A few days ago I was having a conversation with a group of people on the other side of the political spectrum—people who voted for Trump and whose ideology skates precariously close to what I would call “conspiracy theorists”. But something happened in our conversation when we met face to face and put in effort to steer ourselves away from the hot button issues that set us off online. When we were free of the digital rage of social media, we instead looked for common ground. It turned out that while there will likely always be a gap in our worldviews, we agreed that billionaires and oligarchs were making America a lot less great every single day.
Just about everyone in America ends up voting for a democrat or a republican during elections. Swing voters barely exist anymore. The divide seems intractable until you actually talk to someone about their political beliefs and they offer up a much more nuanced picture. Liberals lament how the democratic party is basically the same as the republican party from the 1990s. Republicans generally admit that Trump is a liar, and morally bankrupt, but they think he’s still better than any democrat.
Maybe the problem isn’t just that we have bad candidates (and a limiting two party system), but that we are unable to even articulate what a more reasonable political spectrum would look like. We end up lumping ourselves in with the most radical fringes of our caucus. When the choice is binary you have to fall into one camp or another.
So here’s why I propose. Instead of left and right, let’s acknowledge another dynamic—up and down.
Uppists are the billionaires, oligarchs and their allies whose sole ideology seems to be to accumulate more power and wealth. Everyone else who realizes that the game is rigged against them is a downist.
Or to put it in a slightly more emotionally charged and far less nuanced way:
If the radical left are Marxists, and the far right are fascists. Then the uppists are the oligarchs and the downists are the masses. Since I doubt very many of you are billionaires, you’re probably with me in the downist camp.
I consider myself Down Left: I am socially liberal—in favor of universal health care, universal basic income and sensible environmental regulations. But I can also appreciate someone on the Down Right who believes in individual freedoms, free speech, government deregulation, religious freedom and self-defense so long as they agree that centralizing power in the hands of billionaires won’t make them more free.
I bet you can find yourself on this spectrum as well. So from now on, when someone asks me where I land on political issues, I’m going to tell them that I’m always ready to get down.
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