The Question Underneath All the Others

After an election, I keep coming back to one thing: whether we still believe our neighbors count.

It’s Sunday, three days after an election, and I have spent an unreasonable amount of time staring at numbers.

Precincts. Turnout. Margins. Who overperformed where. Who didn’t show up. What worked, what failed, what Thursday might tell us about November. This is the part of politics I genuinely love, and I will probably keep pulling it apart long after anybody else cares.

But there is a point where the numbers stop answering the question I actually want answered. What are we trying to do here?

Not win an election. Not even trying to elect more Democrats or Republicans or build a better message or knock more doors or squeeze another couple of points out of a precinct.

What is politics supposed to accomplish once everybody goes home?

Because eventually it all leaves the campaign office. The mailers stop. The yard signs come down. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and then the people we elected sit down in rooms and start making decisions.

And every single one of those decisions land somewhere.

A hospital closes and, on paper, there will be an explanation. The numbers didn’t work. The reimbursement wasn’t there. The money had to come from somewhere else. All of that may be true. It is also true that somebody having a heart attack now lives farther from an emergency room.

A family loses help buying groceries and there will be language for that too. Eligibility. Spending. Work requirements. Fraud prevention. Somewhere underneath all of it is a parent standing in a grocery aisle deciding what goes back on the shelf.

Politics has a way of making human consequences sound technical enough that we can forget they are human.

There is an old instruction to love your neighbor as yourself. I don’t need to believe those words came from god to believe there is something true in them. And I don’t think “love” means what we have watered it down to mean. It isn’t just affection, and it certainly isn’t niceness. The harder demand is recognizing an obligation to somebody whose life is not yours. The stranger. The person without power. The person you do not understand. The person you have every reason to put on some other side.

Another person’s worth does not depend on our ability to understand them.

I wish that were as basic to our politics as it sounds.

Instead, a lot of our politics now seems to begin with deciding who deserves what happens to them. Own the libs. Make them cry. Punish them. Teach them a lesson. Hurt the right people badly enough and somebody will call it a victory.

Then we call get to speak about the problem of polarization, as if the real sickness is that everybody has gotten rude.

I don’t think the problem is that we argue too much. I think the problem is that we have gotten very good at deciding who counts.

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Loving your neighbor does not mean avoiding the fight. We have confused decency with keeping the peace for too long, as though the moral position must always be somewhere safely between two sides. Sometimes there is no honorable middle. When somebody is being hurt, refusing to confront the person doing the hurting is not kindness. It is comfort.

If someone is being cheated, there is nothing loving about refusing to say who is cheating them. If somebody’s freedom is being taken away, the moral answer is not automatically halfway between the person losing it and the person taking it. If somebody is getting screwed, there is nothing noble about pretending otherwise because naming it might make the person doing the screwing angry.

Sometimes you have to pick a side.

That does not mean every disagreement is a battle between good people and bad people. Government is full of tradeoffs. There are bad ideas built around good intentions. Reasonable people can look at the same problem, care about the same people, and disagree honestly about what will help them.

But I would like the disagreement to begin with the assumption that they matter.

Thursday’s election is already becoming the past. The signs will (or more likely, have) come down. Campaign shirts will get shoved into closets. Precinct percentages that felt enormously important Thursday night will eventually become numbers almost nobody remembers.

What happens because of those final numbers will last longer.

The people we chose will make decisions. Most of them will not make headlines. A line in a budget. A funding request. An appointment. A vote in a room almost nobody is watching.

And somewhere, every one of those choices will reach a person.

That is what I want to remember when all the campaign noise dies down.

I have never really thought of myself as a single-issue voter. I still don’t, at least not in the way we usually use that phrase. There are too many things that matter, too many questions where the answer is genuinely hard, too many times when good people can look at the same problem and come away believing different things.

But maybe we have been thinking about the “single issue” part wrong.

Maybe the issue isn’t health care or taxes or abortion or guns or immigration. Maybe those are just the places where the deeper issue gets tested.

Maybe the single issue is whether we believe other people count.

Whether the child who isn’t ours counts. Whether the family we will never meet counts. Whether the person whose politics make us furious still counts. Whether somebody else’s freedom matters when we have no use for that freedom ourselves.

Do we love our neighbors as ourselves?

I don’t mean that as a religious test. You can believe we are commanded to do it. I can believe the command itself is unnecessary. Either way, the political question is what happens next.

Do we act like our neighbor counts?

Do the people we elect?

Can we fight over the numbers, argue over the policy, make the hard choices and still remember who has to live with them?

I don’t know if that makes me a single-issue voter.

But I’m beginning to think it might be what all of us have to become.

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