Fun Trumps Fear

What to make of the midterm elections? You may, if you wish, lend your ear to the ululations of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters, who are eager to tell you that the mythical Red Wave failed to materialize because of Donald Trump, or because of Dobbs, or because of January 6th, or because Mercury was in retrograde. Maybe there’s some truth to some of that. But if you’re curious as to why the Republicans did not ascend as predicted, a much simpler and more instructive explanation is hiding in plain sight, one that offers valuable insights to all Americans, but particularly to those of us who look heavenward for inspiration.

Here it is, put bluntly: Americans voted the way they did because Americans have lost all hope.

Step back for a moment from the rat-a-tat of our hyperventilating news cycle and consider the last four decades stateside. What story would you tell about America if you had to sum up its recent history in a minute or less? If you’re thoughtful and honest, you’d probably point out some great achievements—the Civil Rights Act, say, or a more-or-less stable surge of economic virility. But then come the downers: declining birth rates; sagging life expectancy; universities turning into ideological consent factories; cultural institutions becoming propaganda production arms; big business melding seamlessly with the state to create a big, impenetrable blob that decides every aspect of life.

We’ve gone from morning in America to mourning in America in record time, in large part because our traditional sources of renewable spiritual energy—church, family, nation—have themselves been the targets of concentrated and clever campaigns run by political operatives for fun and for profit. Just look at the Black Lives Matter movement, which brought violence and unrest to American cities, advocated the dissolution of the nuclear family, and berated the nation as inherently evil—and which, for its efforts, earned a $50 billion pledge from multinational corporations without the inconvenience of transparency or accountability.

And while political operatives—mostly on the left but not exclusively so—spent the last forty-odd years stripping civic society of its emotional, social, and spiritual guardrails, they offered in return a paltry and toxic alternative: fealty to party. Increasingly, our political campaigns have less and less to do with clear and effective messaging, or good ground games, or clever segmentation and analysis of voter blocs and interest groups, or crisp communications, or any of the staples of political gamesmanship. Voting in America these days, as we all saw last November, has become a simple proposition: You walk in and support your tribe, even if it has chosen to nominate a cognitively impaired man, say, for Senate, and even if its commander in chief has presided over a disastrous economy, surging crime waves, and other terrible, no-good things.

How do we extricate ourselves from this sorry situation? This is where last November is ­instructive.

The answer, it should now be clear, isn’t to fret about elections. Sure, elections matter, and they have consequences, and no one living in a republic is at liberty to ignore or dismiss the electoral process. But these past midterms proved just how little effort elections require: Go ahead and nominate whoever you want. Trust your loyalists, divided right down the middle, to mutter their amens. Their affiliations as Democrats or Republicans have now replaced all deeper affinities and belief systems.

Instead, the answer to the question of where we go from here is wilder and eminently more cheerful. What we’re seeing now isn’t a political stalemate; it’s a ­spiritual crisis, and it may only be solved by spiritual means. How? This is where the faithful ride to the rescue.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; the wheel is already perfectly round and well-greased. All we have to do is learn from movements that have successfully cast off oppressive political realities and replaced them with something much more lively, soulful, and productive. My friend Srđa Popović, often credited as the architect of the Arab Spring and the man who nearly single-­handedly brought down Slobodan Milošević’s murderous regime, has spent his life studying how non-violent action can affect profound change, and his principles apply neatly to contemporary America, a nation in need of reawakening. Three of those principles in particular come to mind.

First, have a vision of tomorrow. Instead of griping about Biden and Trump and wasting our breath on this or that election, let’s show our morose and deflated brothers and sisters that what we offer isn’t just a ballot but a way of life. The America we’d refashion, if given the chance, isn’t a place where all elected officials pledge allegiance to the GOP. It’s a country where parents have a right and a responsibility to be active in the education of their children. It’s a nation where public servants see themselves as just that, servants of the public, rather than as impish czars who relish the power to regulate all aspects of human life, from shutting down schools to banning plastic bags. It’s a place where compassion trumps compensation, because everyone listened to the rabbis of the Talmud who taught us that we mustn’t look away when our streets are littered with the homeless and the hopeless. (On this point they emphatically agree with the rabbi Jesus.) The America we envision is a place of hope, where deaths of despair will be cured with the warmth of communal engagement and the strength of a belief in life’s higher purpose.

Such a vision is a start, but it isn’t enough. To win hearts and minds, we need to consider the second principle: unity. To win, it’s imperative that we realize that we aren’t the minority or even a slim majority in this country. It’s plain to see that it’s not 49 to 51 percent who want wholesome, normal lives. That aspiration is widespread. We are the overwhelming majority, even if some of our potential coalition partners strike us at the moment as standing on the other side of the partisan transom. The faithful Muslims in Michigan, for example, who are mobilizing against public school boards that bombard their children with sexually explicit content at a very young age, share our vision for tomorrow. So do gay and lesbian parents who are horrified by the new gospel of gender that erases their identities and ­experiences. So do Latino immigrants who came here legally to pursue the American Dream and are incensed to see their efforts ridiculed by secretive midnight transports of migrants into already struggling American regions for no reason other than cynical political calculations. Our goal should be to reach out to all who seek to make normal normal again. We must learn to overcome our considerable differences and focus on our crucial commonalities at this critical juncture.

To forge unity, we need the third and key principle of action: Make it rock. No movement worth its salt ever got off the ground by dourly debating facts and figures, or by sourly accusing its enemies of all sorts of malice. To win, we need to capture the joyous and ebullient and generative energy we so often feel in our houses of worship and around the dinner table with our loved ones. We need to invite our neighbors to join us, not in a culture war but in a church choir concert. The fact is plain: Fun trumps fear every time. Forget politics. Invite your neighbors over for a leisurely dinner, show them your loving and welcoming home and family, and you’ll soon note that their transformation had already begun.

All this may sound like pious mumbo-jumbo. It’s much more gratifying to speak of Red Waves and other sweeping crests. But hope is how societies heal, how spirits awaken, how futures brighten. And hope needs to be embodied in our lives if it’s to be visible to our neighbors. The late Michael Gerson, speechwriter for President George W. Bush, wrote of the “disorienting, vivid evidence that hope wins.” It’s time we prove him absolutely right.

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and the cohost of its popular podcast, Unorthodox.

Image by Pexels via Creative Commons. Image cropped.