The power balance of the U.S. federal government has tilted to the left. What should liberals do if they want to keep voters on board? And what should the right expect? Maude shares some suggestions.
by Mauve Maude
February 4, 2021
Our 45th President promised last summer that the only valid election would be the one in which he won. Sure enough, our 45th President disputed the results of the election he lost (by twice as many voters as he did in 2016, and by the same number of electoral votes with which he won in 2016). Through all of the manual re-counting of ballots by Democratic and Republican citizens, the certification of elections by all fifty states according to their own Constitutionally granted laws, including those governed by Republicans but won by Joe Biden, through the voting of 306 to 232 electors, and even through the weekend before the Congressional count, our 45th President and his most ardent supporters repeated his story without managing to produce any credible evidence, just hearsay and conjecture, predicated on posture and pre-established belief. They repeated it until he left the White House on his own accord, after insurrectionists raided our Capitol, having come directly from a rally in which the President told them to march on the Capitol, surely knowing they’d been planning for two months to raid it if the election was not handed over to him, and that many had threatened violence against Democratic officials from across the country (I mean, the rest of us knew). And our 45th President and his administration did nothing while we lost more Americans in that insurrection than we did in Benghazi, including a police officer, whose remains were honored in the Capitol this week.
But all of that failed to stop the election process lain forth in our Constitution, and on January 20, the 46th President, fairly and freely elected, was inaugurated.
Those treacherous few months of American history also didn’t stop the state of Georgia from electing two Democratic Senators to replace their Republican incumbents, also sworn in January 20, giving the Democrats the narrowest possible majority of the Senate. Though the same ballots that elected Joe Biden and gave us the Georgia runoff also placed new Republicans in the House, including a QAnon candidate from Georgia, the Democratic majority remained. And so the second impeachment of our 45th President went through the House as if it was covered in butter. That second one, again, was for inciting violence against our elected officials and democracy itself, and doing nothing to stop it while people died–one of his final and least clandestine efforts in trying to upheave the election he knew months ago he’d lose.
So that’s where we are. Now the talk is all about how to go forward, and the only sure thing is that forward is the only way to go.
Republicans are calling for unity (for nice terms), and moving on (for not so nice terms). But censures and threats against their own party members are a rather shaky example for the rest of us to follow, and one must wonder what we’re moving on to, if while attacking their own people, the party continues to cast baseless doubt on our election integrity and isn’t interested in penalizing seditious ex-Presidents either. But then some Republicans are very willing, even under the threat of career loss and death, to tell us they see otherwise, implying that sticking to democracy and our Constitution is not entirely a partisan issue.
Democrats are tired of playing nice, and they can’t afford to anyway, considering our country nearly teetered into the pit of fascism. Still, when convicting the ex-President requires a whole two-thirds vote from the Senate, it’s not likely they’ll be able to prevent him from trying it again in 2024, if he decides that’s still what he wants to do, and if he’s not incarcerated. And even if we don’t have him to worry about, we do very much have to face the mess he’s left behind, which is a generation of Congressmen and the voters who control them, who’ve already shown quite clearly that they’ll throw the whole project into the fire if it doesn’t go their way.
But, the most important word, concept, and reality here is voters. We are still America. We did not slip into autocracy. Voters are the reason we’re here, and they’ll be the reason for the future too.
When we elect officials, employing them to represent us, we should expect to be represented. If they represent us badly, we should expect them to change, not the other Americans to whom they’re representing us. And that pressure is entirely up to us. We haven’t been putting that pressure on our elected officials. We’ve been putting it on each other. So what we need to focus on is how We the People are going to call the shots. But I think that relies heavily on our getting a hold of ourselves first.
Where I Am
From living most of my life in the “point of view” of people who are not like me, I’ve long honed an ingrained sense of seeing things from other angles. I’ve spent about half my life walking in majority-right avenues, in a state that’s been solidly red for thirty years. Still, where I’ll firmly land nine times or more out of ten is on the left side of an argument. That is where I feel free to be who I am, that is where I find people who understand me, and in my experience that’s where people are more likely to let me help. I spent the other half of my so-far life in a majority-left environment, where much personal work involved unlearning negative stories the world told me about myself, that in my youth I was all too willing to hear. That’s all brought me here. “Here” is where I came from. “I” am not entirely the same. But I still see both sides, up close. I walk carrying friendship in my right hand, and intimacy in my left.
So let’s talk “both sides”.
Soap and Water
It does indeed take both to get things clean. Neither does well without the other, and they don’t really need anything else but thought, effort, and time. What “both sides” doesn’t include is supremacy. That would be like washing your hands with soap, water, and acid. It eats away at everything anybody tries to do, because it’s nothing but a toxic illusion. “Both sides” can’t exist with supremacy in the middle, because supremacy only values one side, and that one is a heart paralyzed with fear. The whole idea of supremacy, superiority, is based on the fear of the opposite: inferiority. It’s projecting the inferiority you fear onto the person you perceive to be opposite you, hoping it will leave you alone. But it’s not inferiority that’s bothering you, because that doesn’t exist. It’s fear. It’s inside you. And so is the solution. You will never find it in stifling the others outside of yourself. People have tried for centuries. If anyone genuinely wishes for unity, for cooperation, for relationship–the idea of supremacy must be deliberately, intentionally, left at the door. You can not be on its side. None of this works with that in the picture. Once that is let go, then we can move on.
(How do we get people to let go of it? We’ll get there.)
“Both sides” doesn’t include supremacy.
Once that’s done, what do we do? First we take a huge breath of fresh air, because now we can breathe, now we can move, now we can talk. Now we can get some things done. But in order to do that efficiently, we’re going to have to shake off some other things too, because they’re weighing us down.
I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few years wondering why people on my right haven’t spoken up–why they haven’t denounced certain behaviors, why they haven’t spoken the truth to people who represent them badly, why they haven’t made it a point to state exactly what it is they believe–rather than just cowering under occasional defensive claims of what they’re not. To be fair, it does happen. And I’ve also had to ask myself a few times if I’m doing (or not doing) the same things. Because it’s clearly not fair to ask others to do what I’m not. And while I have, at times, done a decent job living up to these standards in their entirety, I haven’t always done a spectacular job at the two I want most from the “other side”. I believe that what this country needs above all things is some responsible accountability, so I will take mine.
The weight of my responsibility and accountability is on my left.
To say that I don’t see people on the left behaving in the exact same ways as people on the right would be an absurd lie. In fact, in the last four years, the right and the left have bizarrely mixed, flip-flopped, like laundry in the dryer, adopting each other’s roles, but still criticizing the other. In ways the left has become as judgmental as they thought the right to be, and the right has become as immoral as they claimed the left to be. I’ve seen liberals embracing both good and bad aspects of religion and spirituality like I never saw them do before. By this I mean individuals, not the left as a whole. The belief that the left is godless is a lie of convenience. And so is the belief that the right is godly. I’ve seen conservatives abandon beliefs they’ve claimed their entire lives. I’ve heard both sides lumping huge swaths of the country’s population into convenient, homogenous groups, completely dismissing the complexity of everyone but themselves, and demonizing each other. And they’ve both, left and right, embraced “cancel culture” like a long lost lover. Like we can just burn, boycott, and dox each other away.
The weight of my responsibility and accountability is indeed on my left. But I could just as easily speak to the right, and I will. Let progress be the water, and conservation be the soap. Either way, we’ve got to clean up our act.
Let’s start with what we call America, Americans, and “the American people”. It’s all of us! There are patriotic ones and seditious ones, but there are no real ones or fake ones. There’s not one group who’s ruining everything, because there’s not one group running it. We are all the people who make this country great, or make it not great, and the difference comes in our care and our effort, our willingness to step up. I truly hope that the people who stepped up for this past election will continue to do so, for good, because we don’t have an accurate picture of what America wants until we all show up to paint it. Much of the country is currently in disbelief at that picture, because they’re not used to so many people showing up. And they should know, because they usually do. People don’t tend to call you a stranger when they see you around. To those just joining us, thanks for coming. We have a big job to do.
There’s no divorcing one half of America from the other.
We are going to have to work together. Let me say that one again. We are going to have to work together. There’s no way out of it. That’s not an ideal; it’s just the truth. I’ve often heard the relationship between the left and the right compared to a marriage, and that’s not wrong, except for a couple of things. You can’t compare a divorce to a civil war. There’s no divorcing one half of America from the other. And most of us didn’t sign up to be here either (though plenty did). We all get tired of trying to be who we are and express our true selves, with so many people telling us we’re supposed to be another way. But that’s life until we decide otherwise. No one has ever escaped that without making a decision about themselves. At some point we all have to take responsibility, stop marking score cards of all the wrongs we’ve been dealt, admit we’ve done wrong ourselves, and find the solutions. That’s freedom. And it doesn’t mean letting people get away with doing the wrong things. It just means solving the problem instead of complaining about it, and yes, finding what works best for both parties, or trying as hard as we can. Life is just a series of problems we have to solve, it’s our attitudes and our effort that make it pleasant or miserable, and it’s hard. “Easy” is an illusion, and so is pride. We have to constantly ask ourselves what’s riding on us being capital r Right. If it’s just pride, or ease, let it go. This is not the time. We can always turn our backs on each other or any one thing, and we can always try to make life harder for those who’ve made it hard on us, but in the end it does nobody any good. We can’t really live without each other; our problems make all of us suffer. So we’re all going to have to suck a little up, stop working so hard on being right, and get to work fixing it. Trying to be right all the time just doesn’t work! We need to do what works.
Next: Own yourselves. Stop letting your emotions and expectations drive you around. You are the only thing in this world you can control. Make a decision to be kind and respectful to yourself first. Then make a decision to treat others with the kindness and respect you expect for yourself and treat yourself with, even if you don’t like them. It’s not about them or what they’ve earned. People aren’t here to earn your respect. That’s no one’s purpose; we need to get that setting out of our minds. Nobody’s here to clean up your act for you either. And you’re not here to cut people down to size, lecture them, shame them, burn them, own them, or dole out the sharpest insults you can think of on social media. It’s about you and what you put out there. The only way we are going to create a kind and respectful environment is to act it out. Consider yourselves on notice, as people like to say. If you continue to put toxicity out there, that’s what you and all the rest of us will continue to get. Do your part. Clean it up. And if you can’t manage to do that, stop complaining about it.
Also: yelling, lecturing, call-out, shaming, and the modern-day, secular excommunications we call cancel culture don’t work. Let’s talk about religion for a second. A lot of people in our country have been deeply wounded by toxic church cultures, and many have gravitated to the left. They have not been wounded by religion, but by misuse of it. The result: people have turned their backs on religion because of the abuse, manipulation, shaming, and straight up danger they’ve experienced in American churches and their surrounding cultures. And that is for American churches to fix, if they want to survive. But what doesn’t make sense, outside of psychology anyway, is all the people who’ve been hurt by toxic church culture, employing the very methods that turned them away from religion. If all that nastiness didn’t spread their gospel to you, it’s not going to spread your gospel to them either. They’ll run in the opposite direction. If you’re one of the people who’ve experienced this hurt, you’ve already seen the evidence of this in your own life. And you can look up and see more evidence right in front of you. People aren’t running to join the Democratic Party because they were browbeaten into submission or agreement by Liberals on the Internet. The ones who are running from right to left are doing it for a different reason. We’ll get to that too. But first . . .
Consider the context, and consider the source.
Stop being so quick to believe, and spread, lies. Sllllllow down. Every moment doesn’t need to be a trigger. The only way truth and lies can start to look the same is when we stop looking for the difference. And we stop looking for the difference when we think it benefits us somehow, even if we’re not looking beyond the short term. (And if you’re acting that fast–headline, meme, like, share, headline, meme, like, share, headline, meme, like, share–you’re not thinking beyond the short term.) It’s always been that way. Social media is not an excuse. So stop and ask yourselves why it is you need to believe the first thing that’s put in front of you. Why should a lie be involved in backing up your viewpoint? Ask yourselves why your beliefs can’t change. Ask yourselves these two questions. Did what I’m being told actually happen? And am I understanding this correctly? Consider the context, and consider the source. Second guess what you read, what you hear–what’s being presented to you–and ask yourself how someone might benefit from lying to you. Truth, education, and expertise are by no means required for publishing Internet content; we know this. Apply that knowledge. Check yourself. You can’t control whether or not somebody lies to you. You can only control your own critical thinking, and it’s your job to do so, nobody else’s. It’s not even mine. Run what you’re reading right now through your truth filter, and see what you get.
Remember: people are not always what they seem to be. We are all complex, and we’re all unique. You know very well how much your unique experience–all the love, fear, pleasure, and pain, every trauma and every rebirth–has made you the complex person you are. What we don’t all seem to realize is, it’s like that for everybody else too, and context is everything. If you don’t know a person, you can’t depend on accuracy, in assuming their intentions or interpreting their actions. Your interpretations of strangers and your reactions to them actually say a lot more about you, and your experience. Keep that in mind when you feel the pull to get into an argument in the comments section with someone you’ve never met. If you respect your own story, respect the knowledge that they have one too. And it’s usually not going to reflect yours.
Finally: people ultimately have to clear up their own misconceptions. All this to say, we have to do things ourselves to properly learn. This is how minds are changed. We operate on experience, and we have to experience things for ourselves. First we see it done, then we do it with someone, and finally we do it ourselves. Then we pack all that up and take it with us; we build on it. This is just how our minds work. Take a minute. Think of everything you’ve ever learned, and how you did it. Think of everything you’ll learn in the future. We won’t experience everything this world has to offer. Our lives are too short. But we can listen to the experiences of others, accept them, and compare them to our own. We can also help people do this themselves–by guiding them on their own will, leading by example, and letting them build their own knowledge, with us. If we don’t do that, someone else certainly will. And if people continue to learn the things that are dividing us, like supremacy, it will eventually become our problem. So many issues already have, and we’re having to solve them in late stages, when it would’ve been so much better to solve them sooner. So imagine, here and now, what are people watching you do, and what are they learning? It matters.
P.S. Have you figured out yet why the quiet ones are quiet? They probably know more about you than you think. If you listen, you’ll know more about them too.
What do you think? I would like to hear from you, but you won’t find the typical Comments section here. If you have given the issue some thought or have an experience to share, please enter it here, or send your response to Maude@mauvereport.com. I would like to share viewpoints from all sides.