I’ve had it with political punditry. It’s not just repetitive, uninformative and life-draining, it’s part of the problem we’ve all been living with. I realized this 30 minutes into the chattering analysis that started up immediately after the election was at long last called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Don’t get me wrong. I wept with relief at the news of their win, and I was very keen to hear what the two of them had to say on Saturday night. Their words matter, just like our votes matter. I admit I had previously thought that my favorite talkers’ talking, playing back to me all my hopes and dreams and received opinions day after day after day, also mattered. David Remnick. David Brooks. Emily Bazelon. Ezra Klein. Nate Silver. I still love them, but their words do not matter now. They will not help explain this. Or rather, their words will help explain this as much as a Gallup poll of that key demographic, “People Most Likely to Pick Up the Phone and Have the Time to Talk to a Pollster.”
Truth is, those people simply had no earthly idea what the American public actually wants, because no one had any earthly idea what the American public actually wants, including the American public. 2020 featured undecided voters, which I know not from polls but personal experience. In the wake of a brutal election that was much, much closer than predicted and the result of which half the country still does not accept, it’s plain the articulate, confident and totally wrong 24-hours-per-day dissection of the American populace by the TV pundit and polling class is not a useful contribution to anything. I would argue that their endless dissections should play no role in the national conversation we need to find ways to have going forward. Princeton and Harvard and Yale degrees do not confer the ability to see into the human soul, which is what we need to do now.
In his speech on Saturday night, President-Elect Biden announced, via the Book of Ecclesiastes, “It is a time to heal.” I propose to add to these words of wisdom a few from a later verse and address them specifically to the chattering cable news class. For you — and for me, insofar as I’m inclined to posit assumptions about why one group went this way and another went another way — it is now “a time to keep silent.” We need to shut up and let other people speak. Yes, they spoke on Nov. 3, but votes are not enough.
I want people to talk to each other, probe one another to get beneath the facts as they know them, and touch on their lived truth. I want to do the opposite of what Jordan Klepper has been doing for the past five years on “The Daily Show,” which is to set out to humiliate people attending Trump rallies. His shtick is easy, gratuitous and cruel. He’s the smart guy waltzing in armed with the obvious facts, which he mercilessly — and deservedly, it must be said — unleashes. It was sometimes head-shakingly funny, but in the end, I think the joke was always on him. Bringing facts to a truth fight is like bringing a dull knife to a gunfight.
Many years ago, when I was running the former South Berkshire Youth Coalition, a health educator taught me a two-word fact about the limitation of facts, and I’ve never forgotten their lesson.
“Oncologists smoke.” In other words, even though oncologists have the facts about how nicotine damages the human body at their fingertips and know in more detail than anyone else on Earth the odds that smoking will kill them, some of them choose to do it anyway.
Facts in and of themselves are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. We need one-to-one, people-to-people communication. We need safe spaces where difficult truths can be acknowledged. We need both to hear the story of why and how we’ve arrived at this precipice, and to reconnect with people who get their news and facts from different places. I’m envisioning a national Story Corps-type of endeavor, whereby each person pledges to interview another person with whom they fundamentally disagree, and the interviews are made public and shared and archived. That sounds like a heavy lift, but not impossible. Why don’t we enlist the pollsters to implement the project? They have time on their hands, and they ought to do something useful for a change.
Our goal in this would emphatically not be to establish once and for all who is right and who is wrong, and what is fact and what is fiction. Those of us who are relieved at Trump’s loss can’t stand smugly on the side of facts with our arms folded and wait for everyone else to see the error of their ways and come over to our side, chagrined and repentant. This will not happen. Trump did not shrink his electorate last week; he received more than 70 million votes, more than any other losing candidate ever. His got great boosts of unexpected support from Latino men in Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California. Yet liberal writer Rebecca Solnit, writing on Facebook, isn’t interested in building bridges to the 70 million: “When you stand on the ground of truth and justice, let others find their way to you.”
I’ve been known to spout this sort of sanctimony as well sometimes, but I do know — in my wiser, more ecclesiastical moments — that neither my nor anyone else’s politics hold a monopoly on truth or justice, because those are ends way above the human pay grade.
If Trump had won, I’d be feeling very differently now, I know. I would be despairing and so very angry and fretting over my Irish passport application. I doubt, too, that someone from the other side would be extending any sort of olive branch to someone like me. But I’m not taking my cues from Trump supporters, I’m taking them from Stacey Abrams, who plays the long game. New voters can and will be registered, and new bridges can and must slowly and humbly be built. My daughter will be able to vote in 2024, and I’d like that vote — for Kamala Harris, of course — to contribute to a true landslide.
