“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?”
So Jesus asks of his followers in Mark 8. He has even more ultimate things in mind, but I’d like to borrow the question and its implied answer in the context of US politics and society.
The US loves, worships!, winners in many spheres. Take sports and business culture as just two examples. Unfortunately, the US celebration of the simple narrative of winning and having glorious winners works particularly badly in democratic politics. It’s a terrible foundation for a peaceful, flourishing, pluralistic society.
In a democratic and pluralistic society, the aim of politics is to allow decision making by a majority without silencing or depriving the minority of the fruits of participation, thus allowing both winners and losers in the political process to continue to flourish in society. Such a politics is about a shared outcome, with room for those winning and losing any individual vote. It is the basis for peaceful co-habitation in a varied, polyphonous society.
That goal is simple to state and hard to maintain. Our politics, deformed through decades of culture warring habits has become all about one faction winning and being able to set its own agenda in a maximal way, to the detriment of the other faction(s). Put differently, the goal of US politics has become depriving the non-winning factions of the fruits of participation as much as possible. I think this is a habit of mind to be found both left and right, but the right has become particularly shameless in its pursuit of the maximal win, as witnessed by its habit of ruthless, doubled down vote supression of opposing voters.
As with so many other spheres that are not sports competitions, this vision of winning is utterly corrosive for politics and society. It’s a recipe for ever increasing strife and ever diminishing peace. The phrase ‘no justice, no peace’ expresses this. The less things are just and ordered well for both majority and minority, the more peace recedes and fractures. Winning under this definition may initially feel good, but it quickly converts into a desperate struggle to find more and more symbolic reassurances of supposed winning, even as the reality of actually winning much of anything good ebbs away, both for winner and loser, who instead become entangled in desperate, contemptuous struggle.
To come back to Jesus’s phrase: under this kind of winning, the winner (and losers) stand to lose everything that is good in a polity (its soul). But those who double down on winning maximally can see this loss less and less, because flourishing itself vanishes from their telos more and more, both for the self and the other.
So it is that political winners can seek to gain everything and simultaneously lose everything. In our time, it’s as though God created Donald Trump to make this very point. But after Trump, the toxicity of the winner-take-all approach will endure, unless we start reconceiving of winning as wide, secure, mutual flourishing, not winner-take-all. Under winner-take-all in politics, everyone loses in the end.