In Victory, No Grace

Remember Haley Stevens?  The very Democratic Michigan member of the House that challenged for the Senate seat only to be defeated by El-Sayed in the primary.  Then, at the last minute, she endorsed El-Sayed’s Republican opponent Mike Rogers in the general – to insane levels of consternation from her “fellow” Democrats.  Well, now that Congress is back in session and she has a few weeks left in her House seat, she is hanging with the Republicans.  Of course she is, after the denouncement she received for her endorsement of Rogers, what choice does she have?  And therein lies the problem.

Earlier this week, David Strom at HotAir wrote, “Rather than looking at policy questions rationally, everything gets boiled down to cartoonish caricatures with angels, devils, and knights in shining armor fighting it out.”  He is certainly right about the lack of rationality – and he is kind of right about the caricature thing, but I really think it is about labels.  Angels and devils are real – labels are simply assigned.  That said, it is definitely reduced to good guys vs bad guys once the label is affixed.  Haley Stevens became a bad guy and that is all there is to it.

More evidence?  Jimmy Kimmel can’t believe Arnold Schwarzenegger still “identifies” as Republican, even though the Governator severely disagrees with the president.  In Kimmel-world “Republican” is bad guy and if you oppose the president you must be a good guy.  His labels aren’t holding so his mind cannot compute.  And speaking of the president, well, he seems incapable of distinguishing between the person and the label – regardless of the cost of that inability.  Labels, it would seem, “are everything” to borrow a modern idiom that is apparently more literal than idiomatic any more.

Perhaps this state of affairs is the result of the information age.  Too much information forces us to create categories for storing it there are only so many categories we can maintain so they get bigger and broader.  Or maybe it’s that information and people are placed by the information machine into silos and we tend to look at only a few silos, choosing to say anything outside the silos we care about is “bad.”  Maybe it’s about the fact that Obama made everything about labels – creating barriers he was supposed to represent the destruction of.  Probably we’re just sinners.

The point is this – life is complicated,  Labels are meant to simplify it, but they are not always helpful.  “Good guys” and “bad guys” are barely useful labels anymore, even in our fictions.  Batman now partners with the Joker, today’s wrestling heel is tomorrow’s babyface and Godzilla Minus Zero is a hero while Godzilla Minus One is a destructive force.  And yet in our politics, in something that actually matters, we cling to those labels like life itself.  We think our fiction sophisticated when it blurs such lines – more reflective of real life, yet when absent in our fiction, we draw them ever harder in reality.  I think we are better off with hard labels in our fiction and flexibility in our reality.

One thing I know, we have to give up confusing our labels and people.  Haley Stevens made a choice.  Agree or disagree, that choice does not permanently place her into one category or the other – unless you are an ungracious simpleton.  You would think given the overwhelming nature of the Democrat victory in the elections just concluded, they might find a bit of grace for her – but such does not appear to be the case.  And so, while a lot of Democrats I know are condemning the president for things he said on “60 Minutes” last weekend, they seem to be guilty of the same sort of thinking.

Probably we are all just sinners.  Politics cannot carry us past that. Something else is needed.  Jesus is needed.