There is No "Them"

I’m still doing the occasional public post. Most are subscriber-only these days.

We'll ride the ship down
Dumping buckets overboard
There can't be more of them than us
There can't be more

Jason Isbell sings those lines in Hope the High Road, his 2017 anthem lamenting Trump’s win.  The track is a mixture of defiance and comfort from one of country’s most celebrated (and politically progressive) singer-songwriters:

Last year was a son of a bitch
For nearly everyone we know
But I ain't fighting with you down in the ditch
I'll meet you up here on the high road

(The “last year” is, of course, 2016.)

I love Isbell’s music, and this song haunts me – and it points, perhaps inadvertently, to the ongoing tragedy of so much of contemporary American life: the rigid, increasingly bitter, binary between the baleful “them” and the enlightened “us.”

When Isbell sings, in reference to the 2016 election, “last year was a son of a bitch for nearly everyone we knew,” I wonder who the people are he still knows. I wonder who he has cut out of his life.  I think of my mother’s wonderful, long-dead friend, Mrs. Williamson, who shared with mama both progressive politics and a deep love for poetry.  At the 1984 edition of my mother’s Christmas party, Mrs. Williamson and I had a somber chat about Ronald Reagan’s recent landslide reelection.  “I confess I can’t quite understand how Reagan won,” Mrs. Williamson lamented, “as everyone I know voted for Mondale.”

She wasn’t joking, bless her.

The pop psychologists who post on Pinterest and Instagram encourage us to cut “toxic people” out of our lives.  Twitter wisdom holds that if you are unhappy with the backwards politics of your parents, or disgusted by the insipidity of your cousins, you can find a new family of choice online – a community of people just like you, who share your passions and your fears, which are of course the correct, scientific, and enlightened passions and fears. Not like the paranoid delusions of the uneducated them; poor benighted troglodytes, damnable brain-washed fools!

There’s a lot to be said for finding one’s tribe, of course; it is nice to be able to exhale, to relax, to not have to be on guard constantly.  I understand the urge to want to retreat to the citadels of the like-minded, where your own instincts and convictions are supported rather than challenged.  I like going to a Rams game and being surrounded by other Rams fans, a human tide of blue and gold; I am very happy going to, say, a Miranda Lambert concert and singing along with a crowd that knows every word to Heart Like Mine (itself an anthem to being different, together.)

(I limit my celebrations of “us-ness” to sporting events, concerts and the occasional religious service. Too much done in unison breeds something dark.)

Part of the reason why we don’t trust election outcomes is not because fraud is rampant, but because we have retreated into silos of the like-minded.  There can’t be more of them than us, and if they won the election, it must be because they cheated, or suppressed the turnout, or colluded with a foreign government, or rigged the machines.  When we start with the presumption of our own moral superiority – and the inevitability of our triumph, were things really on a level playing field! – we treat every defeat and setback as evidence of a great conspiracy to deny the majority its just and deserved victory.  Everybody I know voted for Mondale.  Everybody I know trusts Dr. Fauci.  Everybody I know, or wish to know, thinks the right thoughts.

I am only a disreputable slinger of groceries, a bumbling father, an absent-minded husband, an exhausted deliverer of laundry. To my friends on the left, I am blinded by my whiteness and stained by a privilege that poverty cannot wash clean.  To almost everyone, including myself, I have no moral authority with which to speak of much of anything.  The one thing that I have always intuited, and that I have learned far more deeply since my fall from grace, is that there is no them.  There is only an us, a messy, confounding, frightened, stubborn, generous and loving us.  If everyone you know or speak to shares a common world view, then you will always be prey for conspiracy theories and delusions and panics.

There is no them.