Here’s a soapbox worth standing on: the virtue of reasonable
argument. I’m not going to play that fear-stoking game where I try to convince
you through a cryptic relation of recent inflammatory public remarks and
awkward events that the public discourse in this country is far worse today
than it ever has been. After all, we’ve all been reminded recently in various
op. ed.s of Senator Charles Sumner’s caning on the senate floor in 1856 (see this article on the United States Senate’s historical minutes site).
But doesn’t it seem is if there is something in the water lately, an escalation
of uncivil discourse? As though we’re riding a high tide of public intolerance
for differing political opinion?
Let’s air it all out. What are the things that the right
says and suspects of the left? That they desire the eradication of personal
liberty, the rejection of a commonly acceptable moral value system, that they
advocate for a nanny-state and a big-brother government and that they care
nothing for the future fiscal welfare of the United States, that they are incompetent,
gay-loving church-hating multi-ethnic Harvard-educated Hollywood elitists who
want to take your guns and build too many highways.
How about what the left fears and says of the right? That
they reject the idea of education for all, that they desire the governance of
civil society to withdraw from all charitable work, that they repent of all
everything that has come of unions and anti-trust laws (5-day workweek, no
child labor, etc.), that they are in the pocket of big finance and big
business, that they are war hawks, gun-loving welfare-hating white racist
backwoods hicks who want to make sure that it’s against the law for a man to
want to marry a man.
Hm. Seem overblown at all? Or did perhaps one of these
profiles stoke the fire of your own political ire, and the other rub you
completely the wrong way? You see, I have a theory about the current state of
our political dialogue. While there have usually been at least two mainstream
political forces in opposition in the history of our country, and there has
always been inflammatory media both for and against each force, I think the
exponential increase in our day-to-day contact with media in the past sixty
years (TV, the internet, and now TV on the internet and the internet on TV, if
you follow me) has been followed naturally by an increase in our exposure to
inflammatory political media. And eventually there’s only so much one-sided
hyperbolic partisan nonsense you can be surrounded by before either losing your
marbles or starting to believe it.
So here we are: it’s 2013 and no matter who you voted for,
chances are very, very slim that you’re currently happy with the performance of
both the executive and legislative branches. But if you think the gridlock or
apparent incompetence is just a Washington problem and not reflective of the
current climate nation-wide, perhaps you ought to read this recent article from the USA Today, in which polls indicate that citizens across the board feel
about as strongly negative about the opposing party as the gridlock indicates
the politicians themselves do.
I think we can be more intelligent than this. We can choose
to discard hyper-spun inflammatory rhetoric and engage one another in
respectful, meaningful argument if we choose to do so. But it takes work—a lot
more work than it takes to hop onto facebook from the couch and spout off the
most recent nonsense from Bill Maher or Rush Limbaugh. It does take some
education—some personal investigation, an investment of the time and energy to
dig a little deeper on each side of an issue and exercise some empathy for
whoever is in a position opposed to you, to remember that we are all human
beings and that we are all (hopefully) engaging the public apparatus for what
we as citizens believe to be good causes.
We are on a path right now of “life imitating art.” FOX News
is wildly entertaining. So is the Daily Show. And there is some good news
reported in both of those arenas. But if you think of either one of them as a
reliably objective journalistic establishment, you’re kidding yourself. Jon
Stewart is a comedian, and Rupert Murdoch is a business-savvy media mogul.
These are not media intended primarily to be reflective of events (objective
journalism), but rather to influence events (ratings, money, etc.). If we treat
MSNBC or NewsCorp as an objective source of news, our sole source of
information from which we construct our opinions as citizens and voters, we are
deluding ourselves. We are allowing ourselves to be washed over as automatons.
This is not to say that there isn’t a place for even televised and digitized
political argument. But it shouldn’t be sold (or bought) as objective
journalism.
Next, when the war of words is engaged, the war of words has
to be substantive. Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut for speaking to
Congressional Democrats about insurance coverage for birth control has no
positive impact of any kind. Those proponents of the political views
purportedly in agreement with Limbaugh’s would have a much longer-lasting civil
success if they would address the lobby for birth control with a common
respect. Instead, Limbaugh’s comments seem to stir up mindless agitation on the
part of those already prone to agree with him, and a deepened mistrust of the
views he represents on the part of those prone to disagree. Limbaugh seemed a
panicked bigot grasping at straws to try to keep the misogynist ship afloat.
Likewise when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proposed
during the 2012 presidential campaign that he had secret knowledge that
Governor Romney had failed to pay taxes for ten years, he did nothing to change
the minds of anyone who had already decided to support Romney (see this article on the Huffington Post for PolitiFact’s final verdict on Reid’s accusations, in
case you weren’t paying attention). He just added to the polarization already gripping the country—and he made a
fool of himself and brought disgrace to his position and party. But he sensed
the power of the Rich-Romney narrative for persuading those few remaining
undecided voters, and he abandoned reasonable discourse (and the truth!) to try
to advance it.
What if we stopped believing polarizing figures? What if we
starting doubting every inflammatory report and started gleaning our
information from slightly more objective news sources? And perhaps most
importantly, what if we made the conscious decision to actually try to
understand the opposition? To employ our imaginations to try to “see things
from their eyes” in order to improve our dialectic reasoning? I posit that this
will ultimately prove necessary for the survival of our nation as we know it.
As we know, after all, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Let’s stand. Let’s maintain a forum for
reason.
