“Us vs. Them” and How to End It.

Grace, one of the finest people I know in the blogopshere, has posed a question to all of us, prompted by an ongoing discussion here.

Nobody’s completely angelic in the political blogosphere. I have spared no mercy in blog smackdowns of Michele Malkin and Ann Coulter. Certainly, my pals on the other side of the aisle have gone downright medieval on the asses of Al Franken and Howard Dean. We can pick on each others’ extremists until doomsday. In the meantime, we must continue to find a way to talk to each other. To listen. To get past Us/Them.

But how exactly is that done? How does one stop the snarking? How do we avoid personal attacks? How can we get ourselves out of verbal traps and resist setting some of our own?

Here, in her comments, is a perfect example of how not to answer the question:

My problem with discussions like this is that the Right was responsible for the “us vs. them” attitude in this country starting in the early 80′s. The Lee Attwater/Grover Nyquist school of pitbull politics was let loose on liberals and it wasn’t until well past 2000 that progressives learned how to respond (and still haven’t mastered that artful spin).

When progressives grew a spine and started to respond in-kind, the right took on the role of the victim, wounded and entitled. Yet, the kind of rabid rhetoric posted on sites like Free Rupublic, Little Green Footballs, Malkin, Coulter, et al is never seen on Atrios, DKos, HuffPo, Wolcott, or even nasty little political blog (which I noticed you de-linked but I recently revived). I have never seen a unified call for genocide seriously entertained on the left. I have seen it too many times on the right.

Not only is this demonstrably and laughably untrue, it avoids the question altogether. It almost demands the hackneyed parental question “If Ann Coulter jumped off a cliff, would you jump, too?”. Certainly, the right has its share of bombthrowers. To suggest that the sites the commenter noted do not, is just plain silly. One of them is, after all, run by a man who once said “Screw ‘em” about a quartet of civilian contracters whose murdered corpses were hung on display from a highway overpass in Iraq. So…..yeah. That’s just silly.

But it’s more than silly, it’s hypocritical. You can’t excuse your own bad behavior by saying that you’re only emulating the bad behavior of those you see as the other side. All you’re doing is jumping off the cliff because they jumped off the cliff, which is not adult behavior. The hypocrisy exists in emulating the behavior of people whose behavior you criticize. You can’t decry bank robbers while you’re knocking over a liquor store. It’s just that simple.

So there’s a perfect example of how the “us vs them” mentality remains alive through lukewarm and laughable moral equivalence. But how do we make it go away, or at least make sure that we see as little of it as possible?

To me the answer is easy because it’s something I do in my political discussions already. When I talk politics, I have three general rules I use as a guide.

1. Never take it personally until the other person makes it so. When that happens, the discussion is over and I’ve already “won”.
2. Always assume that the other person is as informed as I am and is arguing in good faith until they demonstrate otherwise. If they lack facts I have, I’ll provide those facts. If the other person insists on completely disregarding those facts when they might have moved their position, then they’re not arguing in good faith anymore. They’re just hanging onto an ideology and the debate is over
3. Always assume that the other person honestly wants to make the country and the world the best place it can be for the most people possible until they prove otherwise.

Those are the rules I use and they’ve never steered me wrong. In fact, they’ve allowed me to get involved more deeply in conversations that might not have happened otherwise.

A few years ago, I worked with a Corporal who was black and a fairly liberal Democrat. We had to spend eight hours in the same room together and, to kill time, we decided to kick around a few political and societal issues, because we shared interests in politics, race relations, and the like. Some of our conversations would get pretty heated, though. We would yell at each other. We’d point our fingers at each other. We’d run other people out of the room sometimes because they honestly thought that we’d come to blows, especially when we started talking about race-related issues. We were friends before we had those debates, though, and we remain friends to this day because we both adopted a very important rule: if at any point either of us got personally offended at anything the other person said, we’d stop the debate and back off.

That did happen once and a while and, when it did, the debate would stop – immediately and without question. We did that because we not only liked each other but also because we respected each other as human beings. We both knew that the other’s beliefs were honestly held and strongly felt. We knew that we might never understand where the other person was coming from. But we never forgot that, so long as the facts were good and the logic reasonable, that it wasn’t necessary for us to understand the belief, only that it was honest and reasonable.

That, I think, is the trick – and the difference between Grace and her commenter. Grace and I differ on a number of issues. We likely always will. But we understand that the other person has come by their beliefs openly and honestly and that we have no sinister motives behind them. Grace understand that my beliefs on the Iraq War have nothing to do with barely-suppressed jackbooted thuggery and that I don’t have a single fascist bone in my body. Her commenter not only believes that I do but holds that belief no matter what I say to the contrary.

When we finally do break the “us vs. them” mentality that seems to be gripping the nation it will be because the good sense of people like Grace will always last longer and be far more preferable than the white-hot disdain for fellow humans displayed by her commenter .

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