Greater than 70% of electorate in Colorado’s Douglas County, conservative and revolutionary alike, voted “no” on house rule in June 2025. The poll measure would have granted the county higher regulate over sure native issues akin to construction zoning, parking regulations and sewer repairs.
Traditionally Republican, however house to a rising inhabitants of vocal Democrats, the county is a microcosm of American political divides – from e book ban debates to COVID masks controversies. Does this divided county’s bipartisan rejection of house rule imply that Coloradans have cracked the polarization drawback?
Alas, no longer truly.
It seems all sides recoiled on the dear and rushed nature of the election. It was once rarely the heartwarming story of warring parties warming up to one another, which is frequently the civic resolution just right people on all sides appear to be wishing for.
You’ll sense that longing in a public radio headline pronouncing the “liberal urban gardener breaking bread with a conservative military-family matriarch.” Or in Sarah Silverman’s “I Love You, America,” a TV collection wherein the comic got down to high-five her manner throughout a divided nation. You spot it in The Village Sq., a nonprofit civic group that describes itself as a “nervy bunch of liberals and conservatives” who promise bipartisan discussion with confrontation but additionally “a good time.”
However what if this actual roughly making an attempt units the bar too excessive – or, no less than, too comfortable and comfy?
As a thinker who research meaning-making, ethics and politics throughout traditions, I’d like to indicate that Coloradans don’t want to hug it out or high-five their manner ahead. Moderately, they may be able to glance to a lot of moral traditions for insights about protective each and every different even if they hate each and every different’s perspectives and values.
On turning into fussy princesses
For starters, in American democracy some tensions are a characteristic, no longer a worm. Whilst maximum would insist racism and sexism want to cross, some disconnects – akin to spiritual variations – are going to stick. So dreaming of full-on cohesion with neighbors roughly misses the purpose.
Moreover, as I’ve argued in different places, the solidarity dream can put well-meaning neighbors in danger of turning into the civic equivalents of the princess and the pea. from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy story. Identical to a royal so natural that even piles of plush mattresses can’t save you her being woke up by way of the lumpiness of a unmarried pea, repeatedly looking for commonplace flooring can dispose other folks to grow to be sameness-seekers who’re more and more allergic to distinction.
And this may make everybody’s stomachs churn much more furiously in any respect in their not-just-like-them neighbors.
The legacy of Onerous Hope
In the case of higher civics, embracing each and every different isn’t the one choice to erasing each and every different. I’ve been growing a unique treatment for rancor in American civic existence.
It’s in response to my many years of finding out philosophy and gravitating all the time to each and every textual content’s maximum precarious and inclined insights on human authenticity and moral reaction.
I name it “Hard Hope.”
Onerous Hope takes its inspiration from the theological and moral politics of a wide selection of thinkers from many alternative backgrounds.
Martin Luther King Jr. mirrored on God’s request that his fans love their neighbors, no longer like them.
Bettmann/Getty Photographs
In a Christmas sermon in 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. mirrored at the biblical injunction to “love thy enemy.” Relating to God, he notes: “It’s significant that he does not say, ‘Like your enemy.’ Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like.”
It’s an arresting perception that takes a second to sink in: He’s announcing that actual neighborly love has little to do with middle emojis.
In a similar way, Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish thinker, emphasizes being referred to as upon to serve others no longer in gentle of shared flooring however in gentle in their being “the absolutely other which I can not contain.” Levinas was once impressed by way of Exodus 33:20 which says no human can see God’s face. He describes the utter otherness of the neighbor as an unknowable face to which persons are however ethically beholden. Individuals are beholden to others inasmuch as they’re different, Levinas argues. Now not inasmuch as other folks really feel hooked up.
And in like spirit, the queer Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa requires a “spiritual activism” wherein justice calls for no longer handiest interrupting inequity, but additionally construction with warring parties. For such radical reference to others, Anzaldúa attracts at the Nahuatl time period for in between, “nepantla,” and problems a decision to “nepantleras” – people who find themselves ready to navigate ambiguous thresholds inside cut up views.
“Honoring people’s otherness, las nepantleras advocate a ‘nos/otras’ position — an alliance between ‘us’ and ‘others.’ In nos/otras, the ‘us’ is divided in two, the slash in the middle representing the bridge – the best mutuality we can hope for at the moment,” she writes.
Onerous Hope is a decision to appear out no longer just for neighbors we love however for neighbors we love least. That’s whilst other folks take to vote casting cubicles to reject their warring parties’ worst oversteps, or even as they paintings inside and throughout communities to raise justice and protected higher futures for all. It’s no longer a decision to modify a bunch’s politics, even though now and then it might probably imply tempering them. And it all the time manner distinguishing the decision to interact politics from the decision to interact other folks – even because it expects everybody to do each.
Onerous Hope asks other folks to take a smash from the bubblegum optimism of believing everybody is solely moments clear of seeing eye to eye and bursting into compassion, friendship and cohesion throughout divides. As a substitute, Onerous Hope invitations other folks to take in the ordinary temper of feeling a way of debt to their neighbors with out liking them. It’s a decision to dig deep, past a way of “shared humanity” to a fair deeper sense of an “unshared otherness” that calls other folks into provider to others.
It’s a thorough type of hope that’s extra about indebted coexistence than enthusiastic camaraderie.
And no longer a unmarried loaf of bread wishes baking or breaking within the procedure.
