Should we want the best for MAGA voters?

While chatting with a fellow attendee at a humanist meeting a few years ago, I said something that sparked quick disagreement. Some of my friends were serious Christians, I pointed out, and I had no wish to see them deconvert.

Their faith was important to them, I explained. They practiced it in ways that made them better and happier people. After investing so much in it, losing it would be devastating for them.

“I want the best for them,” I said.

My conversation partner wasn’t having it. Surely, he said, belief in a non-existent God could not be in their best interest. If I wanted the best for them, wouldn’t I want them to know the truth?

Therein lies a conundrum with which I’ve wrestled for a long time—one that was put before the broad public by much-quoted remarks at the Charlie Kirk memorial service in September. You probably know the moment: Erika Kirk citing Christian teaching as she spoke about love for one’s enemies and told the audience she forgave Charlie’s murderer. And Trump, in turn, saying Charlie was like that, too.

"He did not hate his opponents,” Trump said. “He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them.”

It’s a cold slap to hear the president speak of me and my ilk with such contempt. Yet can it be said that we want the best for him, and his supporters? And if so, what does it even mean to want the best for one’s adversaries?

Good answers will go a long way toward determining the future of democracy in this country.

Too much to ask?

Without religion compelling us, why would secular progressives want the best for those on the other side of the political/cultural chasm that is such a defining characteristic of national life today?

Wanting the best for our foes is quixotic at best, we might think. Why grant them a forbearance they generally don’t give us? Worse, it’s easily weaponized. How many times have we heard “I only want the best for them” offered as lame rationalization by those who aggressively proselytize or condemn peoples’ sexual identity while attempting the impossible task of turning gay people straight? Or those who say cutting off public benefits for poor people is “good for them” because it weans them off government dependency and motivates them to find work?

READ: Do secularists need confession and repentance?

Even if we assent to the general idea of “wanting the best for them,” the actual practice might strike us as too much to ask. The political opponents to whom we’d be extending this sympathetic regard might strike us as too undeserving, too stubborn, too unrepentant in their toxic views and rhetoric, too steeped in hatred—totally irredeemable. Think Stephen Miller. The best we can do is defeat them politically, we might think, and get their hands off the levers of power.

I’ve made that last point myself. Several years ago, despite the fact I consider myself a secular follower of the values and teachings of Jesus—including “love your enemies”—I wrote a column for USA Today stating there could be no more futile attempts at compromising with Trump and his political allies. I argued that liberals with across-the-aisle sensibilities “can't afford to continue extending olive branches only to have them shoved back in our faces.”

As I said then and say now, we have to vote them out of power, and vote again and again and again to keep them politically sidelined.

Caring about our rivals

But here’s the thing. We can fight tooth and nail to defeat our opponents politically without writing them off as human beings. We can still care about them in some sense, whether it comes from our idealistic and humane regard for all people, or from our pragmatic realization that a democracy cannot function in a healthy, sustainable way when a large subset of the population is left to rot.

That is what happened to a fairly large degree with neoliberal Democratic leaders and rural and working-class Americans. Hard pressed by global economic changes and feeling abandoned and looked down on by liberals, many working people turned to MAGA for respect and relief from their communities’ and their own real problems. But instead of effective solutions, they have received little more than grist for their carefully cultivated resentment, grievance, and disdain for “the left,” on whom everything bad is blamed. They got their man in the White House, but the actions taken by him and his administration have usually been so crude and impulsive—severe tariffs, interruptions in SNAP benefits, indiscriminate raids by ICE men in masks—that they have tended to do more harm than good for many of the people Trump is supposedly fighting for.

Liberals wanting something better for Trump voters is no naïve capitulation. Addiction, poverty, lack of healthcare and good jobs, the breakdown of civic institutions—solutions to these and other problems afflicting many working-class and rural Americans are not only humane but are, in the long run, good politics and good for democracy.

Obviously, we must be careful. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote recently in theNew York Times that the term “working class” has become “a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns.” I suspect this applies to “rural,” too.

Cottom goes on to say that Democrats emphasizing outreach to working-class voters demonstrate “a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that … Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.”

Don’t write them off

Cottom makes valid points. “Getting along” with one group should not come at the expense of another. The Democrats should not sell out loyal supporters—should not sacrifice their commitment to a just and inclusive America—in an attempt to win over hypothetical new supporters. Just as you and I should not compromise our own core commitments in any interactions we might have with those on the other side of the divide.

But does that mean we just write these people off? I contend no—not politically, not personally.

Rather than “hate” our so-called enemies, we can look out for them and their well-being, operating on the premise that no person, no region, no demographic, is beyond redemption and beyond of our circle of care. We must invite them in if they’re willing to leave their “stars and bars” or the equivalent at the door. We must insist on government policies and practices that are just to all Americans, including those in Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables.

On a personal level, if we interact, stay in touch, and listen to the legitimate parts of our rivals’ stories and concerns, we might even influence them in the long run, as they influence us (gasp!) in our understanding of who they are and where they are coming from with political and cultural stances.

It doesn’t mean we excuse a Nazi tattoo or a Confederate flag, or nod in assent to incoherent conspiracy theories about climate change being a hoax and Democrats stealing the 2020 election. If we “want the best for them,” we want them to be free of toxic falsehoods.

And if we want democracy to have a chance in the decades ahead, we need to understand that no one can be scorned and abandoned. What do we think “deplorables” do when they’re forsaken and normal politics fail them? Quietly acquiesce and crawl under rocks?

A quarter-millennium of American history says they do not—and what they do instead might not be the best for any of us.