Spiritual Lessons of the 2025 Election

Including epistemic humility, complex seeing, multivalence, and engaged equanimity

For anyone left of the American political center, this been the best news week in over a year. There’s no denying the strength of the Democrats’ showing in the elections, and there was even some encouraging news from the Supreme Court, which seems poised to stop at least some of Donald Trump’s authoritarian power grabs.

It has also been a reminder, for me at least, of good old fashioned dharmic virtues like epistemic humility, impermanence, and equanimity.

True, among the hundreds (thousands?) of election takes written this week, I have not seen this particular angle developed. On the contrary, much of the media discourse — conservative, centrist, liberal, progressive — has continued on doing exactly what it had been doing, namely confirming priors, predicting doom (whether from Trump or Mamdani or whomever), and, in this case, pivoting seamlessly from chanting in unison that “Democrats are hopelessly lost” to chanting in unison “Democrats have found their mojo again.” The herd of sheep has simply changed directions.

So here’s an attempt at a different narrative, one which has the benefit of providing (at least to this writer) a useful course correction.

Really, this election result should not be surprising, because it tracks what polls have been telling us for months: that MAGA insanity is deeply unpopular not just with news junkies and leftists, but with, you know, ordinary centrist Americans who aren’t on board with liberal politics but are basically decent human beings focused on kitchen-table issues and not into things like the Gulf of America or the Billionaire Ballroom.

Republicans are all on the Trump train for a variety of reasons, not least fear of retribution from Trump’s friends in conservative media and billionaire-donor circles, and so everyone’s been kissing in the ring. But in so doing, they have managed to do a remarkable two-step dance of self-immolation: massively overreaching on their base’s pet issues, while completely failing to deliver on what voters most wanted the party to do: fix the economy.

The election results illustrate a core principle of electoral politics: that overreach is good for the other side. To reach for an ancient (2023) example, when Ron DeSantis starting banning books and making anti-wokeness the center of his politics, I cheered, because he was way to the right even of many Republicans. Conversely, when Black Lives Matter and MeToo took extreme positions in 2020 and 2021 (‘Abolish the Police’, white people are effectively born racist, there can be zero tolerance not only for sexual misconduct but for contested, debatable gray areas of male behavior), I was nervous. In the heat of it, as I was forced to attend several long DEI ‘trainings’ at my former place of employment, I knew that the backlash would come. And so it did.

Today, of course it is not ‘good’ for ICE to be throwing legal residents of this country into unmarked vans; it is horrible. But it is politically good. Ditto a lot of Project 2025. A majority of Americans do not support this agenda, and it’s not why they voted Trump back into office. And ditto all of Trump’s blustering nonsense, which normal people, including many who voted for him, do not like. Oh, and don’t forget the Epstein Files, which as I’ve written about here before, may not be top of mind for progressives but is absolutely part of the picture here. Promising to unseal the names of powerful pedophiles, then backtracking because Trump is obviously one of them, is a bad look and it matters.

Probably, the GOP could get away with this overreach if they at least tried to bring down the cost of food, housing, and fuel. But they’re running in the opposite direction with dumb tariffs and trickle-down economics. Polling shows that to the extent normal people (i.e. not political junkies) are aware of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, they hate it. The summary assessment of it as “tax breaks for billionaires while taking away food stamps and health insurance” is sticking, it is accurate, and it is a loser for the Right.

On a personal/spiritual/psychological level, I need to relearn the value of political equanimity. Despite its connotations, equanimity — at least in the Buddhist sources that undergird my contemplative practice — doesn’t mean one doesn’t feel emotions like moral disgust, fear, and anger. It means that one can acknowledge them while retaining the ability to sit back and assume a posture of noticing, observing, and remembering rather than merely reacting. For example, Trump’s destruction of USAID is both a humanitarian catastrophe and a political miscalculation that will likely have “positive” political consequences. The National Guard on the streets of American cities is a blow against the democratic order and, most likely, an overreach that is not where American public opinion is.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter, obviously you know that I’m not sanguine in the face of these depredations. Protest is important, trying to break through right-wing media walls is important, and voting is very important. Passion and equanimity are both of value. But if I reflect on my “bad days” from 2025, they are when the scale tipped too much toward doomsaying, certainty, and panic. This week’s news might, I hope, bring a reminder of the value of having both a cooler head and an impassioned heart.

In practice, this may look like oscillation between the two — I didn’t expect this essay on “oscillation as spiritual practice” to be my touchstone this year, but it has turned out to be that. That’s fine. We have moments of immersion and moments of constructive detachment. Or it might look like balance, complex seeing, and multivalence; holding multiple realities at the same moment. How does it look like for you?

R.B. Kitaj, Nerves, Massage, Defeat, Heart (1967)

When I look toward 2026 through these lenses of epistemic humility and complex seeing, I see three major questions.

The first is whether there will be fair elections next year. The issue with next year’s elections isn’t whether the Republicans are popular — they aren’t. It’s whether there will be fair elections at all. Trump’s inner circle have made no secret about their love of Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orban. Well, look at what happens in Hungary. There are elections but they are unwinnable by the opposition. Orban’s people control most of the media and the election apparatus itself. Opponents are depicted as anti-patriotic extremists and, if need be, arrested and silenced. It is very, very hard for opposition politicians to prevail.

Are we prepared for that reality here? I don’t know. And the more convincing the Democrats’ victories are, the more important the GOP’s anti-democratic initiatives become. I remain both worried and pessimistic about the fairness of the 2026 elections. Gerrymandering we know about – but what about ‘election integrity commissions’ who, if they follow Trump’s lead, may disqualify mail-in ballots en masse? What about ICE and the National Guard on the streets near polling places? What about endless lies and rage-bait on Newsmax, OAN, Fox News, The Daily Caller, and CBS News? What if Larry Ellison prevails in his bid to own CNN?

I don’t think we really know. We don’t know that it’s going to be Orban 2.0, we don’t know that it won’t be. This is where, I think, we ought to concentrate most of our attention: in ensuring that this tyranny has an expiration date.

Second, we don’t know which is the right recipe to defeat it at the polls. On the left side of the aisle, there are now two increasingly solidified theories of How To Win: win the center and motivate/enlarge the base. For the last ten years, the Democratic establishment has mostly tried the former. But this year, Zohran Mamdani did the latter and won, which is remarkable. It is indeed surreal that New York City will soon have a socialist mayor with a record of hard-left positions (especially on Israel/Palestine). But this is exactly what Bernie Sanders said could happen: rather than waffle and cozy up to the establishment, candidates should focus on core economic issues, motivate the base, and enlarge that base by attracting anti-establishment independent voters, who are numerous.

I’d love to see the centrists/abundance types have a little more epistemic humility when it comes to Mamdani’s successful application of the Sanders playbook, but many threw their own “vote blue no matter who” slogan out the window when they didn’t like who the who was. Of course, New York City is not Virginia (or even New Jersey), and what works in a liberal blue city may not work in a moderate purple state. So it would be nice to see some humility on the left, too. Basically, I don’t know who is right in this debate, but I think those same virtues — equanimity, analysis, the right kind of detachment — could be really helpful right now.

Finally, the wild card in all this is the Supreme Court, which finally, after the most dispiriting nine months in its recent history, seems ready to limit Trump’s power to unilaterally declare tariffs, which is clearly a congressional rather than presidential power. At oral arguments this week, Justice Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts seemed highly skeptical of what Gorsuch called a “one-way ratchet” increasing presidential power in this way.

Once again, wisdom calls for multivalence. On the one hand, the Court’s “shadow docket” rulings have caused enormous suffering and damage to our constitutional order. On the other hand, Justice Barrett was correct when she said, on Fox News, that these are all interim orders. Maybe, maybe, the Court will side against Trump on some of his most consequential power grabs after all, particularly those justified by bogus “emergencies” that have functioned as an end run around the separation of powers. (They will still destroy the Voting Rights Act and any semblance of respect for transgender people, however.)

Preaching to myself here, and you if you’re reading these words, I want to make a plea for longer-term, less reactive political discourse. Obviously, it’s hard to resist the Roy Cohn/Steve Bannon tactic of flooding the zone with shit every five minutes. There are outrages everywhere. But this week’s election result could inspire us to keep focus on longer term trends and threats, rather than the outrage of the day (or hour). This is a dark and uncertain time, but it is not a story whose end has been written. Many catastrophes that people predict do not in fact come to pass — often because of the hard work we do to prevent them.

Effective, sustainable political engagement requires spiritual practice. Dr. King knew this, Gandhi knew this, and plenty of figures on the Right knew it too, even if they deployed religion in ways I profoundly disagree with. Like everyone I agree with politically, I’m enjoying the post-election glow. We all deserve it. I’m also harvesting some lessons I’m grateful to relearn.

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Thank you for reading and for subscribing. It’s nice to have some good news to write about.

Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week:

• The Big Picture’s summary of Trump’s “emergencies” gambit is really useful reading. It’s one of those pieces to bookmark and refer to later. (I’m still curious who in the administration came up with this tactic).

• My understanding of Trumpian overreach was inspired by Paul Krugman’s analysis of Project 2025 and how it has been rolled out more quickly than planned, with adverse political consequences.

• Jules Evans has written a nonfiction Thomas Pynchon novel about an absurd psychedelic shyster named, Pynchonesequely, Virgil Klunder. I can’t do this piece justice; you’ll just have to read it.

• I’ve read so much verbal garbage about antisemitism, Israel/Palestine, and Judaism lately, I’m sick of the entire subject. However, there has been some very, very good stuff on the subject lately as well: The Battleground’s survey of philosophical analyses of the phenomenon; at Arc magazine, Shaul Magid’s enquiry into what is meant by ‘love of Israel’; and John Ganz’s look at American right-wing antisemitism, which has boiled over in the last week, entitled ‘A Viper in its Bosom.’

Again, thank you for subscribing — I hope you’ll consider spreading the word. I’m happy to say that this project is now financially sustainable and we’ve been rolling out more subscriber-only benefits as a result. Thank you! Keep the faith.