By Mark Grimsley
On Tuesday, February 11, at 6:30 p.m., we’ll have a 2-hour session focusing on a crisis in American life today: the political tendencies that place us in danger of losing our democracy, a possibility that many serious scholars and commentators on politics now consider to be very real.
We’ll look at one aspect of the problem: the tendency of Americans to villainize those with whom we disagree. People with different views on candidates or public policy no longer are simply citizens with different views on policy. They’re wrong: they’re culpably, deliberately, wickedly wrong. That, at least, is the message we get from the hyper partisan environment that surrounds us—and that many politicians and opinion makers deliberately foster. It isn’t good for the soul and it isn’t good for our democracy.
I’ll be giving a presentation entitled “The Democracy That Broke: Incivility and the Origins of the American Civil War.” It offers an historical perspective on this epidemic of hyper partisanship. I’ll talk about why the Founders feared exactly this kind of phenomenon and how their fears were so thoroughly realized by the 1850s, an era of hyper-partisanship much like our own, which ran our country straight off a cliff into a civil war that killed 3 percent of the US population and nearly destroyed American democracy.
The presentation will focus on the importance of having constructive political exchanges between those of different political views, not with the idea of persuading them to change those views, which is very unlikely, but of understanding them, which would reduce hyper partisanship and restore a healthier dynamic underscoring that citizens can disagree with one another regarding political world view—the political premises that drive one’s positions on specific issues—while seeing one another as decent people who happen to hold different political philosophies. This will have to be done at the grass roots level because so many political leaders and opinion makers now benefit from division and therefore encourage it.
There are at least two challenges to achieving this goal: first, the lack of the skill set required for that kind of dialogue—the current model is based overwhelmingly on confrontational debate, which is sterile and self-defeating; and an addiction to rage: too many people have gotten to enjoy holding the other side in contempt—and those who don’t generally just distance themselves from politics with a “plague on both your houses” stance that is not healthy, either.
Please join me for this evening of reflection on the importance of countering hyper partisanship, and how to do it.
Mark