The Return of Undecidedman

This is actually the second time I’ve blogged on the subject of critical thinking and US elections, although I didn’t realize that this is what I was doing the last time around.

You see, four years ago I was getting set to cast a party-line vote, just as I had always done (for the same candidate most of my friends and family were voting for). But then I noticed something happening to my kids (who were 8 and 5 at the time). They too were getting swept up in the “mania” surrounding one of the two candidates for President, and were expressing their enthusiasm by mimicking the unquestioning behavior of their parents and most of the adults around them, treating anyone considering any other decision with ridicule and disdain.

This triggered memories of years spent in Washington, DC with a group of partisan friends who had trained their children to denigrate detested members of the other party, kids who could be called upon to sneer at their parents political bogeymen like trained seals. While amusing at the time, I was not prepared to let my children start their political life unexposed to anyone who was not prepared to consider more than one political option. And so I decided to become an undecided voter.

This decision came at a time when the undecided voter was making news, and for good reason. For while the results of the last election seemed inevitable on Election Eve, right up to that point if you added the statistically undecided vote to the vote assured by either candidate, the race still seemed up for grabs. And so a fevered rush was on to convince these undecideds and when that didn’t seem to create an assured result, cajoling of undecideds turned to ridicule and wrath.

In my case, undecidedness was a chosen (and somewhat artificial) identity that I used to alert my kids (and the rest of my family) that at least one person they knew was planning to think about whom to vote for until the last possible second. And a short-lived (and now-defunct) blog I created (called Undecidedman) was the place where I publically explored different issues and weighted each candidate until finally making my choice on Election Day.

Looking back, many of the critical thinking concepts (notably the Principle of Charity) we will be exploring during this election cycle were the foundation of that blog. And while the site gathered a small but stable following (some fellow undecided, some the aforementioned critics of anyone who had not made up their mind), it was the reaction of those closest to me that I found most interesting.

For while they were prepared to support this somewhat-eccentric project, it clearly disturbed them that someone in their midst was not acting in a politically predictable way. Some suspected this was an elaborate effort to justify switching parties, and it took until after election fever had worn off for many of them to somewhat “get” the point of what I was doing.

Looking back, this reaction makes perfect sense. For the period during which Undecidedman was up was the homestretch to Election Day in which all choices save one had already been made. In such a context, why shouldn’t someone who was still thinking things through be seen as either wishy-washy or weird?

Which gets back to the reasons why this project is starting so early in the election cycle. For, as noted previously, we are now in a period when more than one choice and more than one outcome are clearly possible. The candidate for one party has yet to be chosen, and even now one can imagine various possibilities for change in the entire makeup of the election, such as the emergence of a viable third-party candidate (something we have seen in recent memory).

Because people, by nature, like to think of themselves as open- and broad-minded, imagination thus becomes an effective component of critical thinking. For if you can imagine multiple possibilities then you are open to thinking about them. And while we will surely be seeing and talking about the closing of people’s minds to multiple options as the number of possibilities begins to shrink and we head into head-to-head electioneering between assured candidates, for now even the most partisan voter has a stake in maintaining their own artificial identity as an undecided voter.

And who did I end up voting for after the whole Undecidedman exercise ran its course? I’ll let you know next week as we explore (and this writer admits to) the all-important concept of bias.