A Moment of Grace

Wherein Jonathan briefly acknowledges there's more to (some) people than their political views

I spent this past week at a leadership development workshop (which helps explain my lack of output in recent days). Twenty eight participants attended from around the United States and Canada, led by three facilitators who guided us through a variety of activities meant to make us more thoughtful, intentional and better leaders. It was an intense four-and-a half days of self-reflection, pushing outside our comfort zones and otherwise communing in quite personal ways with people we’d mostly never met before. Overall, it was a sobering and wonderful experience, some of whose lessons and insights I hope to be able to integrate meaningfully into my work and social life.

Mostly, I am writing this to share a few thoughts about what I experienced this week in relation to the larger (and increasingly gloomy) political moment we’re in. I’ll start by noting that I was one of two people from academia. A handful of those who attended the training work in government jobs or for nonprofits, but the vast majority came from the private sector, in industries including oil/gas/energy, commodities trading, software development and sales/retail (I’m keeping this stuff vague for confidentiality’s sake).

The facilitators kept us busy. We loaded onto the bus from the hotel at 7:30 every morning, were at our seats at the center and ready to go by 8am, and with time for breaks and lunch, we worked until 5pm. So, we spent a lot of time together, and a lot of time talking together. Reflecting on all of that sharing and conversation (see, I told you there was a lot of reflection), I commented to my partner and another friend that I probably talked less about politics this past week than I have in any in my adult life. And what a pleasure that was! I am, in many ways, fortunate in my work. One aspect of that good fortune is how much my intense and lifelong passions are part of what I do for a living. That includes my interest in politics. The flip side of that, however, is that for a combination of personal, professional and personality reasons, I am a political obsessive. And as our political situation deteriorates, I think that’s taking an increasing toll on me. Among my politically obsessive friends and family, I know I am not alone in feeling that way.

One reason I started this substack was, perhaps paradoxically, to try to alleviate some of that distress. My thinking was that, *if* I am going to be so consumed by politics anyway, at least writing about it in this format might afford me even a modicum of agency over what otherwise often feels like a hopeless situation. I think that was a good decision for me and obviously I hope that others find what I write useful. But I was struck by how good I felt this past week. There were many reasons for that, including the activities we engaged in (which included numerous fun and wacky role plays, making TikTok videos and more), the camaraderie with the lovely people I got to know and the opportunity to push myself in ways I don’t typically do. And it was certainly also true that the very minimal time I spent talking politics last week contributed to a sense of calm, presence and peace of mind. I have not determined to purge such talk from my life - for professional and personal reasons, that would be a non-starter. But an opportunity to take a break from it for a few days provided me with a very real, if short-term, mental health benefit.

Since I only had the briefest conversations about politics, and only with a couple of folks, I don’t know the political views/affiliations of almost any of the two dozen or so new best friends I made last week. I can say, however, with close to 100% confidence, that there were plenty of people in the room (I won’t try to put a number on this), whose politics are *very* different from mine. And even with some of the guesses I did try to make, I felt nothing but genuine warmth and affection for the folks’ whose stories I got to know. A sort of digression here. Most people do not spend most of their time thinking about politics. We political obsessives are freaks and outliers. That greatly adds to the frustration of following as closely as we do. Unlike us, most people tune in and out, picking up snippets of news coverage here and there, or listening to the rantings of their more attuned friends and family (aside: lord help *my* friends). They’re not constantly consuming, dissecting and analyzing news. They spend their free time doing something other than getting themselves worked up about the latest political outrage. Insofar as they do think about politics, their judgments derive mainly from intuitions about how experiences in their own lives add up to “common sense” understandings of what a good leader does or doesn’t look or act like. Confronted with what seems to be such slapdash, haphazard and simplistic “reasoning,” it’s hard not to feel very judgmental about the non-obsessives’ faculties generally, especially when they vote for the wrong side.

Why do I mention all this? Because if all I knew about some of the folks I got to know this week was what they thought about politics, I would know nothing of how thoughtful, self-reflective, supportive and well-meaning they could be. I wouldn’t just judge them to be wrong in their views. I would impute to them fundamental deficiencies of character and ethics. And I would assume they lacked basic capacities for empathy, reasoning and self-reflection.¹

I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with one of my oldest friends about what we need to do reach out to the “other side,” to break down barriers, to engage and better understand their perspectives, even as we try to nudge them toward different conclusions about their political beliefs. What I always say to this friend, among other things, is that that’s just not a scalable approach to solving our problems. Those one on one conversations might be meaningful and rewarding on a human level. But they can’t compete with the reach and toxicity of Trump, Tucker Carlson et al. I still think that’s true. I’m also not trying to tell anybody *not* to judge those who vote for Trump, or Kari Lake or Herschel Walker. Their votes are doing grievous damage.

But most of what we know of the other side - especially as many of us are increasingly socially sorted - is what we see in our social media feeds and on television. We see those who are loudly and proudly hateful and ugly, caricatures of ordinary humanity. And of course, we see their political elites - the conscience-less cretins like DeSantis, Cruz and Trump whose degeneracy their most avid followers mirror and reinforce.

So, one thing this week reinforced for me was to try to save most of my ire for those elites. They mean to do ill and they deserve only our scorn and opposition. But our constant exposure to the very worst of the non-elites is creating a distorted view of regular folks. I’m not optimistic about where we’re headed. And one reason for that is because it’s too easy for ordinary folks to accept that which they should not accept. To repeat, therefore, this is not a brief to be sanguine about what we’re confronting. What is it then? I don’t know. Maybe just a little nudge to myself that there’s more to some folks than political views I find abhorrent. And maybe that nudge can allow me to experience just a bit more humanity in myself.²

1. For the record, I do have people in my life who I care about and are on the other side of the divide, though only a few.

2. I’ll expect I’ll be returning to my more bitter and enraged self shortly.