Political Dreams and Electoral Nightmares

Hohenschwangau Castle garden, looking at the Alps. Near Fussen, Germany, 2009. Photo by Andrew Donaldson

Nothing really starts a day off like being offered your dream job and having to turn it down, at least for now, all before 7:35 am on a Friday.

To be fair, when it was offered to me the individual pitching it lead off with a variation of “I know you probably can’t but I wouldn’t feel right not at least talking to you about it.” There have been previous collaborations and there are future plans to work together, and the relationship is there to do something big in the future. But I did have to say no, and it did hurt. A lot. I had me a good sad for a while about it. But I made the right decision, and the groundwork for something better, or at least with better timing, is laid out for the future.

Learning to deal with having what you want in front of you and denying yourself that thing is base-level adult behavior. Toddlers struggle with this. Teens struggle with this. When adults struggle with this, their lives and the lives of those around them get messed up and complicated in a hurry.

The politics of the last few weeks have really highlighted how many folks project their dreams and wants on the news cycle as it spins, and how few can restrain themselves from revealing a whole lot of inner bad in their public hot takes.

You don’t get your dream country, community, city, or county in a big, diverse, pluralistic representative democracy. But the lie that you can is being peddled by candidates up and down the ticket. Folks from talking heads, to office holders, to bot/troll accounts endlessly proclaim to this group or that how if only magical – meaning governmental – force was brought to bear to force everyone who is “other” into the box of “just like me” the heavens would open and mana would rain down upon us all.

Such things are a particularly wicked kind of lie, since the base alloy is taking folks’ inner dreams combined with their worst human impulses to forge a nasty shard of intolerance. Complex issues of race, class, identity, patriotism, community, family, all rendered down into a stinking hot mess of self-serving feels, ignorant demands, and universal loathing for anything different than one’s self. Self-restraint goes out the window since with politics, there is always “the other side” to blame and point to as justification for doing what the unrestrained was going to do anyway. But the politics of winning makes behavior otherwise rightly identified as unacceptable righteous, as long as your candidate, your party, your ideology, your tribe, win and put down those horrible them, they, and those over there.

Losing out on what you dream is a hard thing. Losing out on political dreams is even harder as far too many folks have untethered their politics from reality in the ether of social media. Giving up on the dream is hard. But it is necessary for personal growth, modifying what you want to fit the world you live in to be productive within it. It is even more necessary in electoral politics in a representative democracy.

But very few look at it that way. Thus, we have the mess we have. The sickness of political dreams turning into governing nightmares doesn’t have a universal cure, but prevention is always the best medicine. Regulate your own dreams, keep your fantasies away from politics, and maybe don’t let your worst human impulses find space to fester in the political discourse of your life.

There will be other dreams. There will be other elections. In fact, the next election starts the moment this one is done. Do not let a nightmare of self eat you up for the vapor that is a political moment that will quickly pass, lest you damage your one life to live before getting to tomorrow.