Preparing Well for 2020

The 2018 election hasn't even happened yet and already the wheels of the 2020 Presidential election are beginning to churn. You could argue that they never stopped churning after 2016, but politicians will start campaigns, visit the early primary states, and people will start attaching themselves to a candidate. You could argue that 2016 was the ugliest campaign season in the last 100 years. I'm fairly certain that I was unfriended - or at the very least unfollowed - over politics, and I know that I'm not alone.

2020 has all of the signs of being even worse. While this sounds depressing, it can also be a chance for all of us to think about how to engage each other better before we get tied up in the mess of the election. If we think and plan ahead about "how" we speak to each other, when we get to the specific "what" we speak to each other, we can hopefully leave the election season less divided. Here are a few things that I hope we can remember that will make this possible:

1. Rudeness is not persuasion.

This is something that I thought most people understood, but I found out the hard way that wasn't always true. I would share a link to a story about a specific politician or a political issue and a couple of people would respond with personal insults or over the top accusations. Not only did this never cause me to consider adopting their position or politician, I doubt it encouraged anyone on the outside to do so either. 

I imagine it may have made those people who were rude feel better about themselves, but it hasn't been lost on me that I haven't heard from those people since the election of 2016 ended either. 

2. You're much more likely to influence someone over coffee than over the internet.

Even if you avoid being rude to other people on social media over politics, there's another issue that occurs: political overload. If you aren't the one running for office yourself, your Facebook wall, your Twitter feed, or your Snapchat snap, shouldn't be completely full of political memes or links to why you don't like the the other candidate. It isn't that you shouldn't advocate for your positions or candidates, but there is a point when the flow of memes causes people to stop paying attention. Comments are usually full of either people who already in agreement with you or the people from the previous section who just like arguing.

This doesn't mean that it isn't worth persuading people! Our form of government is founded on the idea of ideas being debated and considered. We've become so polarized that people rarely consider ideas that come from outside of their political tribe. It would help the health of our country if people tried to convince each other of their positions in a non-social media forum. This will help us build the depth of our ideas by having to defend them in more than a couple of sentences, and it will help us see something else important-- the next point:

3. People are more than their political beliefs.

People on either side of the political divide tend to define people by cut and dry labels: liberal, leftist, far-right, conservatives. Some labels we embrace as part of our identity while others we bestow on others without bothering to ask if they would consider that label for themselves or not. The truth is that while labels are easy and in some cases generally helpful, they can also have a harmful effect - causing us to forget that people are more than their political beliefs.

We're at the point where we politicize everything from the restaurants we do or don't eat at to which sports we watch. When we politicize people, we lose that there is a multitude of our personalities, talents, interests and virtues that have little to do with what political tribe we belong to. The harm, then, is to ourselves when we miss those things and don't allow ourselves to view people as people. As Christians, we believe that all people are created in the image of God, and so for a Christian to politicize a person, you are diminishing your ability to recognize that their identity is not rooted in politics but in their status as a being created by a loving God.

4. There is benefit to listening to opposing viewpoints without responding.

When we do listen to the viewpoints of others we often feel the need to respond quickly with our own point of view. Pastor John Piper recently explained why he doesn't share his political opinions on a specific issue, and it caused me to pause. His reason: he doesn't have the expertise or wide-ranging research to speak authoritatively about most political issues. This flies in the face of how I normally operate. Normally my process is: read something about an issue (or at least read the headline), think I know about that issue, tell other people what to think about that issue. The truth is that if I actually want to be responsible with my political viewpoints, I need to start with a lot more listening and understanding along with pushing myself to actually look into multiple viewpoints before deciding that I know everything there is to know.

The other option is this: I don't need to have an opinion on every political issue or politician! Sometimes it's enough to say: I'm not sure what to say about this and want to keep from speaking out of ignorance. Not speaking can actually be more helpful to other people than deciding that a half-baked political opinion needs to be shared.

5. This is NOT the most important election in your lifetime.

I love reading about history. The biggest thing I often walk away with after reading a historical biography is that as much as things have changed, there's so much that hasn't. Basically as soon as the country began, people were viewing issues through party lenses and using media sources to communicate their spin. Another thing that hasn't changed is that people almost always view the current election as the most important election in their lifetime. 

The number one perpetrator of this viewpoint: politicians. If they can convince people that this election will either cause the survival or destruction of the country, state, city, water reclamation district, etc. then they can get people to actually show up and vote. While this might seem like a simple political tactic, what it does is cause tribal identity to intensify. When you think that the other side is going to destroy your community, why wouldn't you huddle up with your "team" to protect yourself?

The truth is that this country tends to moderate itself over time. When one party has control of multiple branches, or when one of the parties becomes more liberal or conservative, balance sets in, and the other side gains in power to offset. That doesn't promise that this will always occur, because no country has the right to eternally exist (just ask the Roman Empire) but it should help us recognize that much of what seems like urgent life-or-death power struggles have been happening for 200 years and will probably keep happening as long as we have a two-party system.

In politics, winning isn't everything.
The 2004 election was the day after my 18th birthday so I didn't vote that year. Well over half of my primary or general election choices lost in the following 14 years. We can be fooled into seeing politics as a game to win or a battle to fight. What politics actually is, is an opportunity to bear the sword of government in a very small way ourselves. What this means is that we need to take our votes seriously as an action that has influence beyond our own interests, but also that the very action of voting carries meaning itself. I imagine that as long as I don't vote for a minor party or an independent (which I have!) that over time the balance of "winning" will be closer to 50%. Sometimes we "win" and sometimes we "lose," but we've only truly lost when we view our identity and the identity of others in their political views rather than viewing ourselves and others as full, complex, changing human beings.