A Left Wing Cannot Flap Alone, Which Is Why We Needed Dick Cheney's Endorsement

[Geno]

Ultimately, my anger is better spent on the candidates actually running than the voters, or I'd be raging against Trump voters all day, and that's not going to get anything done either.

The political content you choose to consume is designed to keep you angry and engaged. Would you say that this benefits you, personally, at all? 

The thing I said about my dad a while back, the heart of the matter is that he has always been addicted to right wing politics, and it's 100 times worse now that he is retired. It has overwritten both his brain and his heart. All he does, all day, is scroll social media, consuming endless amounts of bullshit, and never questioning any of it. He legitimately hates my wife because she doesn't like Trump. 

That's not just a right wing thing, though. There are no shortage of left-leaning people who do exactly the same thing, consuming endless propaganda and casually spreading it around, because it sounds right to you, and you already agree with it (which is why you're seeing it in the first place). They rarely go out and interact with anyone who isn't aligned with them ideologically, and after long enough, it's pretty easy to believe that your alignment is one half of a binary, and anyone not in your half is actively making everything worse, on purpose, because they hate you. 

My dad is a devoted red hat, Trump means more to him than his family. There is never any hope of getting through to people like him. But, he is not representative of the average person who voted for Donald Trump. There are millions of those kinds of people, who made their choice for their own reasons, and none of them had anything to do with ideology. Being attacked and demeaned for the choice they made is a big part of what makes them ideological, and to identify personally with these amoral monsters currently steering the ship. I think it's more important now than ever, to do the tough thing, and make an effort to reach out to those willing to hear you, because the only two sides there really are, are normal people, and the amoral monsters. The monsters require normal people to enable them. Oh, and they absolutely exist on both sides, too. Just because our general belief system is based nominally on equality and empathy, does not mean powerful people won't exploit this for their own ends. 

Hence, no more ideology for me.

Unfortunately, ideology is inescapable.  Even saying "no more ideology" is itself an ideology.  I completely understand not wanting to soak in nothing but talking points from rage baiting videos, which absolutely exist on the left side by unscrupulous sorts trying to feed on anger and nothing else.

So don't take me pointing out that I want to "spend" my anger on particular targets as a suggestion I only care about anger.  It's an emotion worth having, but there's a lot to focus on.  At the moment, my strongest emotion is desperation, and I'm well aware that too can be easily manipulated.  The biggest danger, right now, is hero worship or taking the side of powerful figures offering all the answers.  I get my focus realigned a bit thanks to certain commentators who are focused more on putting things in perspective than outrage, and as far as news consumption... well PBS Newshour has been my news source of choice for a while now because they actually ARE just straight reporting, unlike a lot of raw commentary that permeates Youtube and the like these days.

I focus on individual issues when I can.  I know what label I ascribe myself, but my first concern isn't "does this fit my label?", it's "does this fit my issues?".  That's why I can easily criticize even candidates I intend to vote for, because actual issues matter to me more than partisanship.

But, I can't just stop caring either.  I want to get involved more and more in a real and effective way, and I've been seriously considering getting into local politics.  I just don't know where to start.

If I ascribe to an ideology, I just try to remember that it's descriptive, not prescriptive. I find prescriptive ideologies lead to rigid thinking--for instance, the most textbook of libertarians (not all are this inflexible, mind you) have this binary view of "public sector bad, private sector good," as if the private sector doesn't poison our drinking water on the regular and wouldn't still employ child labor if permitted to do so. That doesn't mean I think the exact opposite is true, either. The same government that endorsed slavery for almost nine decades later ended slavery. The same government that created Jim Crow laws later outlawed Jim Crow laws. The same government that gave women bodily autonomy later ripped that autonomy away. And yes, private organizations sometimes do some good as well. In the end, governments and businesses are run by humans, humans are fallible, and we need to hold those people accountable and try not to put power into the hands of the worst of our kind (easier said than done, of course).

I call myself progressive because the idea of progress--of doing better--resonates with me. To me, the term is, by definition, flexible--the willingness to change my mind about what I once believed in the face of new evidence in an ever-changing world. That doesn't always translate into practice, of course; progressives can be as rigid in their thinking as anyone else. I also know some people on "the left" with whom this idea of "progress" does not resonate, especially coming from the mouth of someone like me, a (barely) middle-class straight cis white man who may not always be in touch with the suffering of those on the margins. When they hear a white person say "progress," what they hear is "equal rights eventually, but not yet--here are some crumbs in the meantime, and maybe life will be less terrible for your children and grandchildren."