My friend, political scientist Kris Kanthak, delivered this sermon at a Unitarian Church in Pittsburgh this past Sunday. I felt better after reading it and feel like maybe there's a way forward in the U.S. after all.
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I am a political science professor. For over 20 years now, I have been studying the American political system. And from that vantage point, I can tell you that things are actually crazier right now than you probably think they are. Congress is more divided than it ever has been before, and that includes the period just before the Civil War. People are more divided than they ever have been before: Political scientists have recently created a concept called “negative partisanship,” which is tied to the fact that people define themselves more by the party they are NOT than the party they are. Being NOT a Republican, in other words, is a more powerful part of many people’s identity than BEING a Democrat. The number of people who say they prefer their children not marry outside their race is at an all-time low, but the number of people who say they prefer their children not marry outside their political party is at an all-time high.
So what can I tell you as a political scientist about the state of our political system that you don’t already know? And many of you may be thinking that the phrase “political scientist” may be a misnomer. Can you really have a science of politics at all? My position is, yes, which shouldn’t be surprising since the existence of political science is pretty important to my ability to keep my job as a political scientist. But I’d like to ask you to think about the world as a political scientist for a few minutes and see where it takes us.
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For the most part, as a political scientist, I build theoretical models of how the political world works. I start from an assumption and see where the logic of that assumption leads me. For example, here’s an assumption: Politicians want to keep their jobs. Now politicians want lots of things, so this is a simplifying assumption, but it is a good one because the other things politicians want (power, a better job, good public policy) require politicians to keep their jobs. So how can that assumption help us to understand the world around us?
Let’s take a fact that has been in the news of late: Senator Pat Toomey is a part of a small group of Senators who have been working privately on legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. He has been under a great deal of pressure to hold a town hall meeting, an open forum where constituents can tell him what they think of this idea. He has resisted that pressure. Why? One possible theory falls from the assumption that Pat Toomey is just a jerk. He isn’t holding a town hall meeting because he is a jerk. I have no evidence to refute that theory.
But I would pose an alternate hypothesis: Holding a town hall meeting won’t help Pat Toomey keep his job and it may make it harder for Toomey to keep his job. If he holds a town hall, a bunch of people who don’t like him will come and yell at him. This will make for good television. It will be played over and over again and will make him look bad to people who may otherwise vote for him in his next election. And no one will be MORE likely to vote for him because he held a town hall.
So in other words, holding a town hall may increase the chances that Toomey loses his job and it will be totally not fun for Pat Toomey. So one theory is “Pat Toomey is a jerk who wants to keep his job,” but another theory is “Pat Toomey wants to keep his job.” Scientists prefer parsimonious theories to overly complicated ones, so the simpler theory is, in my view, better. Maybe he’s a jerk, but he doesn’t need to be to be a jerk to be the kind of senator who won’t hold town hall meetings on Obamacare.
Now, you may think you don’t care if Toomey loses his job and he should hold the dang town hall anyway because that’s his job, but think about this: When was the last time you did something at work that both wasn’t fun and increased the chances of your losing your job? Plus, if you had a job where doing one of the functions of the job made it more likely that you lose that job, is that a problem with you or with the job?
And then you may think, oh, term limits are the answer because then Pat Toomey won’t have a job he wants to keep. That’s fine, but it is also pretty likely that he wants A job once he is term-limited out of the one he has, and we can follow the implications of that theory to mean that if voters can’t give him that job, he will listen to the people who can: lobbyists, his political party, etc. So it makes logical sense that term limits aren’t a good way to make politicians more responsive to their constituents because it falls directly from the assumption that politicians want A job and if you don’t let them keep the one they have, they will try for another one (Being an ex-president is a pretty good job in and of itself, by they way, so term limits work OK for them).
So we can see here that the assumption “politicians want to keep their jobs” gives us some pretty good traction for understanding why our current political system works the way it does.
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This last year, the University of Pittsburgh not only allowed me, but encouraged and supported me to engage in an experiment on the effects of political dialogue: I would take a small sub-group of students from my Introduction to American Politics large lecture class and ask them to talk one-on-one about their views on American politics. Now, these students were selected on the basis of race, gender, partisanship, socio-economic status and other factors to be diverse as possible. The theory is, if you get a diverse group of people together to talk – really talk and really listen – about what divides them politically, you may get some traction on helping people to understand that what binds us together is more powerful than what divides us.
For example, we Americans, 240 years ago last Tuesday, decided to go in together on an experiment in democracy based on one particular assumption: All men are created equal. Now, that assumption is non-falsifiable: I can’t prove that it is true, but I can’t prove that it is false, either. But it is the basis for our democratic government and I would argue that the history of the United States is the history of us working out the implications of that simple assumption. Is the assumption that All men are created equal compatible with the institution of slavery? No, so the 13th Amendment to the Constitution got rid of it. Is the assumption that all men are created equal compatible with the idea that we should define “men” based solely on their sex or gender identity? No, so we passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote. And the debate continues today as to what that assumption means for public accommodations for people who are trans or non-binary. So “All men are created equal” is a powerful assumption that we have made as a group, and it continues to be our touchstone, from the Gettysburg Address to Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech. It is an assumption with powerful, complicated, and controversial implications and our nation’s history is a struggle for working out those implications. All men are created equal.
So to properly test the theory that inter-group dialogue can have great benefits, I again have to start with an assumption. And in this case, it was an assumption I asked all the students in the dialogue to share with me. It wouldn’t work if we couldn’t share this assumption. The assumption was both simple and profound: We are all trying our best.
At first it sounds like nursery school pablum and really obvious that we should just give people the benefit of the doubt. But assuming people are trying their best can be really, incredibly hard. I now drive my husband crazy when we are in traffic and some idiot cuts him off. I interrupt his anger and the poor guy responds “I know, I know. We’re all trying our best.” The guy who cuts you off in traffic and then gives you the finger is trying his best. It doesn’t mean you have to be his friend and it doesn’t even mean he doesn’t have to live with the consequences of his actions. But you choose not to decide he is an awful person because of his poor behavior.
In inter-group dialogue, assuming that others are trying their best means that you have to listen to stuff you might otherwise not want to hear. It means that when I share something with you about my reality, you will use that information to try and understand me and relate to me, rather than to correct me and decide my views have no value. It means that when someone says something truly outrageous – even racist or sexist – you need to take a deep breath and remind yourself that the person is trying his or her best.
But if you are in my inter-group dialogue class, you get the benefit of that same assumption. So you can counter the outrageous statement. You can say you were offended and you can say why. And the other person is obliged to hear you out under the assumption that you, too, are trying your best.
But here’s where it gets harder: Think of the person you dislike the most in the world. Now assume that person is trying their best. Pat Toomey is trying his best. Nancy Pelosi is trying her best. Paul Ryan is trying his best. Donald Trump is trying his best.
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I know what many of you may be thinking: Your assumption that people are doing their best is just plain wrong. Some people are just awful and they need to clean up their acts.
So what if my assumption is wrong? What if people are not trying their best? What if they’re just jerks? What if they are irredeemable? What if they are not even human?
As a scientist, I have to admit: If my baseline assumption is wrong, everything that follows from that assumption is probably wrong, too. Ptolemy believed that the earth was at the center of the universe and he built a model of celestial movement around that assumption. It was wrong.
But here’s the thing: Ptolemy did a lot of really excellent work based on that wrong assumption. Working through the implications of the assumption of a geocentric universe was what led us to learn a lot about how the universe works. We got closer to the truth because Ptolemy held fast to that wrong assumption that he honestly believed was right. So wrong assumptions can be valuable. You don’t have to be absolutely convinced that people really are trying their best to believe that it is valuable to make that assumption regardless.
Those of you who have dabbled in meditation may be aware of the loving kindness meditation. You start by thinking about a person you love, and sending them good and kind thoughts. You wish them well, and that feels great. But you end with choosing a person you don’t like and sending them good and kind thoughts. You wish your enemy well. “May you be happy, May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be at peace.”
Now I can tell you from experience that it is HARD to do a loving kindness meditation and wish good things on a person you don’t like. And I should note that I don’t actually believe that sending good thoughts to people really does make that person feel better. But you know who feels better? Me.
The same thing is true from assuming that someone you don’t like is doing their best. Reserving the assumption that someone is trying her best only for those people who deserve it misses the point of the exercise. You need to assume the best in people who don’t deserve it. Again, you don’t have to be their friend. You don’t have to work with them and you sure as heck don’t have to vote for them for president. But if you want to take the assumption seriously, you need to offer it to everyone, not just the people who you think deserve it. In fact, you especially need to offer it to the people who don’t deserve it because they are the ones you understand the least and therefore they are the ones from whom you can learn the most.
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So here’s something that is true about me and I’m telling you this because I’m hoping you will believe that I am up here doing my best. Here’s my truth: I am mad. I was all ready to get to celebrate having the first woman president and instead I got a guy who can’t stop tweeting sexist stuff about Mika Brzezinski. I’m mad. I’m mad at Trump and I’m mad at the people who voted for him. I’m mad because I think they turned their backs on the concept of “All men are created equal” to give power to a bazillionaire who literally brags about the size of his penis. I’m mad and I really, really want to stop at just being mad. It would be so easy to stop at anger. I could stop at anger and never have to get up from my couch. Plus, I would get to feel self-righteous, which is my absolute favorite thing to do.
The Declaration of Independence that starts with “All men are created equal” ends the following way: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” It’s fine to be mad. I can’t decide that I’m not allowed to be mad, because being mad is part of me doing my best. But I am mutually pledged to every single Trump voter out there, whether they know it or not, and whether I respect it or not. The day after the election, a Trump-supporting student in my inter-group dialogue class came into the dialogue looking as shell-shocked as anyone. “I just wanted to stick it to Wall Street,” he said. “I didn’t want people to be scared. I’m sad that people are scared.”
Now I completely acknowledge that I have tons of privilege in this society, and so that privilege may be linked to my ability to believe that everyone is doing their best. My privilege allows me to look at a student who should’ve KNOWN people would be scared and see a person who needs to be told that people are scared. I need to share that with him. I understand that it is much easier for me to believe that everyone is doing their best than it is for many of you. Many of you are angrier than I am, and you have an absolute right to be angrier than me. I have no right to say you must drop your anger at the foot of some belief that people who do awful things, people who tweet awful things, are doing their best. If you can’t make that assumption, if you aren’t there yet, if you will never be there, that’s OK. I have the privilege to be able to make that assumption, and if you do to, I think you should. All I want from you, and all I believe in my heart and my soul you are giving me, is your best. I’m mutually pledged to you. I have no choice.
Kris Kanthak is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.
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