what you believe vs. which side you're on

I was as surprised as anyone by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. I remember being in a restaurant not too long afterward and overhearing a conversation between two women, one of whom was trying to make sense of the fact that her parents had voted Trump. She kept saying, “but they’re good people! They’ve always been good people!”

Many of us can probably relate to that woman, trying to figure out how someone we know voted for a candidate whose values don’t seem aligned with their own. I admit, I didn’t have these kinds of conversations in person, but in looking around social media I kept running into a few general rationalizations:

“Sure, he’s said some awful things, but other people have said worse things than that.”

“I’m voting for him because he’ll do X. He’s not really going to do Y - that’s just something he said to get votes.”

“He’s no saint, but he’s the type of person we need.”

I was really blown away by the contortions some people were willing to twist into to make their vote make sense. It made me wonder, “do you really know what you believe, or do you just know which side you’re on?”

I realized once I put it into words that if I was going to ask that question of others, I had to ask it of myself first. I don’t mean the minutiae of “do you support a capital gains tax on blah blah blah.” I mean, what are my beliefs about freedom? Or democracy? Not many people would say they were against freedom or democracy, but what happens when the freedoms of others make us feel unsafe, or democracy starts to feel like rule by mob?

These are obviously huge questions that I can’t even begin to do justice to yet (or probably ever). Hopefully over the next few months I can put everything I’ve been learning and thinking about these subjects together into something cohesive. I’m not trying to write a dissertation or anything, I just want to organize my thoughts and state my current beliefs clearly.

Anyways, what made me start thinking about all this again was something the professor said in my lecture series about America after the Cold War. At one point he casually mentioned how Bill Clinton was chosen by the Democratic Leadership Council as a candidate who could move the party back toward the center and win back white middle-class voters. It was news to me, and it caught my attention because I find the constant shifting of the platforms of the two major parties very interesting. All the more reason to be aware of what I believe instead of just which side I'm on.