Politics is about the issues and not about party loyalty—or it should be. In the following I will explain how this relates to questions of democracy and humility, and how this is relevant in today’s rather caustic political atmosphere.
I. Personal Experiences with Local Politics
I’m living in the United States and caught in this battle between red Republican and blue Democrat. When I became a citizen, I chose to be an independent. Here’s why.
Back in Germany when I was still a student, I was in local politics. I was in a political party that I felt represented more or less my positions. The key is always you don’t have to be happy with everything, but you just need to feel like they do more of what I like than what I don’t like.
When you’re in local politics, you figure out there’s a lot of stupidity in the world. There’s a lot of things that happen that are annoying and a lot of things you don’t understand why they happen. And often times it has to do with a focus on party loyalty over actual issues, over actually listening to the people.
And so I left politics. I focused on my studies. I left the political party too. And back in Germany, I have voted for different parties each election depending on the issues.
I have never voted for extremists. I’m not voting for socialists or communists, which is actually something I think about. I grew up in East Germany, which was a socialist country that called itself socialist. The main party was a socialist unity party and was on a path to communism — where Communism is the goal; Socialism is the path. The opposite to socialism is social democracy, which is what communists have been fighting against over and over again because social democrats believe in reform—in steady work towards improving life for people—where socialism is a path towards an imagined progressive future that ends up communist. At least that’s the theory I grew up in. I studied it, I lived it, and I didn’t like it.
We use different terms in the US, sometimes at our peril, because immigrants like me who don’t necessarily teach political science don’t understand the nuance. But that’s a different thing.
I’ve never voted for any right-wing extremists either. I don’t like Nazism, obviously. Well, maybe not obviously always. We are seeing sort of a revival of such ideas, disturbingly. I don’t like parties who are overly reactionary. I have no problem with conservatives, but I think there’s a difference between conservative and reactionary, just like I think there’s a difference between leftist and progressive. So I am in the center, hopefully. It’s the worst position to ever have because you annoy everybody. But I do this channel here not to please everybody. I do it to annoy everybody into thinking, as much as I annoy myself sometimes.
When you learn that your own side may have most ideas that you like, but there are some ideas you don’t like, and that the other side may have good ideas too, hopefully that teaches you humility. Hopefully that teaches you that the thinking in either-or is wrong. And if you’re American, you think the European party systems are so much better—think again, because even there everything coalesces in coalitions into two sides anyway. So you always have kind of a more conservative-ish side versus a kind of more social democratic-ish side. You have the socialists and the fascists in the opposition recently always. But in the end, it’s about who has power, who needs to actually work with people, and who doesn’t have power.
The American two-party system in this sense is frustrating because you don’t get to choose that many nuances. You don’t have, let’s say, the alternative between Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Greens, Liberal Democrats on the centrist-ish spectrum. Well, Social Democrats more left, Christian Democrats more right, but all goes for the center. That’s for Germany, but the pattern you have in many other countries too.
But the American system used to allow for an understanding that the party is not always an exercise in loyalty, but more like a platform. And there can be Democrats that are more conservative and Republicans that are more social democratic. And the parties used to not stand like this—they used to overlap. I mean, you can look at political theory, you can look at data like that, but that’s how it used to be. And now everybody feels like they have to pull apart more visibly to not offend their base.
But this thinking about party loyalty is limiting, which is why I consider myself an independent and nonpartisan—and again, it’s a very annoying position to some.
II. Democratic Party Challenges
Now, I have noticed that the Democratic party—and I’m not speaking here as a Democrat because I’m not, I’m speaking here just taking that perspective and having talked and listened to and heard a lot of Democrats speaking recently—they seem not to have understood why they have lost. They still don’t seem to understand. And I am noticing a tendency that when the midterm elections happen next year, the Democratic party is basing their assumed success on the fact that Donald Trump is so toxic and so dangerous and so unhelpful to the success of the US that many people will come around by then, and then maybe the damage by tariffs and other things will have settled in.
I wouldn’t count on that. I would not count on that. First of all, it’s a cynical ploy. You’re basically betting on the suffering of people, tricking them into voting for you. That can backfire because there are actual ideologues on the other side that will not listen to you because they just don’t like your politics. And no matter how much damage there is, if there’s damage, they won’t listen to you either.
There’s this famous book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” written from the perspective that voters frequently vote against their own interests. But here’s an assumption made about what these interests are. Under the political left, there’s a certain feeling that the material interests of people—whether they have enough money, whether they have enough healthcare, whether they have all kinds of these measurable things—that these things are the rational basis on which to vote. There’s some truth to that.
However, a lot of people vote for what they would call values. Some people say, “No, I’m not going to vote for this or this policy because it goes against my values.” These values may not be measurable. They may not be, to other people, rational, but they are no less real. And who knows what’s rational or not. Sometimes your deepest convictions don’t need rational explanation. And sometimes what we call irrational may be rational on another level. It’s not my job to figure out what people feel deeply down and whether it’s rational. If I’m a politician, which I gladly am not, it is my job to figure out what the people want.
III. Gerrymandering and Cancel Culture
We see a focus on strategies, and I just watched something today about gerrymandering. Gerrymandering means to shape your voting district based on whether you believe all those people now demographically are in a group that will support your party. It’s a travesty of democracy, and it’s done by both Democrats and Republicans. If Republicans do it, Democrats complain. If Democrats do it, Republicans complain. But everybody plays this cynical game.
It is based, however, on this idea that people are their demographic block—that if you’re white or black or whatever, you’ll vote a certain way. If you’ve voted Democrat or Republican in the past, you’ll vote a certain way in the future. I would see this more critically. I wish there was no gerrymandering, but there will always be gerrymandering. There’s gerrymandering going on also in Germany and other countries. I use Germany as an example because that’s where I’m originally from.
Then we have cancel culture—the demonization of other people’s views and the punishing of these people, whether directly or indirectly, whether through legal measures, through banning or through shunning or through whatever, sending hordes of online accounts against them. This is happening again both on the Democratic and the Republican side.
Neither gerrymandering nor cancel culture is helpful, and neither will work, because what Trump showed is he was able to capture votes from former Democrat voters. The Democratic party has not understood that yet. It has not understood, in my view, that there were people who were willing to vote for Obama and now for Trump.
If you don’t understand that this has been possible, then there’s some learning needed. There’s a number of African-Americans, mostly young people, who are voting for Trump, who are abandoning the Democratic party because they feel the Democratic Party has too much of a condescending position towards them, seeing them as living always as victims. Many people don’t want to be victims. Maybe that’s one of the themes between Democrats and Republicans: Are you comfortable seeing yourself as a victim, or are you just ignoring that narrative and want to proceed anyway?
IV. Why Trump Captured Democratic Voters
Why has Trump been able to capture Democratic voters? Well, there are certain policies that people have seen as more important than what the Democrats have been doing. It may also have to do with Joe Biden, with Kamala, but I don’t think it’s candidate-based.
We see that the Democrats have doubled down on issues that are dividing the population more than they should unite them. I believe that the pro-Palestine against Israel focus is a mistake. I have no problem if you’re pro-Palestine and pro-Israel and against Hamas—that’s my position. Again, maybe a complicated position to some, but the way that Israel has been demonized is disturbing. It doesn’t mean you have to like what the government of Israel is doing. Many Israelis don’t. But the breadth of support for what Hamas stands for is frightening people. It’s also rallying some other people. But the question is: who’s in the majority? How do you win elections with this?
And I must say I have no problem in principle with DEI. I believe we need to realize people in their diversity. I believe we need to give them an equality of opportunity while also taking care that their starting positions are a little bit better. This is what equity actually is. It’s not equality of outcomes. It’s equality of opportunity plus. A child from a poor neighborhood with worse education will have less of a chance to succeed than a child from a more affluent neighborhood with good education, and you just need to give the kid with less good starting positions a little bit of a boost in order to be able to compete equally. I don’t believe in equality of outcomes. That’s a fool’s errand.
And I also believe we need to truly include everybody’s voice—everybody’s voice. We can’t exclude people based on whether we like them or not.
V. Sidelining and Exclusion
I’ve also noticed a peculiar tendency. If you believe in diversity, you also have to care about every single human being. You also realize there’s such a thing as neurodiversity. The attacks against some people from industry and politics that have displayed some neurodiverse tendencies have been shocking to me. Where is the empathy here? Where is the realization that some people’s communication styles are simply different than others? I’m not naming names here because I don’t know.
We’ve seen mainstream Democrats sideline others — we are seeing it happening to John Fetterman right now. Fetterman tries to be a classic centrist Democratic politician. He is believing in being what in German we would call supporting the state. No matter what your politics are, you make sure the system keeps working because if it breaks down, everybody is going to be worse for it. So no matter your political differences, you make sure the wheels are running. You may adjust where they’re running a little bit. You may make sure they’re running a little bit better, but you never endanger the system.
I mean, not completely. You may want to have it change, but you do it gradually. So here you see again why I’m not for extremism.
But you’ve had politicians like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who were Democratic politicians winning in red states. What happened to them? They were driven away. They were sidelined. They were ostracized, even though they had found the strategy to listen to and talk to people that were not Democratic Party voters naturally.
So if we think that we can ignore what people want and just say, “Well, but I believe in what’s right and that’s what I’m pushing through,” that is always a losing principle.
VI. Republican Party Challenges
On the other side, we see that too. There are plenty of people who now say, “Well, I don’t like illegal immigration. I want all those undocumented people gone.” But no, not all of them, but the criminals because I don’t want these people. But if we have people here that are in the communities doing the work that needs to be done, I’m fine with that.
More and more people are realizing that you need a scalpel, not whatever other blunt instrument I can think of right now. You need to actually go after people who are posing a danger to the community and who have come unvetted, who have come illegally and are now undocumented. But you cannot think that the future of America as a country of immigrants, given the very selective immigration system we still have, can do without immigrants, whether legal or illegal, documented or undocumented. And I don’t like these language games either. Just call it as it is.
You’re seeing this as a challenge on the Republican side right now. But extremism is never a solution. If we choose purity and ideology over common sense, we are not listening.
Again, I am not a partisan. I am pro-democracy. I’m a centrist. All I’m saying here is focus on what the voters want—all voters, not just your base.
VII. Understanding Trump’s Appeal
I’m still seeing a lot of videos of people switching to Trump. Why is that? Because they care about certain issues.
Thus if you want to win against Trump, do not treat Trump as an idiot. I don’t know Donald Trump. I can’t say anything. I don’t know. But he clearly has had a winning strategy. So don’t ignore it.
Trumpism is attractive to many, whether you like it or not, whether you understand it or not. If you don’t understand it, find out what you can learn from it and do not just pretend to not understand. I’ve heard from people who say, “Well, you know, maybe something’s wrong in their head.” That’s not how you win over voters.
Don’t go to people and say, “Well, tell me why you could vote for such a horrible person.” Well, that already predisposes people against you. And it doesn’t allow you to understand actually why people would say, “I don’t like Trump per se. I don’t like what he says. I don’t like some of the things he’s done, but look at the other side. Look at my issues being represented by Trump, more or less.” That’s what people say.
And people are very able to vote for a candidate they don’t like if the candidate does something on the issues they want done. So listen to the people who you do not typically listen to. They may open your eyes. It’s not a comfortable experience, I can tell you that.
VIII. Governing Lessons
And if the midterms turn out bad for Democrats again, you cannot govern against the people. And I’m sincerely hoping that Trump is slowly learning this lesson. And he seems to have learned some of that lesson already on Ukraine and NATO. And he may learn it on immigration. He comes from the casino and hotel and real estate industry. He knows that the country would fall apart without undocumented labor.
Do I see the Democrats learning? Again, I’m not a partisan. I’m just making an argument here. I’m not seeing them learning this lesson that you need to think about—even if you think something is right, you need to think about how to communicate that successfully, but you also need to think about maybe you’re wrong. Maybe the people that disagree with you know something too. Maybe their worries should worry you too. Maybe their concerns should concern you.
This is not a world of right and wrong always. In some cases it is, but in a democracy, the guiding rule is or should be humility.
IX. Democracy as Humility
This is the—if there’s anything I can reduce democracy to because that really is the theme of the channel: What is democracy? It is humility.
Democracy is an erratic attempt to solve the problem of sustainable, stable government. And it’s based on the idea that you might be wrong and the others might be right, and that for a few years you may have to tolerate, even embrace, the rule of the others over the rule of yours, and that maybe we need to overcome this tribalism.
This is why we have a separation of powers, checks and balances—for the principle of humility.
So we all need to be humble, and we all need to understand what the other side is thinking. And maybe we’ll find out in the process of these exercises that there is no other side. There’s only all of us, and we’re all trying to survive.
In conclusion, if you care about democracy, you need to care about all the people and their issues—all of them, not just what you think your base is.
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 