Voting As an Act of Moral Imagination

If re-elected president, Donald Trump plans to deport millions of people from the United States. It takes a certain kind of moral imagination to understand the scope and consequences of this plan — and to vote against Trump solely on this basis.

A voter possessing such imagination understands that neighbors who don’t have green cards or U.S. birth certificates are fellow human beings, not criminals, gang members, or individuals “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Such a voter can envision the suffering of millions of people if the plan were to be carried out: the immense, avoidable pain of those deported – as well as that of their families, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

From the standpoint of economic impacts alone, the deportation scheme defies reason. According to a recent study by the nonpartisan American Immigration Council, deporting upwards of 11-13 million people will cost hundreds of billions in arrests, detention, legal processing, and removals, and it would mean the additional loss of billions in tax revenues, including contributions to Social Security and Medicare. It would result in “labor shocks” to industries reliant on undocumented workers: agriculture, construction, and hospitality. And it would represent, overall, a reduction in annual GDP of between 4.2 percent and 6.8 percent, losses potentially greater than that of the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

To suppress the voices of reason, Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance deploy the ancient strategy of scapegoating: painting the immigrant as the source of all grievances, whether those grievances involve high housing costs, a lack of well-paying jobs, or violent crime. Demagogues in our national past used the strategy successfully to foment movements leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the eugenics-based immigration quotas of the 1920’s, and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-American citizens in the 1930’s.

The sheer noise of scapegoating rhetoric exerts its power on people’s fears and anger, but ultimately it’s voters’ indifference – a moral blindness to the vulnerability of others – that enables the deportation machine to grind forward. Indifference is a state of numbness and disconnection, a paralysis of the very qualities that make us human.

Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and author who has written extensively on the moral and spiritual development of children and adults – and on the power of stories to foster the moral imagination – has tied morality to empathy and human connection. He said,

“morality defines not only how we get along with the world and one another, and the rules of life; it characterizes our very nature. Morality has to do with human connection. It has to do with the kind of connection that responds to others, and in turn earns the caring response of others.”

If reason and the moral imagination can prevail in this election, new spaces for healing and listening may just open up. Not immediately, one may surmise: the noise may get a lot more intense in the short term. But if spaces do open — if enough quiet moments are taken collectively and individually – it’s possible, just possible, that the moral imagination may yet point us to a new sense of ourselves – and a new sense of what a democracy can be.

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