In Politics, Being Right Should Not Be Enough

Steven P. Millies
4 min readApr 12, 2020

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Bernie Sander’s Disappointed Supporters Would Do America a Favor If They Would Learn That Quickly

Freedom is hard.

This is not an academic point. Freedom means accepting not just that we disagree, but that others are wrong. And, it means accepting that if others are as free as we are, and they are wrong, we will not get what we want and often we will get what is bad.

Making this argument to my fellow Catholics has been my Sisyphean vocation for 30 years. Yes, I tell them, I agree that abortion is morally evil. But our nation of laws and our constitutional freedom has no place for that until we convince other people to agree with us. If we are free to be right, others must be as free to be wrong and politics is where we try to persuade one another.

Now I find myself making the same argument to Bernie Sanders’s disappointed supporters. Yes, there are deep, structural injustices in American life. But with apologies to Elizabeth Bruenig who wrote a strage paean to Bernie Sanders recently for the New York Times, “being right about virtually everything” is really quite unimportant. In fact, it is beside the point. Actually worse, thinking this way is dangerous to freedom and human dignity. It tempts us toward otherizing one another, encamping against one another because we are right and they are wrong. It feeds our polarization, fuels conflict. And, as the last several years have demonstrated, that prevents us from accomplishing much of anything. We fail to to address injustices at all.

If we take “broad human dignity” to be the vital political goal that Ms. Bruenig, Sen. Sanders, and I agree that it is, then it seems important to recognize that the Trump supporter and the Wall Street trader have must be as free to be wrong as we are free to be right. So, now what comes next?

Allow me to put it another way.

Ms. Bruenig offers this somewhat harsh assessment of the Biden campaign —

And as Joe Biden prepares to mount a general election campaign based largely on the fantasy of going back to normal (meaning the Obama years), Mr. Sanders remains critical of life under the past administration. He contends that the bailouts bestowed upon Wall Street by the federal government during the 2008 financial crisis were a disaster that rewarded financial malefactors and that the fallout of the recession continues to crush average Americans under debt, poverty and stagnant wages.

I share some disappointment about the Obama Administration. But I have questions.

Would you prefer an administration that achieved disappointing compromises, failing to extend universal health coverage but still improving access to healthcare for millions of Americans? Or, would you prefer a candidate who was “right about virtually everything” but failed to persuade a majority to do anything?

Would you prefer an administration that failed to punish the greedy wrongdoers on Wall Street and did not effect real financial reform but did shallow the recession despite fervent, obstinate congressional opposition? Or, would you prefer to stand on the sidelines and call out the crushing debt, poverty, and stagnant wages while achieving not even a compromise to mitigate them?

These are not false dilemmas. These are the real dilemmas of political life. And, as much as the most ardent pro-life voter, Bernie Sanders’s supporters seem to be strangers to them. Despite their sincere belief in human dignity — a belief as sincere as any voter’s who is singularly focused on ending abortion — Bernie Nation cannot appear to fathom that others possess so much dignity and freedom that their being wrong can matter.

They know they are right. They cannot understand why being right is not enough.

Being right is not enough because other people need to be persuaded, not told. Free citizens must be convinced, not brushed aside. Right arguments win in increments, not all at once. And, politics is the forum where this happens. Politics is about slow, frustrating, awful progress that is so slow it does not look like progress at all.

The danger inherent in Bernie’s supporters’ disappointment is that they have an opportunity today. We all do.

In four short weeks, COVID-19 has shifted the center of American politics and made things seem possible that seemed like Bernie’s idlest daydreams only two months ago — student loan payments have been waived for six months, a Republican president has floated the idea of direct federal payments for COVID healthcare, and a universal basic income now is under serious discussion. The opportunity is here for real, incredible progress.

Will Bernie’s supporters accept a little at a time, organize and work to continue persuading their fellow citizens to achieve even more? Or will they sit stubbornly at the extreme of the Democratic Party, pulling it farther from the center as pro-life voters have done with the Republicans?

The right thing seems plain enough, at least to me.

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Steven P. Millies
Steven P. Millies

Written by Steven P. Millies

Steven P. Millies is professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

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