Focus on the Things That Matter
6 min read
Although I came of age at a moment when politicians on both sides of the aisle were amenable to hearing each other’s ideas, we’re now at a juncture where each side seems more or less unpersuadable, unbudgeable, at least on the big stuff. The same goes for a substantial wedge of the public. We’re all rooted in our own media ecosystems, standing on different epistemological substrates, working with different understandings of what we think—know—is true.
The 2020 election was stolen; it wasn’t stolen. Immigrants are what make America great; immigrants are the problem. Inflation is going down; eggs cost too much. (They do cost too much, though for reasons that probably aren’t Joe Biden’s fault.) Abortion is an issue over which there really may be no compromise—this is life we’re arguing over. Life! What could be more fundamental than that?
I could go on.
And Democrats, just among themselves, are already arguing over why Tuesday night’s election turned out the way it did. How I loathe this part, all the gladiatorial intraparty bedlam: Racism was the main cause. Misogyny was the main cause. The intense estrangement and demoralization of the white working class, that’s what did them in—not only did they see their jobs slip away, but they were told that they were bad people when the words white supremacy entered the liberal lexicon, the mainstream media, and the vocabulary of many progressive politicians. All the talk about trans rights did them in—why do Democrats talk about gender-affirming care (and use that phrase) when parents have legitimate anxieties about their 18-year-olds who want top surgery? “Defund the police” did them in—don’t many people in dodgy or dangerous neighborhoods want cops? Elon Musk and Joe Rogan were the problem. The cultural conservatism of Hispanics was the problem. The failure to recognize illegal immigration and inflation and crime was the problem. Joe Biden’s mental decline was the problem; his not coming clean about it was the problem. The result was inevitable, because center-left parties are folding around the globe like beach chairs. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
So the question becomes: How do we move forward without venom, without looking at strangers—and people within our own party—as potential enemies? As people who, if given their druthers, would undo the American project and destroy its values and make this country profoundly unsafe? (Which is something, by the way, that both sides believe.)
My answer would be something pretty basic, but at least achievable—a step the media can least try to take, that local leaders can partially achieve, but that we, as citizens, can most easily do ourselves: We can focus on our vulnerabilities. We can choose to talk about and pass bills to address and continually emphasize the human hardships that bind us together. We all experience grief. We all have disabled relatives in our family whom we worry about. We all need friendship and mourn the relationships that have faded away. We all get cancer or some other disease that makes us reckon with our own mortality. We get chronic illnesses; our bodies fail.
These five subjects are exactly what I’ve written about since joining The Atlantic in 2021. Suddenly, in my 50s, I found myself unconsciously drifting toward existential matters, because they started looming like smoke. What gives life meaning—this is what matters to me now. If not now, in life’s final innings, then when?
And we share so many other common struggles. Worries about our kids, if we have them. The trials of eldercare. The comforts of religion, if you’re religious, or the values and belief systems and structures that guide you, if you’re not. We all want love. We all want fulfillment. Married people all know how hard marriage is, if they’re in one, and divorced people know how hard divorce is, if they’re in the midst of that.
Most people instinctively lean into these topics.
Last year, I wrote about my intellectually disabled aunt, who had the catastrophic misfortune of being institutionalized in 1953, when she wasn’t yet 2. Along the way, I met a woman, Grace Feist, whose child had the same condition but the good fortune to be born 60-plus years later, and therefore led a far better life, a good life. The times had changed, sure, but her mother was a roaring outboard motor of determination when it came to supporting her girl, learning sign language and building what amounted to a Montessori school in her own home.
She was a devoted Christian who told me repeatedly how much she loved God; I think of the universe as a big-bang-size, multidimensional expanse of indifference. Yet I am psychotically attached to her. In fact, I fell instantly in love—she is warm and generous and funny and partial to silver flip-flops even when it’s 20 degrees out, because she’s used to the cold, having spent years freezing her ass off working security at an oil field in North Dakota, where she got to see the northern lights.
When we came around to discussing politics, she mentioned that she’d voted for Trump in 2020. I had not. But her reaction, almost immediately, was to tell me that she thought Republicans had lost their heads about masks—Was it that big a deal to wear one? Really?—and that she herself always wore one, because her youngest child had immunological issues. And I responded by telling her that I thought the Democratic policy positions on trans issues were excessive and ignored the legitimate concerns of parents, who didn’t want their adolescents making precipitous and irreversible decisions about their body when other factors could so often be at play. (To my fellow Democrats: Yes, there are kids who absolutely know they’re trans—I think of Jan Morris, who realized this at 3 or 4 while sitting under a piano—but I worry about the teenagers who suddenly come to this same conclusion when they hadn’t previously felt this way.)
Our impulse was to find consensus. Most people’s ideas about politics are pretty nuanced.
And that assumes they’re thinking about politics in the first place. Many people—27 percent, according to a 2023 Gallup poll—just don’t give that much of a shit. (And 41 percent follow national political news only “somewhat closely.”) It’s not part of their thinking in their everyday life. Grace and her husband, a lovely and quiet guy named Jerry, are far more preoccupied with other matters. I told them I’d just written a story about Steve Bannon, the one and only substantial feature I’ve written about planet Trump; neither had heard of the guy.
Grace and I were tied for life, in spite of our differences. Her child, my aunt, our love and pained concern for them both—these were far deeper connections. And yes, I know:How hokey and Pollyannaish. Liberals will likely say: We have work to do. Trump is dangerous. We’re faltering on the precipice of catastrophe, if we haven’t already backwards-tumbled into the brink. And yes, I agree. We do have work to do; we should be terrified; we should be mourning the country that was. But more than half the nation doesn’t feel that way. And focusing on the shared things, the so-very-basic things, is the one thing within our control. They’re real. They matter. They’re the stuff of life.
