Nick Grunig
Bengal Contributor
The 2016 election was shellshock for millions of Americans, myself included.
Ever since that night in November, I have been picking up the shattered pieces of an optimistic teenager. Two years later, I’m now glued back together as a skeptic.
That journey led me to a phase of nihilism where I fell into the trap of “us versus them,” and I’ve noticed many still remain amongst that trap.
An internet poll run by Axios this October asked how Democrats and Republicans would describe each other, and the results were quite jaw-dropping. A majority of Democrats saw Republicans as racist, sexist, bigoted, ignorant or spiteful. Only about nine percent saw them in a positive light.
A majority of Republicans saw Democrats as spiteful, and half thought they were ignorant. Eleven percent positively saw Democrats.
The diagnosis for our political system would no doubt be a bad one, but what’s causing this hatred is contempt.
Merriam-Webster defines contempt as “the state of mind of one who despises.” I like to think of it as considering a person irredeemable or unsavable.
Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, tends to agree that contempt is not just ruining marriages, but even more so our politics. And as a political science major here at Idaho State, I have to agree with him when looking at political debate on campus and on other schools’ campuses when I represent ISU Debate.
So, what has contempt done? Something interesting I found is that the game of tribalism we are playing is turning Republicans more anti-war and Democrats more pro-war, at least when looking at Syrian troop deployment.
Multiple sources, including Slate and Axios, report those mentioned above, thus leading to this swap of what was considered normal during the Obama administration.
From my fellow left-leaning people, I see more people on the pro-war side, against moving troops out of Syria. That’s just one issue where I lose sight of what party I would ally myself with at times, and it’s all seeded in the hatred of the current president.
I by no means like the current president, but I still hold my value set regardless of who does a specific action. If we as the left wanted troops pulled from Syria, why wouldn’t we want to stick to that?
It’s because politics wants to be a game of alienating the other, a “non-them” party/movement where we become anti-Trump or anti-Republican regardless of what they say, and it’s a dangerous game that we are playing. This game will blind us from actual policymaking and critical thinking because we just want to be against things, instead of being for them.
The heart of the political debate has to lie in reasonable disagreement with multiple worlds at play. A blanket “no” creates a system of unresponsive politics, which I fear is becoming a normalized trait.
Saying “they aren’t worth the time to try to convince,” or “they could never convince me,” is wrong because we should look to create well-intended political voters. Yes, we need both sides to buy in to having their mind changed, but we should also realize that dogmatism establishes a precedent of lack of compromise that leads to a standstill.
Much of our hatred for the government comes from the standstill we get in Congress. A population that refuses to associate with the other political party in social groupings, even the more moderate on our political spectrum, creates hatred that spoils the whole system.
Seeing the other as fundamentally evil destroys any compromise that could happen. Without compromise, it just creates two parties trying to destroy each other.
That eventually leads to mutually assured political destruction, one where we can’t trust anyone, beyond our tribalistic camp and throws change out with the bath water. That is at the heart of democracy, and we are on the verge of throwing that out.
