I was talking with a few friends recently about the state of the nation, and as it often does, the conversation turned toward people we know who still support the current president.
Someone mentioned their frustration with their neighbors who are still unrepentantly MAGA, saying, “But the thing is, they’re good people”.
I gently pushed back, replying, “The question is: are they good people, or are they just nice people?”
I wasn’t engaging in semantics, I wasn’t being flippant, and I wasn’t playing devil’s advocate. I’m really trying to figure this out.
How do we assess the goodness of the people around us when their political affiliations, theological beliefs, and personal ideologies are doing irreparable harm to other people? Does how they may treat us really have any bearing on the contents of their hearts? At what point does someone’s politics become a moral indictment?
I think we need to be careful not to mistake niceness for goodness, as the two aren’t automatically mutually inclusive.
Niceness is a skill, not necessarily a personality trait. Most of us are capable of at least being superficially polite in social settings, mustering up the requisite cordiality to exchange pleasantries while bringing in the garbage cans, speaking to strangers in the checkout line, and running into work acquaintances at the gym.
Very few of us are outwardly rude to people in person, even those with whom we have fundamental worldview differences. In most of those cases, we’re strategically civil. We smile, make small talk, wish them well, and the moment they leave, we exhale and celebrate surviving a possible public disaster.
We’re not exactly being phony, as much as we’re treating people with simple decency and not inviting unnecessary turbulence. We’re trying to navigate already exhausting days by reducing conflict, avoiding an honest airing of grievances that might derail our day and set off a relational atomic bomb.
I’m sure that my friend’s Trump-supporting neighbors are quite nice to them, as they are familiar, straight, and white. This specificity, surface affinity, and perceived safety enable them to be in a posture of respect and even kindness toward my friend. They are not the monstrous villains of incendiary Evangelical sermons, the demonized boogeymen of presidential social media diatribes, or the fake news fodder of partisan propagandists, so they are the beneficiaries of courtesy.
My friends’ neighbors may even be reasonably nice to the Latinos who work on their houses or to the gay couple they’ve lived next door to for a decade. But if my friend were an immigrant moving into their community, or a transgender woman walking into their church, or a newly-hired person of color at work, what would their neighbors think and say about them then?
And, more importantly, as members of vulnerable, marginalized communities, how would their lives be marred by hardship and discrimination, as a direct result of their neighbor’s MAGA worldview? This matters. We can’t judge a person’s character simply by their surface treatment of other people of privilege. We also need to weigh the harm to already-oppressed human beings that they are complicit in.
When we’re tempted to gloss over someone’s politics or handle them with kid gloves because they’re nice to us, we need to remember the people on the other end of the legislation they set in place, the cruelty they co-sign, and the suffering they celebrate.
I believe people are incredibly complex, and we need to continually look to unearth the humanity that may be buried beneath layers of dogma, political tribalism, and ignorance. I do believe that there are good people who are obscured by dangerous lies they’ve come to see as true.
But I also know that there are hundreds of thousands of “nice” people around us who think, post, and advocate for the very poisonous hatred that our nation is beleaguered by; the evil currently leaving people traumatized and terrified.
Eventually, we may need to face the reality that some very nice people around us may not be very good.
