Elections divide us; digital discourse can reunite us
Finding the common ground obscured by binary political choices
“How could anyone vote that way?”
This question, in various forms, appears all across social networks after every election. It’s inevitable given political structures that force us to pick sides. Elections involve complex concepts and “all of us are impacted differently and unevenly based on our backgrounds, identity, and our state of being,” says activist and strategist Daniel Hunter in How we Win: A Guide to Non-Violent Direct Action Campaigning by George Lakey. But our choices are limited to one candidate or an overly-simplified “yes” or “no” on extremely complicated issues.
Election outcomes obscure nuances in individual voters’ positions, preventing us from seeing areas of shared values, experiences, and vision between the people who voted “yes” and those who voted “no” – or the people who voted for Candidate A and those who voted for Candidate B.
“Dividing the world into two distinct sides … makes us imagine division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement,” says the late Hans Rosling in Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. “In most cases there is no clear separation of two groups, even if it seems like that from the averages. We almost always get a more accurate picture by digging a little deeper and looking not just at the averages but at the spread; not just the group all bundled together, but the individuals. Then we often see that apparently distinct groups are in fact very much overlapping.”
Unfortunately, division is built into our political systems. It’s not surprising that we evaluate issues differently and reach different decisions about which of the limited political options we’ll choose. But we have no way of communicating our personal reasons, caveats, and reservations on the ballot itself. We don’t have the option of indicating which parts of a candidate’s platform or a ballot initiative we agree with and which parts give us pause. We currently have no political mechanism for finding and building on the overlaps. Our systems enshrine conflict and separation.
“People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative,” said Grace Lee Boggs, a community leader and believer in the power of small groups to create positive social changes. “We need a vision that recognizes we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.”
We can’t expect unity to come from structures based on forced binary options. Much like it’s up to us to navigate social media in ways that avoid and diffuse outrage, it’s up to us to look for the commonalities and overlaps obscured by the electoral process and ignored by institutions, power-brokers, politicians, strategists and commentators who thrive on reducing us to distinct groups. “[We] are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations,” says Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody.
Social networks allow us to connect with people we might never encounter in our physical world, listen to their feelings and experiences, and grapple with their thoughts. If we interact with lots of people — or at least pay attention to opposing views posted in digital spaces — we’ll have a pretty good sense of why people vote the way they do. “By exposing people to each other, and each other’s ideas, memes [and all digital media] are part of a broader phenomenon that expands the range of acceptable discourse,” says An Xioa Mina in Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power, “feeding a hungry public who wants to talk about issues that in previous eras might not have been discussed openly.”
These connections are vital to a functioning society because they enable us to understand, value, and trust people who are different from us, instead of dismissing or vilifying them outright. As pollster Anthony Salvanto says in Where Did You Get This Number, “if you hang around with people who think differently than you do, you’re more likely to see them as having shared values outside of politics. If they aren’t around, they’re different. They’re abstractions.”
But we have to look past the never-ending, round-the-clock political coverage and non-stop political ugliness flooding social networks to seek out connection instead of reinforce division.
Using digital media to explore the viewpoints of people who vote differently from us is one answer to the question asked by Sharon D. Welch in After the Protests are Heard: Enacting Civic Social Engagement and Social Transformation: “how can we shape our new forms of communication to counter, rather than reinforce, polarization and sensational, simplistic thinking?” Genuine curiosity leads to inquiry and dialogue about the ways we differ as well as the ways we agree, opening our eyes to new ways of understanding our present, interpreting our history, and imagining our future.
Digital media enables us to share and amplify our connections and discoveries, connecting us with ever more people interested in creating a better, more inclusive world. “[T]he brave new world we seek to create has existed before, and could exist again” say David Wengrow and the late David Graeber in a The New York Times guest essay adapted from their forthcoming book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. “All we are lacking now is the political imagination to make it happen.”
Meaningful conversations in digital places can spark and grow that imagination.
Ideas gain momentum when multiple individuals transmit overlapping and reinforcing messages in digital spaces. With enough momentum, ideas become movements that transform societies.
Why waste our digital capital arguing, bemoaning, or gloating about the outcomes of elections that continue to present us with woefully limited, inadequate, and disappointing options when we can collaborate on mindset shifts that will transform our world into a place where everyone thrives?
Also from Lauren M. Hug — Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World and COMING SOON Digital Grace: Embracing Benevolence in an Outraged World.