I have been thinking this morning about the most important voting value.
For the last few weeks, I have wanted to write about voting and values, but I haven’t known quite what to write about.
Initially, I thought about writing about how I am trying to vote my values this election, but you probably don’t care too much about my values.
And honestly, why should you? My values may or may not be good values.
I also thought about writing some kind of trenchant criticism of certain voting values I find woefully lacking in our country.
But, once again, the question is, why does my opinion about such issues matter?
In addition, you have probably already heard a lot of criticism from various folks about voting values they find woefully lacking in one way or another.
More such criticism probably isn’t helpful.
So, in this post, I want to talk about the only voting value that really matters.
And it’s a value I think all of us can eventually agree upon.
Picture courtesy of Unsplash.
Not surprisingly (see blog title), I want to talk about the voting value of love.
Now, to be clear, I think that love as a voting value initially strikes people as naïve.
After all, many people will say, we live in the real world with real people, and many people are bad. So, love just won’t work.
I was recently discussing the political philosophy of Italian philosopher Machiavelli with some of my classes, and that’s the philosophy he holds.
He argues that we live in the real world, and so the ends justifies the means.
Portrait of Machiavelli, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Many of us are very tempted to believe that the end justifies the means when this philosophy helps us get our way politically.
On the other hand, we tend to get upset about this kind of mentality when people use it against us.
That’s because we want to be treated with dignity as human beings.
So, we want people to understand that our well-being matters and that our values, our suffering, our dreams, and our struggles matter.
And when people act as though the ends justifies the means, they act as though certain ends (i.e. certain political goals) matter more than people.
And we don’t want people to treat us this way.
Nobody wants to be treated this way: that some abstract political end is more important than they are.
Okay, so this is why we can all agree on love as the important voting value.
Love, as a practical virtue, means that we treat every person as though they have dignity.
This means we practically care, as much as we are able, about their values, their suffering, their dreams, and their struggles.
And to love people practically, we must listen to them and try to empathize and have compassion for them.
We also need to realize that we may not understand what they are going through because no one perfectly understands another person’s condition.
Loving people practically this way gets tricky because 1) no political party loves perfectly, and 2) sometimes people have bad values and dreams.
I get this.
But let me make a few suggestions about working with these problems politically.
Political Parties
While it is true that no political party loves perfectly, your vote doesn’t end on election day.
I didn’t come up with this saying, but it is true: Every day, you cast a vote for the kind of world you want to live in.
You vote for the world you want to live in with the things you say and do.
And you vote by the way you treat other people and the behavior you support in your leaders.
So, if we have the chance to vote love each day by the way we act, let me suggest some ways that love, the way I have defined love above, doesn’t behave:
Love doesn’t dehumanize an entire group of people, like the working class, the educated, liberal folks, conservative folks, gay folks, or trans folks.
And Love doesn’t demean immigrants, Haitians, Puerto-Ricans, religious folks, non-religious folks, Israelis, Palestinians, men, or women.
Love doesn’t ignore women, who know best, who tell us that abortion is life-saving medical care.
And love doesn’t believe we can do whatever we want with our body just because it is our body.
Love also doesn’t insist babies be born and then work to defund education or deregulate the environment and gun control so that current adults can do whatever they want.
(Because this deprives babies born today of meaningful education and work, a clean environment, and a reasonably safe society in the future.)
Love doesn’t forget how precious babies are, and it doesn’t treat women like their worth depends on having babies.
And love also doesn’t ignore the importance of families of all kinds to the stability and well-being of children.
Love doesn’t vilify an entire group of people like the police or the government.
And love doesn’t ignore the long-standing cries of People of Color that suggest that our judicial and police system is stacked against them.
Love doesn’t believe that our religious beliefs are synonymous with God’s view of the world. (Because that would be arrogant.)
And love also doesn’t require people to ignore their religious beliefs. (Because that would be ignorant.)
Love doesn’t assume that “our team” has it all figured out politically.
And love also doesn’t overlook that both the Republican and Democratic parties embody some important aspects of love.
Love doesn’t believe that money is the most important thing we can pursue in life.
And love also doesn’t overlook that we need money to survive in our current society.
Love doesn’t overlook the fact that not having a fair chance to earn money deprives people of life-saving amenities (like food, housing, and medical care).
And love doesn’t forget that focusing only on our own survival and that of our family may deprive other other people and families of the means they need to survive.
Love doesn’t immerse itself in news filled with gossip, conspiracy, hate, and arrogance or support leaders who revel in such immature vitriol.
And love also doesn’t deny that evil exists in the world.
Love doesn’t ignore that the U.S. has flaws like any other country, some of them serious, that it needs to work on.
And love doesn’t ignore the ways in which the United States, which all its faults, has served as a beacon of light for many people around the world.
Love requires us to love both our neighbors and ourselves.
And love recognizes that love has to be a concern of both private morality and public justice, given how connected we are as a society.
So, when we go to vote, we must try to vote for love in a political system in which neither political party fully embodies love.
Do what you think is loving and cast your vote.
And then, once again, remember that you vote every day for the world you want to live in by the way you act.
You vote every day by the things you say and do, the way you treat other people (especially those who are different from you), and the behavior you tolerate or support in your leaders.
The more we remember that voting is something we do every day of our life, and the more we vote love, the more we will change our current political parties so that they more clearly reflect love practically.
After all, our political parties are a reflection of us.
Now often when folks talk about loving others in this way, I will hear other folks say something like, “Well, I’ll behave in a loving way when the other side starts to behave in a loving way.”
I want to point out something here: You probably vote the way you do because you believe your side is better, more mature, and wiser. Right?
So, be better. Be more mature. And be wiser.
Love is always better, more mature, and wiser.
About People Who Have Bad Values and Dreams
At the beginning of this post, I suggest that Love, as a practical virtue, means that we treat every person as though they have dignity.
And this means we practically care about their values, their suffering, their dreams, and their struggles.
Sometimes thinking of love this way worries us for two reasons.
The first reason is that there are some people who have really bad values and dreams.
Now sometimes we think people have bad values and dreams simply because they hold different values and dreams that we do.
But no person knows everything, so it is important to reiterate here that love requires that we listen and have compassion.
In listening to other people, we might realize that what we thought was bad was just different and something we didn’t fully understand.
So, I invite you to consider that if you aren’t regularly trying to to listen to folks who are different from you, you may be suffering from a love deficit.
You can always work on that, and I will write more at the end of the post about why you might want to work on that.
But what about the people who truly do have bad values and dreams?
You can read more about dealing with such folks here: Treating People with Dignity, Even Mean, Ignorant Ones
But a second reason we worry about loving people practically is there are a lot of unloving people in the world.
And perhaps we worry that it makes us vulnerable if we love people.
For instance, sometimes we try to love people, and they return our love with hate and mistreatment.
That is so painful. That’s why we feel like love makes us more vulnerable.
I get this concern because I’ve struggled with it before, too.
The main thing I have concluded is that love makes us stronger, even if it sometimes makes us more vulnerable.
Love connects us to every other good thing in the world like hope, joy, playfulness, wisdom, truth, and beauty.
So, every time we act with love, we build a firm foundation.
And in the end, it is that firm foundation we build with love–not hate or cruelty–that lasts.
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You might also like this post: Why I am a Christian but not a Christian Nationalist.
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