How to Stay Sane Until Election Day, and Beyond – BCB #97
How to Stay Sane Until Election Day, and Beyond – BCB #97
Also: White Rural Rage provides a case study in deepening divisions
Amanda Ripley’s tips for strategic political engagement
November is still more than six months away, and already, many Americans are having a hard time keeping their heads screwed on straight. Building on her guidelines for surviving 2024, Amanda Ripley wrote up a few ways to stay engaged in the run-up to the election without going mad. Polarization isn’t about to stop being a problem, so here are a few ways to conserve our energy for the long haul.
1. It’s okay to not talk about it
Some relationships can and should be exempt from political debate. If you care about someone and simply don’t feel you can reconcile your differing views, Ripley writes, it’s possible that the best thing to do for yourself and for them is not to try.
Staying in relationships with one another is the only way to get lasting change. Hard conversations matter, but some people are not ready — not now. They don’t want to hear it — and maybe neither do you. Severed relationships harden our hearts and freeze our minds in place. Long term, that retrenchment can make everything worse by leaving us more isolated from one another.
2. Make improvements on the small scale
You can’t snap your fingers and fix our broken relationships. But what you can do is start small and look for little ways to effect positive change in your immediate surroundings that aren’t necessarily at all political.
For instance, Ripley spoke to a corrections officer and Marine Corps veteran named Caleb Follett, who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and whose circles are staunchly Red. Follett used to avidly post about politics online, but this year he’s posting about exercise instead. “I realized, man, when I used to be posting all the time, it was fueled by anger,” he told Ripley. “It’s like I stepped back, and I found a problem that I can help people with.”
The best case scenario is that these kinds of small tweaks build trust and solidify relationships in a way that lays the groundwork for long-term change. One organization built on similar principles is Civity, which is focused on creating a “cultural infrastructure of positive relationships” through everyday actions.
3. Know your triggers
At this point, most Americans who are at all politically engaged know what it feels like to slip into a negative spiral or succumb to doomscrolling. So Ripley encourages readers to ask themselves, “What will I get out of reading this story?” before wading in. Sometimes the most catastrophic-seeming news is actually the most compelling, while the stories you might be more inclined to skip reveal a picture of our reality that’s less frightening (for example, we aren’t as different as we think we are).
The trick is to watch for your own emotional responses. Conflict hurts, so we are all sensitive about certain things. Being aware of where you suddenly get angry or defensive is a key part of having better relationships with the other side. If you really want to level up here, you can try the Political Courage Challenge.
4. Start small, think big
There’s no denying that this is a pivotal election, but America’s polarized woes won’t evaporate in November, regardless of who wins. We can start thinking beyond the election that’s right in front of us and really try to imagine what a better, more functional America could look like.
“The narrative of this election is not as compelling because it’s so familiar. And that is, strangely, an opportunity,” says April Lawson, who has spent the past six years working for the depolarization organization Braver Angels. “We’re looking for something fresh, something different. There’s the potential for a new story — not about Trump and Biden but about who we are, as Americans.”
White Rural Rage sows seeds of division
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s White Rural Rage, a book parsing the ignoble qualities that, they claim, make America’s white rural voters most likely to undermine the country’s core principles and ultimately its democracy, quickly became a New York Times best seller after its release in February.
Yet this book, and the reaction to it, may be a case study in how not to have better conflict. According to Tyler Austin Harper writes in The Atlantic, there are two problems here. First, the book stretches existing research to make its point. Second, it both reflects and reinforces existing prejudices.
Harper takes issue with Schaller and Waldman’s inability to define “rural.” Rural studies scholars agree that there isn’t one definition that everyone uses—in fact, a number of the places singled out in the book would qualify as urban by commonly used metrics. The more pernicious fallacy, according to Harper, is the claim that “rural Americans are disproportionately likely to support or potentially commit violence that threatens American democracy.” Schaller and Waldman write about how members of a right-wing sheriffs organization pose a threat to democracy, but offer no evidence that these sheriffs are more likely to work in rural parts of the country. This sort of fudging is unfortunate, because many methods of determining how many people support political violence greatly overestimate the percentage.
Schaller and Waldman disagree with these criticisms of the accuracy of their work, and have written a rebuttal. But whatever the factual problems with the research underpinning White Rural Rage, we have to ask: is this a constructive narrative? Is this book likely to have a positive impact on our society?
For example, statistically speaking, white Republicans are somewhat more likely than white Democrats to hold racist attitudes about Black Americans. That doesn’t mean that any particular Republican—the person in front of us—is racist. Building up a negative stereotype is going to make other people treat them worse—which will in turn make it harder for them to change even if they do have something to learn, because change requires psychological safety.
The situation is not dissimilar to pointing out that violent crime rates are higher in Black communities. This is true, but it also plays into a harmful stereotype of Black men as dangerous. There are both good and bad reasons to bring this statistical fact into the conversation.
Along this line, it’s hard to tell what Schaller and Waldman hope their book will accomplish. When one reporter asked Schaller what the solution to the problem of white rural rage might be, he turned the question around, arguing that liberal writers like himself can’t solve the problem. “Until rural Americans demand more from their elected leaders, i.e., Republicans, their plight will only get worse.” In another interview, Waldman added, “Rural white people need to engage politically and get something that's not just about saying that they're mad at liberals. If they start demanding more of their Republican representatives, then they might actually provide something better and you could have a more active politics in those places.”
This might be true. But in writing a book critiquing white rural rage and then calling on those same white rural Americans to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, Schaller and Waldman are playing right into the stereotype that Blue types don’t care about disillusioned white rural voters. As Harper puts it:
White Rural Rage illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits. … [This book] will likely pour gasoline on rural Americans’ smoldering resentment, a resentment that is in no small part driven by the conviction that liberal elites both misunderstand and despise them.
Quote of the Week
The question of our time is not who are the bad Americans, but what is wrong with our systems—our government, our economy, our modes of communication—that means that so many people feel unseen, unheard, and disrespected by the people in charge? And what can we do, constructively, about that?