest thought to who was President when they took their vows or buried a parent. It barely registers among what we might call the middling moments that make our lives memorable and enjoyable, a BBQ, a weekend getaway, dinner out with a loved one. It’s not even really a part of the little pleasures we take more often, a fine cup of coffee, cooking or relaxing for a few hours in front of the TV after a long day. Of course, many have likely seen these moments derailed by politics, a fight over Thanksgiving dinner or a dinner party that goes south when the topic comes up. This, however, is politics as an intruder, an interloper that we allow to ruin moments better off without. This is letting politics rule our lives, rather than we ruling politics as the Founders intended. After all, the Constitution opens with these history making lines, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” This is usually taken to mean that the political power in the United States of America is invested in the people, and as the people, we choose the powers given to the government, limiting them in many cases to protect our rights and freedoms. More generally speaking, it suggests an ordering of spheres of influence in our lives with politics ranking beneath the more fundamental principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In recent years, this has been captured somewhat imprecisely and almost coarsely with the notion that politics is downstream of culture, but beyond making important aspects of our lives sound like a sewer, it’s far more fundamental than that. Both politics and culture are downstream and subordinate to the individual. The reason America has enumerated powers and limited government is because personal authority and liberty supersedes the government. We are not below politics. We are above it, beyond it. Allowing the vagaries of the political winds, which tend to change directions in cycles, to dictate our happiness, satisfaction, or even our mood for more than a few minutes is a betrayal of the autonomy of the self. It is a way of saying, even if not explicitly, that we are below our leaders, ruled by them, our lives dictated by them, subject to them in ways that control, confine, and limit us.
This is an elevation beyond what was ever intended – in this country at least. The cynic in me would suggest that it’s an intentional part of what we might call the “hard-progressive” program or “socialism-light” to differentiate it from liberalism or more moderate forms of the progressive movement. Traditionally, American’s prized family, community, and faith above and beyond the government. In the early days of the Republic, residents of small towns flung across this great continent relied upon those closest to them, turning to a neighbor, a community group, a church or a local official long before they considered asking for anything from Washington, DC. Some of this was purely geographic. Before trains and planes, government simply couldn’t be there quickly enough or responsively enough in the first place, but some of it was by design. According to the original Constitution, the capital itself was seen as subservient to the states. The Senate was elected by local officials in the state, making the world’s most august legislative body fundamentally beholden to the will of a minor state legislator. This, however, proved an impediment for centralized power to succeed when this power by definition needs to be beholden to no one. The current direct election of Senators didn’t exist until 1913. At the time, this was seen as a move in favor of a more robust, direct democracy, but as an unintended consequence, the federal government became unmoored from the local, set above it rather than partnered with it and the individual quickly followed. Ultimately, to be subject to the will of the elites, the people need to acknowledge that the elites and the government they constitute exist above both them and the other things they value. You need to believe that government and government alone has the answer to whatever question or challenge you are facing. You need to look up to the government as a potential savior, rather than down upon it as a necessary evil, both increasing its importance in your life and placing you in a subservient position. As James Madison so eloquently put it, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” This is a statement as subtle as the opening of the Constitution itself. On the surface, it means that people are not perfect and the government is the means by which we restrain, moderate, and mediate our darker impulses. If everyone did what they were supposed to do in every situation, there would be no need for laws and the government that enforces them. On a deeper level, the use of the words “angel” and “necessary,” rather than simply saying we need the government to protect us from ourselves, elevates people to a higher position, relegating government to merely a tool, a shovel or a boat, that furthers our ends but does not define or restrict them.
Whatever phrasing you choose, it should be no surprise that the importance of elections has grown rapidly with the size of government. As late as 1929, even after the direct election of Senators mandated by the 17th Amendment, the government represented less than 5% of the economy. Today it accounts for almost 25%, but this fails to account for its growth in our headspace and mental state. This is necessarily harder to measure, but if social media, the media in general, and pop culture at large is any indication, it must be much, much greater. Putting this another way, how often do you think a farmer in 1880 thought about who was President? While I can’t say for sure, I’d guess that except in times of crisis, most or at least many might have gone weeks if not months without giving Rutherford B. Hayes a thought and they were probably happier for it. How often do you think about it today and is that truly positive development in your mind, or does it seem like you’re working for the government in a figurative (and literal, given the growth in taxes) sense? This isn’t an argument that all of the growth in government over the past century has been bad by definition. The 1880s wasn’t paradise on Earth because people didn’t care who sat in the Oval Office. To some, particularly in the South where a strong federal government refused to protect the rights of the former slaves, under Rutherford B. Hayes, in fact, the lack of a strong government was disastrous. There are certain things only a government can do. We might debate what these things are and when it is proper to do them, but the existence of these things is a fact that should be acknowledged, if only to better determine the particulars of any government involvement. Instead, it’s an argument that the government currently occupies far too high a sphere to be healthy and that, regardless of the proper size of any government, the idea that people on both sides increasingly stake their personal identity and their happiness on the outcome of elections is an affront to that personal identity in the first place. It’s also a call for all reasonable, fair minded, non obsessed people to put government and elections back in its rightful place at the back of our minds. Perhaps Billy Joel put it best: Life goes on no matter who is wrong or right, and ensuring it goes on in a positive direction is our individual responsibility, not the government. This is something we would all do well to remember, win or lose.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 