POLARIZATION
I wonder about polarization which is where people who live in the United States have been headed for a long time and which seems to be getting more and more intense. Extreme polarization leads to violence. Polarization caused our bloody civil war and seems to be threatening now. The near assassination of Donald Trump, even though my guess is that it was done by a loner who was trying to prove something to himself or to someone else, signals that we live in a tinderbox.
The way I see it, both sides in our current polarization are sure they are right and that the other is a threat to everything American. One side, MAGA,seems to me to be a righteous backlash against a world that is rapidly changing in every way through technology, a change that is also upending traditional American values.
The other side, liberals, feel they are defending the cultural identity of all kinds of people who have been marginalized—women, different races, immigrants, LGBTQ people—along with facing the global threats of authoritarianism abroad and global warming. Liberals seem able to accept rapid technological change and are able to adapt.
Each side is very much threatened by the other and will do almost anything to win the next election including demeaning the other side and calling them all kinds of names.
An example for me of this intense polarization is the issue of abortion. When I was a boy abortion was criminalized. Then in a period of liberalization of the old values abortion became protected by the constitution. This was not only a threat to the holders of traditional American values but it quickly became a symbol of which side you were on. All MAGA people are horrified by abortion, to be a MAGA person you have to condemn abortion. All liberals in order to show they are liberals have to be in favor of abortion.
But it is pretty clear to me that each side is right. If you believe that a child after conception is a fully formed human being then abortion is murder, no way around it. But liberals don’t believe we are fully human at conception and draw the line when a child is fully human when they can survive outside of the womb. Liberals approach abortion completely differently from MAGA folks, they are affirming something completely different, the right of a woman to control her own body and to decide whether and when she wants to give birth or not. MAGA people are talking about murder, which of course everyone is against, and liberals are talking about freedom and the right to control your own body which it seems everyone could also agree with. But we can’t believe both at the same time.
But once we are completely polarized on this issue, or any issue, how are we going to unpolararize? Our current solution seems to be democracy, to vote, and then accept whatever the majority decides. But the problem with this is that we are evenly divided, 50/50 with election victories being 51/49%. This coming election won’t resolve anything. We will be just as evenly divided after the election as before with the losers denouncing the winners and each determined to win the next election. Worse than that this next election might end up with one side being outvoted but winning the electoral college while other side wins the popular vote, maybe by a lot, but loses the electoral college and the election.
We’ll be just as divided, just as angry after the election as we are before.
And just as discouraging we will still be shouting at each other and calling each other names with no way of deciding who is right without some form of authoritarian way of enforcing one side or the other.
The only possible resolution it seems to me is to listen to each other, to accept the other person’s views as being strongly held and moral, to agree that we are simply good hearted people who disagree and then when we cool down a litte see if there isn’t some way that we can come to a compromise that will be acceptable to the other side. We will certainly not be able to resolve the issue of abortion, or any issue, if we shout at each other and don’t listen to each other and even more certainly will not be able to resolve polarization when we are evenly divided.
So how can we listen?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 