Navigating the "Narrows" on Election Day
Perspective is tough hold onto when stakes are this high
First thing’s first! Scandalized continues to chug along even in the midst of election madness, and these past two weeks have been no exception. Last Monday, Jaci and I dove into the expensive world of insider strock trading in Congress, when it gets problematic, and how (somehow) none of it is against the law.
This week, an absolutely chilling tale about a state attorney general who thought he hit a deer with his car, but actually hit — and killed — one of his constituents.
Now, onto today’s post, which is being written under not-insignificant duress on the eve of Election Day 2024.
You don’t need a long, meandering post with election predictions, right?
I mean sure, I’m a political scientist. For many of you, I’m the only political scientist you know, which is a good thing. Nobody should know more than one political scientist. One per friend group is the ideal.
But I’m assuming that just about anybody who reads this Substack on a regular basis has enough of an interest in politics, and in the outcome of today’s election, that you have already consumed enough election forecasts, hot takes, and deep-dives on why the Ann Selzer Iowa poll is either the harbinger of the apocalypse or a flat-out guarantee that we’re about to elect our first female president.
So instead today: a little meditation on perspective, with comparatively little politics and a good sprinkling of parables and poetry.
In a desperate attempt to get out of my head five days out from the election, I took the dogs on a walk in the Boise foothills this past weekend. I left my phone, and any late breaking developments in the campaign, behind in the car. It was tough to really do that; partly because these hikes usually start out from low ground. You’re climbing, slowly, on a narrow path where you can’t see more than a few feet in front of yourself. It’s important to look down only at your own two feet so you don’t trip and fall, but of course you end up missing out on the impressive sagebrush and other Intermountain-West foliage around you.
Eventually, though, you reach a crest; the trail evens out, and suddenly, after all your painstaking work, you can see for what feels like eternity. The sky, the land, and your eyes open up, and you’ve gone from looking at the world through the smallest possible lens into one that goes for miles in every direction. You stop, you breathe, and you take it in however you can.
These moments are precious, and this one was particularly so.
That’s because I’m currently stuck — as I imagine many of us are right now — in a spot of trouble I like to call The Narrows. Due to world events, personal issues, and everything in between, our attention is gated, blinkered, thrown around with such reckless abandon that we’re all having a little difficulty seeing the forest for the trees, much less the sagebrush. We focus on the small; we limit ourselves strictly to what we can control; and we shrink our perspectives just for the sake of being able to process all that we’ve been given to shove through our ape brains.
Widening your perspective is a tough thing to do in the easiest of times. And unfortunately, the trickiest thing about perspective is that the times when you need it the most are also the times it’s most difficult to grasp. Like the night before a massively important presidential election, which is when I’m writing this post.
I’m finding lately that my thinking is hopelessly narrow. I cling to tiny details, minuscule signs of hope, little things that I can control because they’re within my narrow field of vision, literally or figuratively.
I clean the entire house instead of completing the grant application that could change my life; or maybe I obsess over early voting numbers instead of writing the Substack post I committed to. I crave control over my small individual situation because the stakes for our collective situation — as a country, as a species, as a planet — feel so perilously high that I can’t possibly face what it means to fall short.
I’m a pretty smart guy, so it’s not that I’m lacking the intellect to “focus on what matters,” to take the wider view of things that will serve me and my fellow Americans well in the long term. It’s just that… I’m human.
We all focus on the Narrow in service of not losing our minds, even — or especially — when we really care about the object of focus. This is a coping mechanism we all have, and one that has an uncanny ability to apply itself to a huge variety of situations.
Take, as an example, the pretty major ongoing issue of dwindling biodiversity as a result of climate change and other environmental challenges.
I’ve recently been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent 2002 series of essays, Small Wonder. In one essay, Kingsolver tells the tale of the quickly-dwindling biodiversity on the islands of Hawaii, thanks in no small part to the population of pigs brought over from both Polynesian seafarers centuries ago, and white Europeans in more recent decades. These pigs are adorable I’m sure, but they appear to have decimated the much larger population of birds and other important flora and fauna that help these islands stay in balance. It’s a clearly better holistic solution for some portion of the pigs to be slaughtered in order to save a vastly larger portion of the plant and animal life on the islands. Here’s Kingsolver:
Enter, then, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who set up a remonstration. The Conservancy staff argued that sparing a few dozen pigs would cost thousands of other animal and plant lives and extinguish their kinds forever. They also pointed out that the pigs had come to Hawaii in the first place under a human contract, as a food item. No matter, said PETA; the chain of pig death ends here.
It’s beautiful, in a way; PETA’s monomaniacal dedication to the simple proposition that no animal should be killed, for any reason. But that position is a textbook definition of sickness by way of The Narrows.
As a nearly 8-year vegetarian, I am generally on PETA’s side on these issues; but I am also generally in favor of Hawaii surviving as a people, as an ecosystem, and as a set of land masses. And in order to do that, it sure sounds like we need to lose some pigs. Sorry to those pigs; but we made our mess, and we need to clean it up. We need to steer away from The Narrows and widen our perspective to accomplish the broader goal of biodiversity and animal/plant welfare.
It’s with a heavy heart that I report the tendency of my home country to fall not just headfirst into, but irretrievably deeply into The Narrows when it comes to how we talk about our elections.
We could make an easy phone call to convince some voter in North Carolina to do the right thing, but instead we refresh the polling average to see how all the people we haven’t talked to in that state might possibly be voting. The latter is easier to undertake than the former, because the former is either too uncomfortable to face, or too difficult to rectify. One course is self-indulgent and narrow; the other widens our political reach to others and creates a potential impact on the outcome of the election.
Our news media seems to have the most egregious, non-treatable case of The Narrows. Take Politico, an otherwise sterling publication who over the past few weeks has taken to writing vacuous, insignificant, and virtually unintelligible articles at the end of each day proudly proclaiming “Who won the day? Trump or Harris.” Yesterday’s was particularly rich:
This is an election that will decide the direction of the country on major issues like immigration, the economy, reproductive rights, and (oh by the way) the future as we know it of the only planet we know how to properly live on. Climate change has come up essentially zero times on the campaign trail.
But who won the day? Americans might well lose their lives, their livelihoods, their homes, or their autonomy over their own bodies as a result of this election; and you ask us, rhetorically, “who won the day?” Never has a narrower view of an election been expressed so publicly and shamelessly.
The Narrows clearly prevents us from seeing the broader picture; but it also tends to blind us to the broad sweep of time. In a week where many of us are drowning in mostly-useless election models attempting to forecast the behavior of hundreds of millions of our fellow Americans, it’s easy to lose sight of the broader, downstream ramifications of whatever it is that happens in the next few days.
In thinking about this, I’m reminded of the old parable of the old Chinese farmer:
Long ago, there was a widowed Chinese farmer. The farmer and his only son labored through the cold winds of winter and scorching rays of summer with their last remaining horse. One day, the son didn’t lock the gate of the stable properly, and the horse bolted away.
When neighbors learned what happened, they came to the farmer and said, “What a sadness this is! Without your horse, you’ll be unable to maintain the farm. What a failure that your son did not lock the gate properly! This is a great tragedy!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
The next day, the missing horse returned to the farmer’s stable, bringing along with it six wild horses. The farmer’s son locked the gate of the stable firmly behind all seven horses.
When neighbors learned what happened, they came to the farmer and said, “What happiness this brings! With seven horses, you’ll be able to maintain the farm with three of them and sell the rest for huge profits. What a blessing!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
The next day the farmer’s son was breaking in one of the wild horses. The son got thrown from the horse, fell hard on rocks, and broke his leg.
When neighbors learned what happened, they came to the farmer and said, “What a great sadness this is! Now, you’ll be unable to count on your son’s help. What a failure to break in the horse properly! What a tragedy!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
The next day, a general from the Imperial Chinese Army arrived to conscript all the young men of the village into the army. Their assignment was to fight on the front lines of a battle against a terrifying enemy of overwhelming force. The farmer’s son, because of his broken leg, was not taken.
When neighbors learned what happened, they came to the farmer and said, “What a great joy! Your son avoided facing certain death on the front lines of the battle. What a blessing!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
I love this parable for a multitude of reasons. For one thing, it showcases two of my very favorite human characteristics: humility and uncertainty, the two traits that, in my view, are absolutely crucial for a president to possess; and which, as luck would have it, Donald Trump is constitutionally incapable of exhibiting.
But it’s not just Trump — humility and uncertainty are the two worst qualities of an election pundit of the sort you’re likely to see later this evening. To be a good interview on a cable news show, you need to be incredibly confident and unyielding in your predictions; and you need to be absolutely sure that you’re right. It’s just good television.
The truth, of course, is that both life and politics are complex. The Narrows can serve us well in cable news politics, and maybe even win us a few elections. But if we want a rich life, they aren’t very useful. In these instances, we want to widen our perspective.
Not an easy proposition on the surface. Luckily, we have some tools that we’d be silly to ignore. Poems are my current frontrunner for the best method of perspective-widening. A favorite of mine is “I Live My Life,” a very short but crucial poem from Rainer Maria Rilke, who might be the least traditionally “Narrow” poet I can think of:
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
Rilke’s a genius and has a knack for speaking almost literally divine lyrics.1 But these are very “wide circles” Rilke is talking about. Anyone who’s ever been friends with a philosophy major in college can recognize this kind of language for what it sometimes becomes. “We’re a tiny speck in an infinite universe,” so why even bother trying to do the right thing on Earth? We “circle around God,” so why bother with the smaller stuff?
“Am I a falcon?” No, buddy, you aren’t a falcon, just a poet. Easy, tiger (falcon?).
Take these lines to their logical conclusion, and they can sound an awful lot like an excuse for not participating in the admittedly narrower work of living in a democratic society. Take these infuriating but all too common questions/proclamations I get from some voters sick to death of politics:
“Why get worked up about an election at all?”
“It’s a big world, and time is a long arc, so this really doesn’t matter.”
“Why care about climate change? The earth will survive even if we don’t, and we’re just one planet in an infinite universe.”
“God will save us, why should we even bother?”
We have the earth we have, and the country we have, and the family we have now; who really cares, down the road? Why circle around “get out the vote” efforts when we can just circle around “God” himself?
I understand all of these questions. They are all, also, bullshit designed to be convenient excuses not to actually participate. I often talk to my students about voting, including the fact that — particularly when faced with the monstrosity of the Electoral College — voting can feel like a fruitless act, a symbol only, a useless manufacture designed to make us feel like we’ve participated rather than a true act of participation.
But it just ain’t so. We often think of voting as mattering only if we, individually — Narrowly — can make the difference in the election. In this line of thinking, voting is only a rational behavior if the election is so close that we think there’s a possibility it’ll be decided by a single vote; otherwise, why bother? In truth, the one prediction I feel comfortable about making today is that few to none of the elections on the ballot, and certainly none of the swing states in the presidential election, are likely to come down to one vote.
So what gives? Why do any of us vote?
There are a bunch of explanations, most of which are for another time when I’m way less stressed about the whole concept of voting. But one explanation is that “Narrow” explanations of voting are wholesale crap.
We think of voting as an individual activity, but in the end, it’s not. We vote because we assume others will; we do this together. We know that whoever we pick as our representatives isn’t going to do all of exactly what we want; so we pick alongside others who might make similar choices, and hope our pick does a good enough job of representing all of us together.
In short? Our vote is a Wide action masquerading as a Narrow one. It’s not some uber-personal choice we make that only has implications for ourselves, but rather a collective enterprise we all participate in together. It’s natural to feel relatively powerless with your one vote against the onslaught of others. But with your vote, you are likely surrounded by other voters who think like you, feel like you, and want to make the same change in the world you do. So don’t feel alone when you do it, and don’t even think of not doing it — because, if everyone who felt like you did the same thing, you’d all be pretty well screwed.
And so, on Election Eve, Barbara Kingsolver is a good messenger for a final bit of advice: to make the absolute most of the time we have to make the difference that we can, even in the face of egregious disempowerment. “Political urgencies come and go,” Kingsolver writes; “but it’s a fair enough vocation to strike one match after another against the dark isolation, when spectacular arrogance rules the day and tries to force hope into hiding.”
Place Picks
It’s been awhile since I last offered some Place Picks, and this seems like the right moment to pick the baton back up again. This week, we need distractions, tunes, and pretty pictures to take us to a less Narrow place; so let’s go there.
Music
“Wide Open Spaces” by The Chicks (Spotify/Apple Music)
There’s not much to say here — what else could you need to widen your perspective on love and life? “Who doesn’t know what I’m talkin’ about?”
Photos
I had a close brush with this kind of thinking earlier in the post, but it’s tough to aim for perspective without zooming out so far that the picture you’re looking at it unrecognizable.
That may be true, and our human brains may not be meant to process images like these. But I still can’t get over this heavenly image from the James Webb Space Telescope that was taken on October 23, 2024. “
This star cluster,” NASA reports, “has a similar environment to the kinds of star-forming regions that would have existed in the early Universe,” which helps NASA learn more how specific types of stars called “brown drawfs” form, particularly in an environment similar to the harsh conditions of the early universe.
Talk about perspective.
Maps
Okay, sorry, I am going to share a map and a link that I’ve found useful and will continue to find useful on Election Day, since I know many of you will be following it.
First and foremost, the big amazing clock map that tells us when the polls close in each state/parts of the state:
And to go along with it, here’s the FiveThirtyEight.com Guide for when we can expect votes to come in. Look for key counties in Florida and Virginia as early bellwethers, even though the states themselves aren’t all that competitive. When in doubt, trust that adorable nerd Steve Kornacki.
Few poets have been better at “talking to God”, a topic we’ll be returning to later
Gratitude for your sharing and for all you do.