I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase “voting against their own interest”. I believe that politics are incepted at a formative age, such that unless you have some dramatic reversal in your adult life it is hard to know where things began.
Yet I know I believed it. I was raised by a mom that often joked my own chance of a political career would be completely dead in the water. She had been a member of a political party in Denmark that advocated, among other things, for more or less pure socialism. You know, like the kind that Karl Marx wrote about, not the social democracy or capitalism light that Scandinavian countries now follow.
So you can imagine that I was pretty crushed by the most recent US election result. Only, I felt a bit different this time. I’ve found myself more curious as to why then ever and less satisfied with answers that simplify it all to stupidity, trickery, or foul play.
It’s not that I don’t believe that Donald Trump is a fascist and will do horrible things. It’s not that I don’t believe that stupidity, trickery and foul play weren’t factor. It’s just, for the first time in my life, I don’t look with generalized disdain at the people who voted for him.
As someone who’s coming from the world of competitive sport, I realize that if after the fact you’re whining about things “not being fair” or disparaging the other side, then you DEFINITELY lost. And left wing politics have been losing for a long time in the US. By my reckoning at least sixty years give or take.
If I truly believe that things are so bad, whining about how wrong people are is only likely to make that string of losing worse. I’ve been forced to admit that I have used a tool of fascism myself, the willingness to “otherize” people I don’t agree with. It’s not ok just because I’m “right”.
Am I Welcome?
As happens all too often, the awakening comes from a self-centered place. Let me back out to another perspective shift I had, one that happened over a decade ago. My wife Kate and I moved to Denmark more or less on a whim.
I had always idealized Denmark with a few cracks, one of which I will explain. More or less I viewed Denmark as mostly better than the US. My exposure to the country had been long summer vacations, filled with close family connections and friends.
Living in Denmark was a completely different story. In retrospect, my experience joining a Danish swim team when I was 15 should have informed what I would come to experience. It was the first time I stepped outside of the bubble of family and friends and into actual Danish life.
The first summer I trained with a local Danish team, and I am not exaggerating here, there was one other kid in a group of 25 that spoke to me. I remember my first day walking up to people, introducing myself and then standing dumbfounded as they continued their conversation without so much as a glance in my direction.
This was my introduction to Jante’s Law, the fictional set of rules that run in the background of Danish culture. I can verify that it is very much non-fiction in the lives of many “foreigners” in the country and the definition of “foreigner” is quite expansive. So perhaps the following will be a warning to anyone looking to carry through on the usual set of threats to “leave the country” now that we may be descending into autocracy. You may not find the socialist utopia greets you in the way you might expect.
When we moved to Denmark in 2013, the social shock was nearly immediate. Now, I’m not going to argue that America is perfectly welcoming to “foreigners” but I will pose this challenge to anyone. Name a country that is MORE welcoming than America. I dare you.
Trying to navigate day to day life in Denmark made me appreciate little things about American life that I’d completely taken for granted. For one, most Americans have a natural curiosity about people that come from abroad.
As in “Oh you’re Danish, that’s cool!” often followed by genuine inquisitions about what that actually means. America is also perhaps one of the few countries in the world where it’s more or less acceptable to be bi-cultural. You can maintain cultural connections to another nation-state and still say you are American, as long as you came from the right places. I never felt anyone in the states question my American-ness despite my split identity.
In Denmark, people are overwhelmingly not curious about your life about Denmark. What they are mostly focused on is that you learn to be more like them, be more Danish. For many it’s an unattainable goal, because even if you should adopt many of the practices you’ll still fall short of a very strict definition of “Danish”.
The point of me explaining this is not to trash Denmark but to highlight a strength of the US. Even now, with a racist xenophobe at the top of the power structure, I don’t believe that most people in the US aren’t more welcoming and accepting than most other places in the world.
That strength is something to be leaned into. It ceases to become a core value when we decide that those “other” people are irredeemable.
Which brings me to my contemporary example of not being welcome. I have to say that I’ve had a creeping sensation of not being welcome in my chosen “team” of the political divide. Part of it has to do with the inexorable passage of time. With each year (I’m currently 41), I come closer to fitting the description of “old white guy”.
Too often, I find people that I’m nominally on the same “team” as generalizing me as a misogynist, racist, sex criminal. Me personally, I still value what I think social democracy can do for all people and I’m still for it. People can call me whatever they want. I’ll stick to my values.
But I can understand how many people who fit my demographics are alienated by those sentiments. It’s important to make a distinction here that I often find myself having to make. Understanding something is not the same as agreement. So when I say I understand how other middle aged white guys feel alienated by what they perceive as left wing politics, it doesn’t mean I agree with them. I quite obviously, do not.
I consider myself a feminist not just because I believe that addressing gender equality would create a more fair and equitable society for women but because I also believe it would be better for the overwhelming majority of men. Most men are not benefitting from misogyny, they are also worse off. I believe in all kinds of basic human rights and equity because I think it would be better for more or less 99% of us.
In order to change things we have to actually shift perspectives and therefore make new beliefs possible. That won’t be achieved by lecturing other people about how they’re wrong. It will come from offering a convincing argument that a fairer, more equitable society is better for nearly everyone. So I’m letting go of my own lack of empathy for people who disagree with me.
In this moment I find myself returning to one of the most influential books I have ever read. Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men” examined the 500 or so members of a Hamburg police battalion who participated in some of the final atrocities of the Holocaust.
The book challenges the conception that people who perpetrated the Holocaust were militant Nazis. The members of the battalion were “ordinary men” who might otherwise have led an average life not committing atrocities. The point is not to excuse those men from the crimes they committed, but to understand that it is possible to influence people to do what is right and also what is wrong. Their rightness or wrongness is not intrinsically embedded in them.
Now you might say to me, “Chris, no Democrats ran on a platform of white men are inherently sexist, racist sex criminals”. And you’re right! However, the Republicans were effective in convincing many men that Democrats were. They convinced a broad swath of Americans from all walks of life that Democrats were for any number of things that we weren’t.
Can leftists win a hate off with Donald Trump? If that’s the way you can count me out. I’m trying to be a little more humble, a little more empathetic and hoping to win a few more people over in my corner of the world.