“How do we get our leaders to stop fighting and start working?”
I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve been asked that question. Even working for centrist members of Congress, that sentiment came up nearly every week I was on the job. For almost a decade.
I can tell you since I left that work, it is still one of the leading questions people have about politics. Even the rabid partisans ask it in their own way. There’s just a bunch of us who are ready to see politicians put up AND shut up when it comes to getting something, almost anything, done.
But I think we need to turn the mirror around.
Just yesterday, I was chatting with a diesel engine technician from Indiana and he asked me a variation of this question. He was concerned that cancel culture is harming our ability to have hard conversations and find common ground. And I couldn’t agree more.
As we were going back and forth, I reminded him of a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt:
My message to him was simple – it’s just not good enough for us to lay the problem at the feet of elected officials. It’s not their fault we’ve become more tribal, it’s ours. They’re simply reflecting what we choose to convey as important. They’re representing US.
For those of us who want to engage in a better process, that’s a bit of a problem. Because that tribalism, that demand for philosophical purity, isn’t allowing us room to have the hard conversations that need to happen for us to grow together and search out meaningful compromise on issues – the kind of compromise that keeps our country progressing forward.
When I think of that Teddy Roosevelt quote, I feel convicted. We aren’t called to passively let elected officials take the reins. That’s not the American way.
We are called to be people of action. People who do. Not because it’s easy; not because the process is desirable. But precisely because it is hard. And because the results can be desirable.
The quest for partisan and tribal purity has put meaningful advocacy in a tough spot. Volunteers become torn between competing interests. And instead of working through those points of friction to reconcile our beliefs and our realities, too many feel justified in simply not showing up.
That’s the easy way out. It also happens to be the less fulfilling way out.
When volunteer advocates first hear my material, there are more than a few eye rolls. As in everything else, we Americans want what we want, and we want it now. And if we can’t have it that way, we question whether it’s worth it at all.
I get it. But I’m the guy here telling you – there’s no fast pass. If you want to move your issues you have to keep showing up. More often than not, that showing up is going to include hard conversations with people who just don’t get you, and mostly don’t understand your stance on an issue.
Fortunately, showing up for those interactions is how you get better for your cause. Not because you’re honing your ability to parry the thrusts of your opponents, but rather because you have more opportunities to see it from new angles. Those reality checks are going to have a compound effect on the way you fight for your cause. They’ll point you to new solutions to problems. They’ll make you better!
But none of that happens without the first step. We have to acknowledge the need for hard conversations. We have to be willing to get uncomfortable. And while that doesn’t mean we have to change our beliefs, it may just help us change how we show those beliefs to the world.
As for our elected officials, it’s not a lost cause. In pockets around the country you can find a few brave electeds trying to do just this. Trying to live out a calling to engage with people different from themselves. It’s long past time we bolster them by reclaiming our responsibility to demonstrate what we expect.
Doesn’t that sound like work worth doing?
Part of the Possible 