I’ll try to interject some perspective into this direction the thread has taken.
Before 2000, I didn’t even really pay attention to what political party a person was when talking to them. I remember that a couple of guys who were good friends of mine at one point or another in my life, I subsequently found out that they were Republicans, again prior to 2000. It surprised me a little bit because my values are pretty far left and we seemed to in general agree on a lot of things. But my friendships were based on common interest in a lot of things, and politics was not necessarily one of them, so it was probably more about separating the person from his beliefs.
But I’ve been used to doing that…religion is a prime example. We live in a Christian nation…now there are certainly PLENTY of people with other religious beliefs out there, but I was conditioned to pretty much expect, at least where I grew up, that if I talked to any random person, he or she was far more likely than not a Christian. Whereas I have never personally subscribed to any religious ideology…I tend to think much of religion is based in outdated superstition. But I also have always felt that it is important to be respectful, not simply because I was outnumbered in my belief, but because it is utterly egotistical to think that I know what is or is not out there any more than those who are religious and believe they know what is or is not out there. I guess my philosophy has always been, no one knows for sure, I believe in what can be demonstrated to be true, and everything else is a theory…but that doesn’t make me any more “right” than anyone else.
So, as they have always said, the two things you should never talk about are politics and religion, and I’ve kind of defined my life by that, because if I find out that a person believes something different than I do, I do not know what their thinking, their values, their analysis (or lack thereof) has told them to lead them to believe something I do not. Now I will never shy away from a fact based debate, but in 2000 something happened that really had never been part of the whole don’t ask/don’t tell environment of politics for me.
No matter what you think about Bush, he ran one of the most divisive campaigns in history in 2000, and we’ve come to see the power of Karl Rove in molding perspective. What Bush understood and was unapologetic about implementing was that the truth and facts are less important than perceptions (which is indeed the first rule of politics), and unlike others before him who had shown some restraint in molding perceptions, Bush essentially created the reality he wanted people to have in their minds and did and said whatever it took to make people believe it. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes accepted as fact. Now we all have an amazing ability for self delusion and I can imagine that there might be more than one Republican disagreeing with that right now, and that’s fine, but clearly even if you don’t agree, one thing Bush did do that I think we can all agree that he did do was to forge his own path without worrying about his critics. Some call that headstrong leadership, I call that turning a deaf ear to the concerns of half the country, and I think it’s led to this sea change we saw in the 2008 election.
But my point is, rather than foster any sense of, “we’re going to discuss issues, hash them out, look for perspective from all sides and then make a decision,” we got a sense of “us vs. them” from Bush and co. The political campaign was certainly run like that, and even in office we heard rhetoric like “you’re either with us or against us.” And when it came to issues we could all basically agree on, that was one things, but so many issues that involve empirical analysis, thousands of years of scientific discovery, pure facts and reason…issues where the vast majority of people of any political stripe could see that science has proven x, y and z, well decisions were being made without regard to evidence and fully within the precepts of a narrow set of beliefs dictated by a small core of devout, evangelical Christians. And because it was the path our fearless leader forged, and because the Republican mind tends to value loyalty above all else, we got into a situation where often times the right was on the wrong side of logic, reason and fact, but was on the right side of power. And as the “you’re either with us or against us” mentality eminated from the top down, it permeated our culture, and forced many Republicans to abandon reason while leaving many Democrats appalled at the degree to which reason had been abandoned in favor of ideology.
This made those political issues rise to the forefronts of the minds of many liberals (outrage will do that to you), and therefore it became an almost all consuming passion that edged out many of the more trivial things on which we might have forged friendships in the past. And after 8 years, it reached the point where the average liberal had been disabused by so many conservatives who had no facts on their side, but who did have well structured talking points and the support of the powers that be. So it became hard for people such as daloon to ever even see themselves being able to actually be “friends” with anyone who represented that which had been such an affront to their sense of logic and fair play for so many years.
But let me tell you another story about something that happened in this timeframe. Just as I was quite vocal throughout this latest political contest and just as I fought back arguments which did not have any logic or reason behind them..I did the same, but to a lesser degree in 2003/2004 leading up to Bush’s second “win”. And I got into an online disagreement with someone who was conservative, but what stunned me was that this guy was intelligent, he had well formed and thought out opinions, he had REASONS to believe what he did, and he articulated them well. And I looked back at some of the people I have known in the past who were Republicans with whom I’d had no problem prior to 2000. And I looked at myself…at the time believeing much like daloon does now that I don’t know if I could ever make friends with a Republican and good riddance to the few I’d known in the past whom I happened to have fallen out of touch with in recent years (not because of political ideology, but in my view, my concerns had matured and I was no longer in the market for relationships based on the superficial things we’d made friends over in the past). But this guy blew me away. And ultimately I did not agree with him, but I understood why he thought the way he did, and I respected his opinion. And I thought, this is not someone I could hate or even dislike…this is someone I could actually have a rational discussion with, and we could vehemently disagree, but still get along.
So when 2007 rolled around and I immediately jumped on the Obama bandwagon well before the bandwagon even existed and everything thought Hillary was going to win, because I’d listened to the man and read his books and thought, “this man needs to be President and I will do everything I can to make sure this happens…”, I began going on sites like this one and interjecting myself into political discussions. And for every 5 to 10 partisan right wing idiots whose idea of debate was garnered from listening to Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter and O’Reilly (shout them down and hang up on them if they start to make sense), I would encounter one intellectually honest person who held certain beliefs and was willing to defend them intelligently from the right. And these people I would not every be able to actively dislike.
So though I can understand the mindset of not being able to be friends with a Republican…having been there myself, I think that’s an overlysimplistic way to look at the world, and I think we just need to heal a bit, and we will once again be able to be friends with our political enemies.
