Winners, losers, fellow Americans

First published in the Wakefield Daily Item, January 6, 2025.

Well, it’s been a couple of months since the election. How’re we doing?

I’m hanging in there. I admit, as both a large-D and small-d democrat and a Harris supporter, I was pretty downcast in the days after November 5^th, and I still find myself soul-searching, worried what Donald Trump’s victory means for the future of the country and wondering about the way forward for progressives.

Life goes on. Walking my two big dogs around our quiet neighborhood near Lake Quannapowitt, I was grateful to see that folks on both sides took down their lawn signs after the election (especially the big inflatable Trump on Church Street – thank you). It’s not only Democrats, the losers, who were exhausted from the endless campaigning and two years of relentless political media. We’re all human and it’s been a crazy, trying time in the life of the nation. It still is.

It’s always interesting, though, to see how people handle winning and losing. Leading up to the election, when I was hopeful Harris might win, I remember thinking: If Harris can pull this off, it will be really important for Dems not to gloat. We just need to move forward and start solving problems, hopefully in a bipartisan way, where the main focus is the facts on the ground, not whether it’s a Democratic or Republican policy, and not whether Donald Trump or Elon Musk or George Soros supports the proposal. Sort of like last year’s bipartisan immigration bill, negotiated by conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats, before Trump nixed it. The truth is, if your main goal is just to win, to defeat and humiliate the other side, problems never get solved.

Winning or losing has different kinds of consequences, including personal ones, and I’ve noted a few of these. A group of old friends, one of whom is conservative, planned a get-together recently and when one of the wives learned that the conservative friend had voted for Trump, she refused to come. A running buddy – an old white guy like me who, also like me, has a kid who’s gay (he’s also married to a woman of color) – explained as we huffed and puffed around the lake why he doesn’t talk to a number of the Wakefield folks he used to before the Trump years. A Facebook friend and conservative former town leader took the opportunity a few days after votes were cast to post that the election had been a good “old-fashioned ass kicking” of the Democrats, then wished everyone peace.

It's been a challenge coming to grips with losing, but accepting loss is essential to democracy and I’ve accepted it (unlike Trump, who never accepted his loss in 2020). Personally, I remain open to keeping relationships going with folks who may have voted for Trump. For some reason, I feel instinctively that our direct relationships with friends and fellow citizens, and the positive potential in them that comes from what we have in common, are the key to a better future, here in Wakefield and across the country.

Maybe I’m just naïve. The 20^th century philosopher Karl Popper probably would have thought so. He first defined a paradox at the core of our communities and of democracy itself: the paradox of tolerance. This states that the only thing an open, democratic society cannot tolerate…is intolerance. More precisely, Popper argued that if intolerant forces or leaders are allowed to predominate, they can take advantage of democratic openness to degrade or even destroy the democratic system, leaving only authoritarian rule by those with the most power and resources.

This may seem familiar as Trump nominates cabinet members whose mission it has been to fight and destroy the very agencies they’ll be heading, and vows to fire thousands of nonpartisan government workers. It is also exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930s, where Hitler exploited the democratic system and manipulated German conservatives to attain power, then once in power ruthlessly destroyed the institutions and norms of democracy (not to mention murdering conservative rivals). It was Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, who said “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.” A cruel joke, but true. For would-be tyrants, the paradox of tolerance represents a vulnerability and an opportunity.

Why are some people tolerant of difference and others intolerant? Part of the answer seems to lie in a basic difference in how one views life and sees the world. Some folks see life – here in Wakefield and in the country more broadly – as a war or, maybe, a football game, where the other team is the enemy and you’re either a winner or a loser. People who look or sound or act different are seen as potential threats – what happens if they take your place on the team? What happens if, heaven forbid, they win?

But our democracy is not a football game. It’s not a war or a contest to see who wins. The idea of America is pluralist, which means that people with different interests and lifestyles and beliefs can coexist peacefully. Lincoln said “government of the people, by the people, for the people” – this means all the people.

In order for this idea not to perish from the earth, you need to be okay with people being different than you. The only thing to not be okay with is people who are not okay with people being different than them. Get it? (There’s that paradox.)

Nobody is better than anybody. Nobody is replacing anybody. And anyone telling you this is actually the one to be feared. When FDR said, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself,” he could have clarified: “There is no one to fear more than the fearmonger.” Perhaps a complement to the paradox of tolerance might be called “the enemy axiom”: the principle that any figure or leader who is constantly warning about some dangerous “other” (immigrants, Muslims, trans people, other non-WASPs) or the threat posed by a particular person or entity (Biden, Harris, Nancy Pelosi, the “lamestream” media) more than likely is the real enemy.

I realize many Wakefield friends who read this will poo-poo me and say that I am the one who is fearmongering, mentioning Hitler, etc. But I don’t think so. I’ve been reading a lot of history of that time and place; anyone who dismisses the parallels just does not know the history. It is striking and troubling to ponder how – and how quickly – a society can go from lively or raucous debate, from an “ass-kicking” on social media, to shouting-down and shoving in public, to shooting, or even storming the Capitol.

We’re all in this together – this is the truth that must win. The only way our community and our country will get through these challenging times is if we, and especially our leaders, take this to heart and put it at the center of all we do. If we don’t, we all lose.

© Jeff Kehoe