OCTOBER 29, SATURDAY

PERSUADING EACH OTHER

I’ve been thinking about the differences in identity that that divide Americans and are the root of polarization. For MAGA Americans who feel that their traditional American identity is being threatened it is their white majority and white control, their fundamental Christianity, their straight gender identity, their

American exceptional entitlement, their freedom from government, their sense of red, white and blue American nationalism that makes us the greatest country on earth, that is being threatened.

But what are my values on the other side? In trying to have a dialogue with MAGA people I have assumed that they are the ones who need to accept the changing world and who need to change. I just don’t know how to do it.

But of course a MAGA person feels just the opposite. For him it is the libs who have gone astray and are threatening the country. The libs are the ones who need to come to their senses and change back to traditional red, white and blue American values. A compassionate MAGA person somewhere is thinking how to gently bring me back to my senses. Maybe that is what my barber is wondering.

What are these values that he wants me to change? One is secularism and relativism. He must see me floundering without any firm beliefs when I find all religions (or no religion) to be equal, accept all cultural patterns as being equal, accept all genders as being equal. If I accept everything then I don’t stand for anything, I am without a foundation while he believes in fundamentals. Not making a choice is a cop out to him. I am wishy washy and weak. And I don’t have much of an answer for that. In many ways he is right. If I believe in everything, I don’t believe firmly in anything.

This wishy washiness is to a MAGA person unrealistic. He is out of work and knows just who put him out of work and doesn’t want immigrants to pour in and take away more work opportunities and lower pay scales as he sees hard working Mexicans do.

My insistence that abortion is about choice and that I am neutral, MAGA women are free to choose not to have an abortion and other women are free to choose an abortion, means that I am avoiding standing up for the life of the unborn and have talked myself into neutrally accepting the murder of the unborn.

My acceptance of all genders including transgender people means that I am encouraging people to imagine that they are transgender and encouraging them to harm themselves and others when it is quite obvious to the MAGA person

that gay people and transgender people are a sickening aberration that should be cured, not encouraged.

My belief in income redistribution so that everyone can live decently to the MAGA person rewards the stupid and the lazy and creates a system in which no one is motivated to work. A competitive capitalist system, sink or swim, creates a strong and vibrant system in which everyone can benefit through the trickle down of wealth from the wealthy to those who are not so capable.

This goes on and on. America is great, or was great, because of fundamental American values and to be great we have to again affirm basic American values and hard competitive work. My suggestion that American wealth partly depended on colonizing a continent with vast resources that we took over by eliminating the people already living here, that much of AMerica’s wealth was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, that the Mexican construction worker down the street is willing to work harder than he does and that all white Americans are here because of immigration are simply a way of undermining American’s belief in themselves and are not true and should be eliminated from public school curriculums. To stay strong we have to have faith in our values and not undermine them.

So, of course, which is clear in the almost satiric way I am describing this divide, my barber or the compassionate MAGA person has no more chance of changing my values and my belief in the facts of American history than I have in changing his values and sense of what is true.

This seems to be the basis for our extreme polarization and I don’t know how to resolve it. My dream is that by listening carefully to each other, unless we can find certain things that we can agree on together, such as defending Ukraine, and leave our differences aside. If the United States is under a deep threat such as when Iraq was about to nuke us, we got out our flags and had solidarity (until we realized there were no nukes). We were united against Hitler’s aggression and again against Russia and a communist takeover during the Cold War. But when there is no external threat our fundamental differences appear and we can’t get along. But it seems sad if only when we are threatened that we can get along. A nuclear war would unite us but also probably wipe us out and all of our differences would seem irrelevant.