Henry AbbottAfter 10 weeks working in the muggy heat of Washington, DC, I was more than ready to return to my home state of New Hampshire with its friends, family, beaches, mountains, “live free or die” ethos, and state monopoly on liquor sales.
Returning home, I found that most of my friends were still working nine-to-five jobs for weeks on end, while I spent my days chopping down trees, chopping wood, and stacking firewood. Meanwhile, I spent my time campaigning for New Hampshire Democrats (the squirrels on the Bowdoin College campus often rival this party in intellectual influence).
If you’ve never campaigned, it’s surprisingly simple: you go door-to-door and convince voters to support your candidate or position. After exchanging greetings and asking if they have time for a quick chat, I start by asking the voter how they feel about the upcoming presidential election and what issues are important to them. We’ve talked about a wide range of issues (sometimes completely off-topic; we’ve talked about Benghazi a bunch of times and still don’t get it), but at some point, nearly every conversation ends up talking about the economy.
First, let’s lay out the opposing positions of the two candidates. Trump wants to raise tariffs on all foreign products by 10-20%, which would raise the prices of all goods. Trump wants to use the money to cut taxes on corporations. Meanwhile, Harris wants to raise taxes on corporations and use the money to give first-time home buyers a $25,000 tax credit. It’s pretty simple. Trump wants to take money from the American people and give it to corporations. Harris wants to take money from corporations and give it to the American people.
When I finished, some agreed, some asked further questions, and some said, “I don’t think that’s true.” So I tried to understand what they didn’t think was true about the economic positions I presented: did they believe that Trump hadn’t repeatedly called for taxes on imported goods, or did they think that higher taxes would raise prices?
So, perplexed, I move on to another topic they care about, typically immigration. Trump opposed a very conservative border bill because he wanted to campaign on that issue, not solve it. I always hear the same thing over and over: “I don’t think that’s true.” Ok, but which do you think is not true: that the border bill is conservative, or that all Republican senators were instructed by Trump to kill it?
I argued different issues — the Affordable Care Act — and when that didn’t work, we argued energy, labor unions, crime, policing, international relations. But as we talked again and again, I discovered that we each had radically different basic facts. The reality I described was as foreign to my constituents as the reality they described to me. We stood on their doorsteps together, each with our own realities.
But if we each had our own reality, then at some point we must have separated from the shared reality, right? But when did the separation happen, 2020 and Covid? What about Obama and the Tea Party? Going back even further, the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement? But how far back? I’m pretty sure that during the Civil War we did not live in a shared reality. Have we ever really shared the same reality with our other neighbors? I’m not sure anymore. I don’t think we’ve ever all really operated from the same basic principles and drawn conclusions from them.
What we need isn’t a new idea, but an old one: tolerance. We need to be tolerant of people who don’t see the world the way we do. We need to be open to those with whom we fundamentally disagree, and treat them as human beings worthy of respect, rather than being quick to condemn them. As former President Barack Obama said, “Our fellow citizens deserve the same tolerance that we would like to be shown to them.”
After all, I stood at the doorstep of people who said they thought I was a radical Marxist-Leninist leftist who hated America, and yet they still listened to me. So I returned the favor by listening to them. I don’t think I changed many people’s minds, but I’d like to think I planted a seed that not everyone who thinks differently than they do is a terrible person.
Grace is understanding that even when we disagree, we all share a particular human suffering. In a famous, now forgotten speech, Justice Learned Hand described the spirit of freedom as “a spirit that is not sure if it is right.” Freedom means the freedom to be intellectually humble. True freedom gives us the opportunity to let down our defenses and treat others with grace, and vice versa.
I spent a lot of time thinking about all of this while I was in Washington DC and since I moved back to New Hampshire. Obviously. But our country is still divided and facing very important questions about the future of the country. I will be voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz this fall, but that doesn’t mean I think everyone who supports Donald Trump and JD Vance should be immediately condemned. (I do believe, though, that Trump is an emotionally unstable, narcissistic billionaire who only thinks about himself. Two things can be true at the same time.) But I also think we need to be more generous with others in our lives. Living generously won’t change the world overnight. Nothing will make that happen, but it’s a start, and I’m happy to embrace it.
Sam Vaughn is in the class of 2026.
