Also in The Polis on Medium.com
Republicans should talk to Democrats (and vice versa)
First thing to establish: I am not anti-Republican, though it’s true that I am a Democrat. I do see the need, though, to tongue lash the Repubs in control in so many places today because they’re actively rejecting input from the opposition. And they’re calling us names. It’s like junior hi out there in the capitals. Hopefully, that will change, because the control Republicans have over our politics is reckless and it’s hurting the country. Republicans in power need a Democratic opposition to prevent their own tendency to overreach and break things.
Naturally, it works in the opposite direction too. Dems can and do talk trash with the best of the Repubs and they press the advantages they have in blue states. Overreach by either party, though, creates polarization, a social disease in which nothing gets done or, worse, one in which government works for the benefit of only those who voted it in.
If the party in power has no opposition political party, it has a lock on policy. It can dominate, and will usually choose to do so. It has no need to please any of the people who do not agree with its policies. It can ignore the opposition. Or more ominously…it can step on their necks. It can channel resources to its own coffers. It can plow on and rig subsequent elections. It can even cancel elections. It can be as mean and shitty as it wants to be.
History has seen this happen often enough, in the United States and elsewhere, so you could be forgiven if you thought it was an inevitability.
Too much of what legislation passes during a narrowly elected administration can piss off people who voted against it. When those people become aggrieved enough about being neglected or abused, they can coalesce into an opposition that categorically works to deny the administration any success. If the opposition is loud enough and persistent enough, it can bring an effective halt to productive government. That’s polarization and without legislative trickery will lead to stasis.
The classic example of this kind of ideological split in America was the Civil War, an attempt to fracture the country along an issue that the electorate held widely divergent views about — slavery. During the war, the remedy to keep us on track, to continue working toward a still elusive “more perfect union,” was bloody and created a persistent antagonism extending even to today. We still see skin color and hair texture as issues to take sides on.
The truth of the reality that race is still an issue in America is that we, some 150 years on, are not all mixed-race individuals. If we were truly color blind, some ten generations past the Civil War, we would all be mixed race by now. Instead our racial differences are enshrined in our census designations: White, Black, Asian, American Indian, Pacific Islander. You can pick more than one, but you must pick at least one. You can’t answer, “I don’t understand the question.” I’m White, by the way.
We’re at a time now where race has again become a flashpoint in the U.S. Republicans, in the majority of states where they control government, have resurrected race as an electoral issue. They don’t call it that exactly, but you see the underlying truth of the matter in the attention they give to eliminating DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives in public, educational, and social programs. They’re banning books by Black authors (among others), making it harder for Black people (among others) to vote, striking references to Blacks (among others) in history and culture, and firing Blacks (among others) who hold positions of authority. It’s like the issue fomenting the Civil War is having a resurgence.
I feel, not without evidence, that Republicans are uneasy at best about Blacks’ greater visibility in American culture. They regard it as a diminishment of White status and their influence in the country. Blacks and other groups that Whites target are seen as threats to the privilege that we Whites have traditionally come to believe we deserve. Why we should deserve that privilege is rationalized in any number of suspiciously contrived arguments. We’re more intelligent, we’re guided by better morals, we’re better stewards of the American way, we’re even more beautiful and more handsome. But the underlying truth of this range of hokey, unproven justifications is that we’re tribal and we’re protective of our tribe. Our tribe members have white faces and we make up the White race.
It is Republicans who majorly believe in this version of White superiority, strongly enough that in their seats of power they have enshrined it into the political agenda that we label White Supremacy. The word ‘supremacy’ here implies not just a belief, but an actionable agenda to maintain Whites in perpetual power. They do that by trying to keep ‘contaminating’ foreigners out of the country; by ‘realigning’ history, education, and culture to valorize Whites and denigrate non-Whites; by making it hard for non-Whites to vote; by triggering negative associations about non-Whites in the media; by rigging elections. And they’re doing it through deceit and subterfuge. And if none of that is sufficient to get the job done and keep ‘those people’ in their place, then they’ll upend democracy itself and replace it with leadership of the elite. Not intellectual elites, by the way, but economic elites — the super rich.
Okay, from a Republican perspective, this rant of mine will seem entirely overblown. Typical paranoid liberal hype! Crazy shit! Trump derangement syndrome! Fucking A, man, go back to the funny farm!
But in my defense and to get back to the theme of this article, all of these actions are real to me and I attribute them to the fact that Republicans will not talk in good faith with the Democrats. Current Republican legislators and notably the president himself don’t see the need to involve opposing voices in their deliberations, because why should they? They’ve got their hands on all the levers already. The upshot is that such blindered governments don’t see the citizens opposing their positions as their constituents. If they didn’t vote for them, then why bother with them. Screw them and the horse they rode in on.
This explains the attacks on DEI, trying to turn the positive connotations of those words — Diversity, Equity, Inclusion — into negatives. But, good lord, those terms are essential to the very notion of democracy and even deeper to the teachings of every world religion. How can you identify yourself with the teachings of Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha by telling people because of their race, “Hold back, there, boy. You’re not one of us and we don’t want you here,” where ‘here’ is our school, our church, our playground, our neighborhood, our town, our country?
DEI is all about the Golden Rule and when you attack it, you’re attacking the foundations of our Constitution: ‘All men are created equal,’ and so forth. It comes down to one fundamental conclusion: being anti-DEI is being un-American, at least according to the established principles of Americanism.
But anything can change, including the Constitution. All countries can move off their original path and their populations can come to uphold different beliefs and honor different values. But there will be some unhappy subsets of people in those changing countries who will feel stranded. If those left behind people make up a sizable part of the population, I wonder whether and how they will adapt. Will they be forced to adapt? Will they withdraw voluntarily? Will they be sequestered away from the ‘good’ people? Will they be eliminated? History has examples of each possibility. Actually, you don’t have to go farther back in history than today’s news to find examples. All of them are failures to embrace DEI.
Republicans together with Democrats, as well as Socialists and Communists and Libertarians and Communitarians and all other shades of political belief, claim to be for the people. But the tenacious, unbendable beliefs about how to actually do good for the people you want to help can disadvantage other people. That, too, history has numerous examples of.
It may be true that any action, physical or political, has an equal and opposite reaction. If some action makes the billionaires richer, it’s likely to make someone else poorer. If you make the path smoother for White people, you might make it rougher for non-White people. But if, as your starting point, you believe that DEI is misguided, the ‘may be true’ turns into a certainty.
And that’s one good reason why governments should not be veto-proof Republican or veto-proof Democratic. No one party should control all the levers, because some people will ultimately suffer for it. Plus if one party realizes its goal to dominate forever, the country’s social disease will have become chronic and it could very well kill the patient. History again.
So I propose here a remedy. If you’re in a red state like West Virginia, where I live, vote for a Democrat to force your legislature to listen to the other side. Make the pols honestly debate. If you go overboard and create an inflexible Democratic majority, vote for a Republican. Repeat till you have a workable and cooperative balance. If someone can’t cooperate, vote them out. There’s no reason we have to be satisfied with just half of the good ideas cooperative individuals can come up with.
Poor West Virginia has been both true blue and true red with a short transition from one to the other. For all the political shuffling, we’re still last in the nation or close to the bottom in longevity, health, education, family income, infrastructure, business development, and poverty. Neither party has managed to bump up those grim statistics.
Thank God we’re still the most beautiful state in the country. At least we’ve got that, right?