Politics are personal

Teach young people to have a little bit of grace this election season

Eleanor came of age in small-town America during the 1940s. She was raised by a stoic secretary and a violent store manager. Her mother grew most of their food and sewed their clothes; her father was physically present but mentally checked out. Eleanor wore pants, like her mother, when most of her peers wore dresses and skirts. She got pregnant at age 17 and married her high school boyfriend (not sweetheart) because she had to.

Eleanor grew up during a time, and in a place, when girls who got pregnant out of wedlock were sent away. Pregnant teenage girls were removed from society to live in group homes with other girls in the same position. When Eleanor’s boyfriend refused to marry her, her mother made arrangements to move her to the home. But ultimately, this was not Elanor’s fate. A close friend of both families knocked on her boyfriend's door and essentially told the boy’s parents that he was in fact marrying Eleanor. Social pressure did its job: they got married and lived unhappily ever after.

Eleanor was sassy, fiercely independent, and the breadwinner of her family—by necessity. She liked to work but would have rather stayed home with her kids. She loathed men, generally, but adored her grandsons and great grandsons. She was a Democrat but believed that everyone needed to earn their keep. 

Some of her beliefs were consistent but some were contradictory. Her personality dictated much of how she approached life but so did her experiences. Some might have called her a feminist but she never used that word herself and didn’t know its meaning. She wore pants because dresses were uncomfortable; she didn’t like men because she didn’t know any good ones; she worked because her husband wouldn’t.

Eleanor would tell you: “My fierce independence is just who I am,” but an element of that fierceness came about because she married an unmotivated man and thus had to provide for her family, mostly on her own. She was “rah, rah, rah women” because, due to her life experience, she had little hope for, or trust in, men. 

She was an accidental feminist.

Eleanor’s story is the story of everyone in the sense that we’ve all had life experiences that shape our worldview, and we all have personality traits or dispositions that do the same.

I don’t think it’s a secret that one’s experiences and life circumstances guide their political opinions. Perhaps what’s less understood is that so does one’s personality. Along with men, Eleanor disliked authority. She had a “don’t tell me what to do” demeanor all of her life. This was the disposition of many of her Democrat friends, and it was innate—people who were skeptical of authority gravitated towards the blue team. She didn’t like anyone telling her what to do because that was Eleanor, but she really didn’t like men telling her what to do because the men in her life often abused their authority.

I tell Eleanor’s story because all too often we don’t reflect on why we vote the way we do or why we support the politicians and policies that we do. We don’t often ask: What are the roots of my beliefs—the deep roots. Instead, most of us walk around with our heads held high, arguing our point with anyone who will listen because we have the facts, we possess the truth, we are on the right side of history.

Not understanding where one’s beliefs stem from makes it difficult to comprehend why someone with different views, different roots, doesn’t agree with you. And because adults lack awareness of these roots, kids don’t understand what shapes their beliefs and the beliefs of their peers either. They may understand that their religion, for example, guides much of their belief structure, but they don’t understand that the personality traits of their parents, which they have inherited, also inform their beliefs.

Adults and young people alike go about their lives with a sense of self-righteousness, as Jonathan Haidt pointed out, because, in their mind, they possess the truth (and sometimes they think it’s the capital-T Truth). As a result, when it comes to teaching young people about effective means to engage in political dialogue, the line of thinking goes: If we teach them to approach political conversations with the goal of mutual understanding, then they are better positioned to change someone’s mind. Or, if we teach them to argue their position well, they will win the debate with facts. 

But politics and political dialogue don’t work like that. 

Perhaps armed with new information from a person one trusts and respects, a mind can be changed, but that’s rare. And certainly you can win a debate with facts because debates are competitions that only require facts to win. Belief structures aren’t rooted in facts, per se. They don’t grow from information gleaned through the scientific process, thus aren’t going to be alerted because the material facts have changed or run counter to the belief.

When it comes to preparing young people to operate in our political landscape, the best we can do is encourage them to root themselves in a belief system that is truly theirs, not that of their friends or favorite celebrities, ask that they have a bit of grace when encountering someone who views the world differently than they do, and help them to understand the yin and yang, the push and pull, of ideas, and of life, that keeps everything in harmony. 

The goal ought to be, first and foremost, thinking for one’s self, and then mutual understanding when they encounter divergent views. And nothing more.