This week would be a good one to stop consuming a lot of media.

Like many, I was glued to the internet and TV on Tuesday night to watch the results of the U.S. presidential election. I watched as states that were expected to be easily blue took a while to call, and swing states all turned red. I knew of the effect of the “red mirage” where ballots from larger cities or from mail-ins took longer to count, leaving open the possibility that the races would get closer. But then that didn’t happen, or didn’t happen enough, and eventually the math got to the point where, one after another, those critical states were called and the result of the election could be declared.

Once the suspense was over, I stopped watching TV. On social media, particularly platforms like TikTok, I first saw a lot of videos of people being shocked, or sad, or angry, or happy. Then I started seeing people offering their analysis of why Kamala Harris lost the election.

She wasn’t aggressive enough against the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. She didn’t do enough to court Jewish voters. She was too tied to the Biden administration. She didn’t spend enough time defending the Biden administration. She was too far to the left, alienating centrist voters. She was too centrist, alienating her base. She wasn’t a good communicator. She focused too much on abortion. Blah, blah, blah. All sorts of theories, very little evidence behind them other than gut feelings.

About the only thing everyone seemed to agree on is that she and her campaign failed. It doesn’t matter if she got 47.5% of votes when the other guy got 50.8% of votes.

In a sense, of course, they’re right. He won. She lost. But what bothers me is that we’re focused on 130,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 80,000 in Michigan and 30,000 in Wisconsin, instead of asking questions about the other 150 million or so votes. We’ve become so consumed by the horse race mentality that we ignore the big picture.

On the day after the election, one common sentiment I saw from people I don’t know is that yes, it is perfectly acceptable to paint more than 70 million Americans as racist, sexist, transphobic, horrible people for voting the way they did. It is perfectly acceptable to hate those people.

And in a free country, you are allowed to dislike people for their political views. You can dismiss them or ignore them or call them names.

But you’re not going to change anyone’s mind by hating them. And you’re not going to win elections if you can’t change minds. And you’re not going to change the world if you can’t win elections.

Moving the Overton window

Too many people, in Canada and the United States, believe that the way to enact social change is to get certain politicians or political parties elected, and then get those politicians to force such change on the population.

We’ll definitely see some of that attempted over the next four years in the U.S. And it’s obviously true that different parties will change the direction of a country.

But it’s also true that politicians will always be politicians, and will follow the population. The reason Pierre Poilievre isn’t going to touch abortion isn’t because his base doesn’t want that, it’s because he knows it would be politically unpopular with centrist voters and could prevent him from becoming prime minister. If abortion bans were more popular here, I fully expect his position would be different, or he would have been replaced by another leader who wants to ban abortion. Jagmeet Singh is being vague about the carbon tax, not because he thinks it’s a bad idea economically, but because it’s become unpopular. If Canadians embraced the tax-and-rebate system, you can bet his position would be different.

In the U.S., social change has been driven by politicians, yes, but mainly by the population. Barack Obama was (at least publicly) against gay marriage when it was unpopular, until it became popular and he was for it. Republicans were for free trade and foreign military interventions until a new right-wing populist movement took over that made the ideas of widespread tariffs and protectionism popular. Often it’s the population that drives the politicians more than the other way around.

It’s tempting to blame one person for all of the politics you despise, but one person is powerless without the millions of followers who support them and vote for them. If you want to take away their power, you’re going to have to get those followers to change.

It’s not easy, and the more the world becomes polarized and stuck in their ideological bubbles, the harder it’s going to be. If you don’t have the energy or patience or mental fortitude to do that, I understand, but there isn’t a cheat code to get around that. There are few truly independent voters left out there, and putting all your eggs in the get-out-the-vote effort didn’t work this time.

How to change the world

So what can you do?

You can start by talking to people who disagree with you politically. Make an effort to pierce your ideological bubble and start having good-faith meaningful conversations with people outside it. That means listening to them, even if you think they’ve been brainwashed by lies. It means asking questions, not in an accusatory or gotcha way but as a way of trying to understand why they think the way they do. And it means understanding when they might be right about something, even if you disagree about the cause, effect, importance or meaning of it.

It means questioning what you hear even (and especially) when it supports your world view. It means fact-checking not just the other side but yours as well.

Exit polls show educated people were more likely to vote for Harris in this election. That makes sense when the other side is convinced that higher education is an indoctrination factory. It may be a clue that education is the answer — not necessarily formal higher education, but helping people to learn things about the world in an accessible way, without condescension, without judgment.

There are people trying to do this. One politician I like on the left is Pete Buttigieg, a former Indiana mayor who ran for president and is now (but soon won’t be) the secretary of transportation. He’ll go on Fox News to talk about policy, and engage with people who disagree with him by explaining why he believes what he believes. He doesn’t call people names, or look down on them, or yell at them or dismiss their concerns. He believes in having genuine conversations in which he both talks and listens.

This isn’t an endorsement of him, but I think if more politicians acted like that, on both sides of the political divide, voters would be better informed and we’d have a better chance of better policies being enacted.

The news media’s role

As a journalist with a mainstream publication, one of the things I advocate for is helping people learn things. It can be a minor thing like adding some background or context to a story. It can mean publishing more explainer-type stories (the news media are starting to catch on to this, which is why you’re seeing more stories of that type these days). Like a dog in a squirrel park, we’re easily distracted by the latest development, but it’s worth taking time to give a bigger picture and help people understand the world around them.

Whether you’re on the left or the right, or a conspiracy theorist whose views can’t be put on that spectrum, if you truly believe that your way is the right way, then you should support people having more knowledge generally, whether it comes in a Harvard classroom or a Wikipedia page. That includes exposing yourself to uncomfortable and inconvenient truths.

There are things the news media do that are counter-productive to this educational goal. Giving platforms to partisan political hacks who manipulate information to make their side look good — whether it’s inviting them on TV as talking-head pundits, letting them write columns or opinion pieces in newspapers, producing news stories that simply regurgitate their statements, or even giving them their own shows on the radio.

People want news, they want analysis, but I don’t know of many people who say they want more one-sided opinions in their news diets. Of couse, they do actually want one-sided opinions, because they don’t think those opinions are one-sided. You don’t think someone is biased if you agree with them.

In an age of traditional news media decline, it’s harder and harder to put in the resources necessary to really educate people about the world. Regurgitating press releases from politicians, companies and police is just easier, and often will get more of a response anyway. It’s up to news consumers to demand more from their media, particularly those they pay for, and reward them when they do their jobs.

But the news media can’t fight disinformation and polarization alone. It can’t cure everything that’s wrong with our political system, and the views of tens of millions of people who hate each other. If you really want that to end, if you really want to progress as a society into a world where voting for a president means taking a hard look at the name on the ballot instead of the party affiliation next to it, then you’ll need to put in the hard work of changing people’s minds — and allowing them to change yours.

Hating people is the easy option. It’s the more comforting one. It’s the more popular one, that’ll get you some clout online. But it’s the one least likely to work, especially in the long run.

So make your choice. What would you rather spend the next four years doing?