I read this fascinating profile this morning about Mary Peltola, the Democrat running for the United States Senate in Alaska.
And what struck me wasn’t whether I agreed with her.
It was how difficult she was to describe.
She’s a Democrat.
She’s pro-gun.
She’s pro-oil.
She’s pro-gas.
She’s also pro-environment.
And she’s really, really pro-fish.
The article calls her politics complicated.
And I thought:
Are they?
Because I’ve spent the last several months talking to more than a hundred strangers, and I’m starting to think Mary Peltola isn’t particularly complicated.
She’s human.
And human beings don’t fit into political boxes nearly as neatly as we’ve been pretending they do.
That’s what my hundred conversations have taught me.
We love labels in America.
Republican.
Democrat.
Liberal.
Conservative.
MAGA.
Progressive.
Boomer.
Gen Z.
Urban.
Rural.
Black.
White.
Rich.
Poor.
We slap one of those labels on somebody and suddenly we think we’ve got them figured out.
But then you actually sit down and talk to them.
And something funny happens.
The label starts falling apart.
I think of people as onions now.
You’ve got to peel back the damn onion.
The first layer says Republican.
Okay.
Peel it back.
He owns guns.
Peel it back.
He’s worried about healthcare.
Peel it back.
His daughter can’t afford a house.
Peel it back.
He’s worried that he doesn’t have enough money to retire.
Keep going.
Eventually you’re not talking to a Republican anymore.
You’re talking to a father who’s worried about his family.
Now talk to the Democrat.
She cares deeply about climate change.
Peel it back.
She’s worried about crime.
Peel it back.
She’s worried about grocery prices.
Peel it back.
She’s wondering whether her son is going to find a decent job.
Keep going.
Eventually you’re not talking to a Democrat anymore.
You’re talking to a mother who’s worried about her family.
Now, those two people might disagree like hell politically.
That’s important.
They might disagree about guns, abortion, immigration, taxes, energy, healthcare and what government should or shouldn’t do.
I’m not saying those differences aren’t real.
I’m saying they’re not the whole person.
And that’s what I saw in this story about Mary Peltola.
Her positions don’t come out of some ideological vending machine.
They come out of her life.
She’s Yup’ik.
She grew up around the Kuskokwim River.
She grew up fishing.
She worked on boats.
She cleaned, dried and smoked salmon.
She has watched the salmon population decline and watched restrictions change a way of life that families in that part of Alaska have practiced for generations.
So when somebody tells me she’s pro-development and pro-environment, pro-oil and pro-fish, I don’t immediately see a contradiction.
I see somebody whose politics grew out of an actual life.
And isn’t that true of most of us?
We don’t arrive on Earth with a Democratic platform in one hand and a Republican platform in the other.
Our beliefs grow out of where we came from.
Our parents.
Our jobs.
Our neighborhoods.
Our successes.
Our failures.
Our fears.
The people we’ve loved.
The people we’ve lost.
The things that happened to us when nobody else was watching.
And that’s what I’ve been discovering one stranger at a time.
Ask somebody who they voted for and you get a political answer.
Ask them what they’re worried about and you get a human answer.
Can I afford my house?
Is my neighborhood safe?
Can I get a decent job?
Can I afford healthcare?
Are my kids going to be okay?
Will I ever be able to retire?
Is somebody going to take care of my mother?
Will my children have a better life than I did?
That’s the America I’ve been meeting.
And maybe that’s what this profile of Mary Peltola is really showing us.
Maybe she isn’t some strange political creature unique to Alaska.
Maybe she’s an unusually visible example of something that’s true about millions of Americans:
We’re complicated.
We can believe two things at the same time.
We can care about the environment and care about jobs.
We can care about public safety and civil liberties.
We can own a gun and want fewer shootings.
We can believe in capitalism and still think people shouldn’t go bankrupt because they got sick.
Human beings aren’t platforms.
They’re people.
And here’s where my hundred conversations have taken me.
I think we’re spending too much time asking Americans:
“Which side are you on?”
Maybe we need to start asking:
“What kind of life are you trying to build?”
Forget politics for five minutes.
What does a good life look like?
I suspect we’d hear some remarkably familiar answers.
A safe home.
A safe neighborhood.
A decent job.
Healthcare.
Good schools.
Food on the table.
A little money in the bank.
People who love you.
Something meaningful to do.
And the belief that your children might have a better future than you did.
Then comes politics.
Because we absolutely will disagree about how to get there.
That’s democracy.
But there’s an enormous difference between saying:
“You are my enemy.”
and saying:
“We want some of the same things, but we disagree about how to achieve them.”
That second conversation has somewhere to go.
And maybe that’s why talking to strangers has become so important to me.
Because every time I talk to somebody I’m supposedly different from, I start peeling.
One layer.
Another layer.
Another layer.
And eventually something familiar appears.
Not a Republican.
Not a Democrat.
Not a Boomer.
Not Gen Z.
Not a demographic.
A person.
Trying to make it through this crazy fucking life.
Just like me.
Just like you.
So maybe Mary Peltola isn’t the exception.
Maybe she’s the clue.
Maybe America isn’t nearly as neatly divided into two kinds of people as our politics, our television screens and our social-media feeds would have us believe.
Maybe we’re millions of complicated human beings carrying around millions of different combinations of beliefs.
And maybe the way we rediscover that isn’t complicated at all.
Find somebody you don’t know.
Sit down.
Ask a question.
Peel back the onion.
And listen.
Because underneath all those labels, you just might discover something extraordinary.
Us.
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