Meet Me in the Middle

I think I tell my sister: “I’m really sick of talking about politics” at least twice a week; I think that sentiment rings true around the country. But why do I keep blabbering about politics? For one, it is really hard to stop talking and thinking about politics when many on my Facebook timeline are engaged in ad-hominem ridden trench warfare. That’s on me for being glued to my screen. 
But politics is a unifier; I can whip together a column about politics, and everyone knows what I’m talking about to some extent. Maybe though, when I say I am sick of politics, I mean I am sick of the vitriolic rhetoric that goes along with it. 
But it isn’t just an idea drought that brings me to this topic. In Convocation last year at my school, Timothy Sherratt, a Political Science professor at Gordon College, spoke on political divisiveness. He didn’t just give the same spiel we’ve all heard: he brought graphs and concrete data with him.
He showed statistics from a Pew Research Center study which found: “Today, 92 percent of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94 percent of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican,” up severely from 1994. 
The study he showed also found that: “In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994. Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing party’s policies ‘are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.’”
This should be universally concerning. Adam Waytz, a psychologist at Northwestern University, said in a Washington Post editorial that we all tend to view our opponents as less intelligent.
He said that many political arguments — on both sides of the isle — “rarely grapple with the interlocutor’s alternate view of reality, let alone the merits of the point. Rather, they center on the other side’s deficient mental capacity, and all the ways that ‘you’ are less reflective, less rational, less empathic and more biased than ‘I’ (or ‘we’).”
This is what I see so often on Facebook and other public forums. I have many conservative friends and relatives that love to blast sensitive “snowflakes” and “libtards” who surely want the country to be run over by illegal immigrants and want nothing more than to tear American tradition apart at the seams.
It isn’t just the right; I know several people who swear on their lives that conservatives hate immigrants, disdain women’s rights and would love to be steamrolled by the 1 percent. Much of this talk, from both sides, assumes that the other has no capability for nuance or well-rounded opinion.
Aggressive attacks on the character of those one disagrees with as well as unhelpful generalizations about the “other” do nothing to promote actual conversation. When one posts something on Facebook attacking the other side, who is being helped? Surely, those who disagree are not going to “see the light” because of an antagonistic retweet.
We in the West pride ourselves with a history of rich discourse and dialogues. Imagine if Cicero, instead of carefully articulating his problems with Mark Antony, sat in front of the forum and called his opponent an idiot just for disagreeing with him.
It often isn’t my first instinct, but I am increasingly trying to show sympathy and an eagerness to understand opposing views when I engage things I don’t like. Am I perfect at it, or even decent? Maybe not. But my first line of defense against an increasingly polar environment should come from myself. It’s the best I know to do. 
ED. NOTE: Collin Hall is the publisher’s grandson and editor of The Tartan, Gordon College.