In 2020, PleaseVote For Hope.
As we head in to the primary election in Colorado I’ve started talking about candidates of hope and candidates of despair. My main goal is to promote understanding between allies as to why two people can have very different emotional responses to the same candidate. Specifically how it can be that your friend — who shares the same values and goals as you — can be repulsed by a candidate that you are strongly attracted to. This dynamic happens in both parties and I encourage voters across the political spectrum to vote for hope in their respective primaries.
Different people, at different times in their lives, are motivated primarily by either hope or despair. When you are hopeful you see ways to make meaningful progress. You know that the arc of history is long, but you have faith that it bends toward justice. You know that politics is the slow boring of hard boards and also that intentions and outcomes do not always align. You value dialogue and the building of consensus.
When you are despairing you view these ideas as naive. You believe that the system is rigged and that nothing can truly be accomplished. You are prone to conspiracy theories about some powerful force that controls everything and will allow no meaningful change to occur. Different villains are popular in different parties and they are generally all things that exist and have influence — just nowhere near the degree of control that despairing voters perceive them as having. One of the attractions of despair is that in a hopeless situation you have no obligation to strive for better.
Where hopeful voters see meaningful progress, despairing voters see token gestures and distractions. They are angry but anger alone isn’t the hallmark of despair. Plenty of hopeful voters are angry too. They key differentiator is that when someone is succumbing to despair they don’t even expect their chosen candidates to truly accomplish anything. The system, after all, is still rigged against them. One person can’t change that. So what they want in a candidate is someone to take a hard line rhetorical stand. To use the bully pulpit of their office to talk about big ideas and “represent our values” rather than to craft or implement policy. And if they will publicly insult people we don’t like while they do it? Even better. Senator SoAndSo can ignore my letters, phone calls, and office visits but by God they have to answer when the President calls them out!
If you are looking at political office as a media platform rather than a job, and politicians as standard bearers rather than as policy crafters, then what you want in a politician is diametrically opposed to what I want in a politician. Our policy goals and values can be exactly the same and we can still dislike or even detest each other’s favorite politicians. Policy debates will not change our minds because the issue isn’t what the candidates believe, it is how they behave.
And frankly despair candidates tend not to have much in the way of policy details to actually debate. Policy crafting requires effort and why put in effort if nothing will get done anyway? Slogans are all a despair candidate needs. “Build the wall!” “Break up the banks!” How will you do these things? Well … they don’t have a detailed explanation right this moment but that doesn’t matter to their base because despairing voters don’t think anyone can do anything useful anyway. As a Trump fan in 2016 said, “Democrats take Trump literally but not seriously, we take him seriously but not literally”. The same could be said of Sanders by a Sanders fan. Clinton fans and Sanders fans talked across one another because hopeful Hillary supporters (who polled as much more enthusiastic than Sanders fans btw) believed they could make the case decisively in terms of qualifications and accomplishments while despairing Sanders fans simply didn’t care about those things.
Watching 8 years of Obama ramming his head against the GOP refusal to so much as hold confirmation hearings for his appointments had given them a pervasive sense of political futility. They were hopping mad at the GOP for doing it but even angrier at Obama for not publicly raging against it. Something a black politician can never do lest he be typecast as the “Angry Black Man”. Also it is never the correct move when dealing with a bully to scream or get worked up. They love that. It makes them more, not less, aggressive.
Ironically, despairing voters on the right felt that way because of all Obama accomplished despite historically unprecedented obstruction. The ACA was no petty bauble. Obama appointed two amazing Supreme Court justices (Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan), passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and enacted sweeping environmental regulations through executive orders just to name a few. The GOP party establishment was making big noise about stopping Obama cold but kept failing to deliver. They shut down the government in 2013 to prevent the debt ceiling from being raised and defund Obamacare — 16 days later the government re-opened and neither goal had been achieved. And so there we were in 2016 with despairing voters on each side angry about mutually exclusive things. They couldn’t both be right — but oh boy could they both be wrong. Obama was successfully blocked a lot but also got lots of things done. It is the nature of despair to focus on whichever part of that you view as bad. The greater the despair, the more myopic your focus on the bad and the more completely you ignore the good (again — what a given person sees as good or bad varies, but the effect of despair is consistent).
That I call one group hopeful and the other group despairing has a value judgement in it. I stand by it. It is bad to vote for someone out of hopelessness and spite. We have many, MANY, media platforms out there. There is no shortage of ways you can represent your values in this world. You can tweet them, you can blog them, you can shop them, you can even live them. The revolution is absolutely being televised (and streamed, and Instagrammed, and talk radioed). Elected offices, however, are a finite resource. Those seats need to be filled with leaders, not cheerleaders. Thinkers, not screamers. We need people who build things up, not burn them down.
And we need them on both sides of the aisle.
So please, get involved in your party’s primaries and vote for the candidates of hope in 2020. Do it at every level of government from your county clerk to President of the United States.