This presidential campaign is quickly emerging as one of our country’s darkest hours. Public policy discourse has taken a back seat to brutal name calling. Poetic rhetoric has been replaced by angry noise. Civility is out. Personal attack is in. The worst part is that this venomous angst is seeping through the pores of the body politic, infecting all of us – our relationships and our families. Roughly one third of people polled recently
said they have been attacked, insulted, or called names on the basis of their political opinions. One in four of those surveyed said a recent political discussion permanently damaged a relationship.
Facebook executives recently told the Associated Press that U.S. users sent out four billion political messages during the first seven months of the year. Although the network claims not to track unfriending metrics, a spokesperson told AP that such communication cutoffs are on the rise. That includes people who left FB in disgust over political posts, as well as those who stayed but selectively weeded friends based on partisan rants. The news service quoted Scott Talan, an American University communication instructor who tracks social media and politics as saying he has seen some fairly hostile Facebook exchanges recently. “They range from pretty harsh, graphically laced, attacks upon people. . .to statements of ‘if you support this person, you can no longer be my friend.’”
My 90-year-old uncle, Jenner Nelson of St. Cloud, Minnesota, encountered an analog version of this Facebook estrangement and adroitly moved to rectify it. He’d been lobbied for months by the Trump and Clinton factions within our family and decided to let us all know where he stood by posting both candidates’ signs on his lawn, as pictured above, but only after covering their names with large X’s of red duct tape. “To heck with them both,” he said. Although the gesture didn’t dampen any of our partisan passions, it helped, at least momentarily, put a political campaign in perspective.
A couple of factors brought us to this point. But first, these words from our two major party candidates for president: “racist”, “bigot”, “crooked”, “totally unqualified”, “dangerous”, “dishonest”, “incompetent”, “fraudulent”, “basket of deplorables”, “lose cannon”, “stupid”, “unfit”, “weak”, “total disgrace, and “pathetic”. And those are just for starters. The word cloud emerging from this campaign is horrendously strident. Put that together with the political intransigence that has paralyzed Congress for the last several terms and we are left with . . .well, a lot of people yelling at each other. One recent survey indicated that the incivility of political discourse is so bad that 40 percent of classroom instructors are hesitant to teach about the election for fear of adding to what is already a serious bullying problem in their schools.
Yet, there is something else going on here. Families, friends and coworkers have always differed on political choices, usually without creating an interpersonal crisis. My parents used to joke about canceling each other’s vote on election day. Nobody is laughing now. The difference with this election is that it goes to deeply held values, the kind of stuff that is part of our core, that defines who we are. We can have friendly disagreements over health insurance or NATO funding without a lot of existential angst. It’s a whole different situation when you are talking about keeping Muslims out of the country, deporting undocumented immigrants, building a wall around Mexico and issues of equity and justice for African Americans and the LGBT community.
This is visceral, heart and soul stuff. We are in different places because we’ve had different experiences that have contributed to our conflicted wiring. My 1960s childhood turned me into a passionate human rights advocate. That means I’m against the wall, the Muslim ban and for amnesty-based immigration reform. That also means I see Donald Trump as a pariah, someone whose world view is totally contrary to my values. On the other hand, there are good, decent folks out there who see jobs disappearing and their communities filling up with people from other countries and cultures. They long for the days when America was a different kind of place. They want to recapture what’s been lost. To them, Clinton is the pariah and Trump is the one with a map to their promised land.
Our vision for the future could not be more different. Yet, they are both so clearly valid to us that, particularly among people who share a connection, it is painful to talk about politics right now because it is a conversation that, by necessity, challenges and threatens our deeply held conflicting views of the world. This interpersonal quagmire could be mitigated by national leaders who would engage us with a vocabulary of civility and accommodation instead of name calling and polarization. Sadly, those cards are not on the table. All we can do right now is follow the road that is right for us and respect those we care about who take another path.