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The Work of November 3

By Bruce Holland Rogers

OpEdNews.com

In the closing days of this presidential campaign, I'm like a kid counting down the days to Christmas.  Instead of looking at the Advent calendar every day, I'm checking the polls.  What will I find under the tree on November 3?  Will it be the shiny president I asked for?  Or a lump of the candidate I despise?

                My obsession, however, also has me a bit worried.  I see the same political passion all around me, on both sides.  Here in Eugene , Oregon , there's a well-travelled stretch of road where partisans gather to wave signs at passing motorists.  Republicans and Democrats jostle for the same turf, but in past elections it has always been a good-natured contest.  This year, for the first time, fists flew.  Each side claims that the other threw the first punch.  Partisan accounts of the fight are completely at odds, and each side accuses the other of stifling free expression.  The Democrats accuse the Republicans of "hate speech."  The Republicans decry the Democrats' "terrorism."  And it's not just this one patch of grass where the tension is high.  Feelings run strong all across America .

                I worry about whether I will get the electoral outcome I want, but there is something that worries me more: the fate of the nation after this election is decided.  The morning of November 3 is certain to dawn on an America that is painfully split.  What I'm referring to here is not the expected closeness of the contest.  I may be close, but it may not be.  The electoral college votes may break strongly for one candidate or the other.  It may even be that one side will be much better at motivating their voters to turn out so that the popular vote is not as close as predicted.  But even if one candidate ends up winning with a ten-percent national margin, we'll be divided in a way that hurts us.  Many on the losing side will say of the majority, "How could they possibly have elected him?"  It's not the proportion of the division that matters, but the depth of feeling.

                I am not enthusiastic about the candidate that I prefer, but I dread the alternative.  What's more, I think the two parties are bound to keep generating at least one candidate I loathe for election after election.  We're steadily becoming a more polarized nation.  Presidential primaries give us candidates who appeal to either extreme, so we don't get many centrists there.  Redistricting is manipulated by both parties to create "safe" House seats, and the result is a House of Representatives made up of extremists who are free to ignore dissenting voters in their districts.  Only in the Senate races do we tend to get candidates who run to the middle.  What passes for political discourse on radio and television is partisan spin.  On talk radio, winning the argument on emotion is more important than reasoning from the facts.  The electorate is hardening.

                A polarized electorate, a hardened electorate, loses much of its capacity for problem solving.  Positions derived from ideology work in practice about as well as communism worked.  Remember communism?  Lasting solutions require some flexibility and a willingness to talk across our divisions, to step out of positions prescribed by ideology.  To my ear, the sweetest words in political discourse are "You may have a point."

                Partisan media are going to go right on being partisan.  Political structures in the White House and House of Representatives are unlikely to soften and grow more flexible, no matter who wins.  So if we're going to have thoughtful discourse, it's going to have to begin with us, the voters, having conversations across the political divide.  We're going to have to rake a risk at Thanksgiving by gently opening a path to political discussion with those family members we don't talk politics with for the sake of avoiding indigestion.  We're going to have to open ourselves to understanding positions we disagree with.

                Healing the political divide doesn't mean picking fights with the opposition.  It means working to open our minds as we encourage others to open theirs.  My wife, Holly Arrow, is a social psychologist, and she offered these Rules of Engagement for political talk leading up to the election:

                1.  Be clear on your goals for the conversation.  Converting the person is an unlikely outcome.  An achievable goal may be increasing understanding of one another's positions and the thinking behind them.

                2.  Use "I" statements --- "I don't trust Bush's agenda" rather than "They" statements --- "Bush and his neo-cons are destroying the country."

                3.  Ask questions instead of making pronouncements.  Instead of saying, "Kerry's a flip-flopper," ask "What is Kerry's real position on the Iraq War?"

                4.  Pose genuine questions, not put-downs disguised as questions.  Ask "Can you tell me why you believe that?" instead of "How can you believe that?"

                5.  Avoid expressions of contempt.  Marriage research shows that they are among the most corrosive things you can do to a relationship.

                6.  If politics has always been a taboo subject between you, be prepared to disengage if it appears that the conversation is going to damage the relationship.

                If, after the election, we seek out tolerant, gentle political conversations with those we disagree with, we might do little to change who is in office for the next four years.  We might not change the media preference for heat over light.  But we might begin a process that favors thought over ideology, a process that will begin to heal our national split from the grassroots up.