When I was a kid, hearing that a Democrat had won the presidency gave me a small pang of anxiety. I could feel it long before I could have explained it, and I doubt I could have explained it much at all. I do not believe my parents demonized the left the way the parties demonize each other today, but I was taught that Democrats were not good, and a child takes that sort of thing in whole. He does not weigh a platform. He just knows that the wrong people have won, and that something he cannot name has become a little less safe.

I imagine some people woke up with that pang this morning. Democrats took the House and the Senate yesterday, and for a good many Americans that lands as something heavier than a policy disappointment. They believe the people coming into power do not simply overlook their interests but stand in direct opposition to them. Others woke up glad, some of them with the particular relief of having felt that same pang from the other direction for a long while, and a few, I suspect, already looking forward to getting even. The last change of power looked much the same, with the two groups trading places. This was the verse in front of me as the news settled in:

The lot is cast into the lap,
But its every decision is from the Lord.

Proverbs 16:33 is a verse I am wary of on a morning like this. It would be easy to hand it to a frightened person as a pat on the head, and it would be just as easy for a happy person to wave it around as a verdict. It will not do either job. The lot does not tell you who deserved to win, and it does not tell you that the fear is foolish. What it does is take the outcome out of everyone's hands at once, so that neither the winners nor the losers get to claim it as their own.

I will say what I expect, though it hardly counts as a prediction. I expect the weight of this moment to be squandered. I have watched each party handed moments like this one and watched each of them waste it, and I have come to think that has less to do with politics than with people. Augustine called it the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate, and it does not check voter registration. There are bombasts on both sides of the aisle, and on both sides there are people who know exactly which fear to press. The fall leaves no party out, and it does not leave out those of us standing back and shaking our heads either.

So what can a person reasonably ask of leaders like that? I have landed on something small. I cannot ask them to agree with me, because there is no politician I agree with on every issue, and if there were, my motives would be suspect. I cannot ask to see their hearts. What I can ask for is a reason. "I think it should be this way because I believe this about the subject, or about the outcome." I can accept that, even when I disagree, and I can respect the person who says it.

What I cannot respect is the sound bite, the half truth and the extreme that exist for no purpose other than to produce outrage. This is where that old pang comes back around, because fear is what makes the sound bite work. A man who already believes the other side is his antithesis is easy to fleece. Nobody has to persuade him of anything. They only have to press on the fear, and he will hand over his judgment without ever being asked to weigh a thing.

There is something creaturely in offering a reason, and I have been turning that over all morning. The psalmist says God knows our frame, that He remembers we are dust, and every reason ever given is a small confession of that frame. To give a reason is to appeal to something beyond your own will. It admits that someone else might need convincing and might be right to resist, and that you are speaking from where you happen to stand, with the dim vision you happen to have. The speaker may not see it that way. He may be entirely sure that he sees clearly. But the act confesses what the man will not, and his speech ends up humbler than he is.

The Roman poet Juvenal has a line that describes the opposite posture: sit pro ratione voluntas, let my will stand in place of a reason. Only one being is entitled to that. When God answers Job out of the whirlwind He does not lay out His reasoning, because He owes none. So when a ruler says, in effect, "because I said so," he is doing more than being rude. He is taking up a seat that belongs to someone else. The creature's posture runs the other way, and I would like to hear it from anyone who holds power over me: let my reason stand in place of my will. I could simply impose this on you, the leader says, or I could work on your fears until you stopped asking. Instead I will tell you why, and you can answer me.

I know that a reason can be a fraud. We are fallen in our reasoning too, and we are awfully good at building respectable arguments for what we already wanted. But the posture I am after is not found in the sincerity of the reason. It is found in the understanding that one is owed. La Rochefoucauld said hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and a false reason pays that same tribute, because even the manipulator has conceded that he must answer to you. He has also exposed himself. A stated reason sits out in the open, where it can be held up against the facts and against whatever he does next. A sound bite promises nothing that anyone could ever check.

I do not have a lesson to draw from all this, only something to consider. If you are afraid this morning, I cannot tell you it will be fine, and I would not trust anyone who did. I can only say that you are still owed a reason, by every one of them, including the ones you trust least. If you are pleased this morning, the same standard falls on the people you voted for, and that may be the harder thing to hear. Your side will have its share of voices reaching for your anger and calling revenge by the name of justice, and fleecing is hardest to notice when it is telling you what you want to hear. I still have that kid's pang in me somewhere, and I know it can be pointed in any direction.

"Come now, and let us reason together," the Lord says in the first chapter of Isaiah, and the longer I think about that sentence the stranger it gets. The only one in all of existence who owes no one an explanation is the one extending the invitation. He stoops to it, the way you get down on the floor to talk to a child, and He does it for creatures who have given Him every reason not to bother. If that is how God has chosen to deal with us, it does not seem like too much to ask of a senator.