Pretend that there is an election coming up in which you can vote. There are two candidates in the race – one of those candidates is an attorney who prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan for bombing a black church. The other candidate in the race is a twice-disbarred judge who has been accused of molesting underage girls and has personally confirmed that he sought to date girls so young that he needed permission from their mothers.
Seems like an easy enough decision, right? What if you found out one of those candidates was a Democrat and one of those candidates was a Republican? Would that change your decision? Would it change the moral and ethical standards to which you hold elected officials?
As a hypothetical, these are not hard questions to answer. In the reality that Alabama voters now face, however, it turns out that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to vote for a child molester if it means not voting for something even worse – a Democrat.
It is, of course, human nature to identify oneself by beliefs and values. The two main political parties have long sought to attract people by appealing to certain beliefs and values. It is a logical strategy for building a base of support that will consistently vote, donate, and volunteer.
However, we have reached a point in American history where now, more than ever, political parties have come to inform beliefs and values, rather than one’s beliefs and values informing party identification. Critical thinking on policy, ideology, and even basic standards of decency becomesimpossible when the only messages presented to voters are “red bad, blue good” and “red good, blue bad.”
Blame for this does not lie at the feet of American voters. Blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and hyper-partisan media. If you only watch Fox News, you probably think Democrats hate America (we don’t, we just think it could be better). If you only read ThinkProgress, you might think Republicans hate poor people (they don’t, they just don’t have a solid grasp of economics). Politicians and many major media outlets have come to think so little of the American people that these are the types of messages that are offered, explicitly and implicitly, on a regular basis.
In doing so, Republicans and Democrats come not just to disagree – they come to hate one another, making compromise impossible and gridlock a certainty. It even causes intraparty problems as well – as we’ve seen at home in Georgia, every Republican in the GOP gubernatorial primary is racing as far right as possible to appeal to the most ideologically extreme members of their party. Governor Nathan Deal’s policies almost seem downright liberal in comparison to some of the ideas coming out of those campaigns.
This is not limited to Republicans either. The 2016 Democratic presidential primary has elevated a similar demand for ideological purity among some Democratic voters – a requirement that Democratic elected officials must support a very specific set of policies and beliefs to earn their support or face opposition in the next primary. Differences no longer seem to serve as the basis for compromise.
Democracy is predicated on the ability to compromise. There will always be differences of opinion and on public policy, but that should not and cannot be used by either the media or political parties to drive deeper divisions between Americans, no matter how many eyes it keeps on the screens, clicks it generates on a headline, or votes it earns at the ballot box.
We should not live in a country where a child molester is a viable alternative to a Democrat just because they are a Democrat. We should not live in a country where a sexual assaulter is a viable alternative to a Republican just because they are a Republican. Creating or maintaining a majority in Congress is important, yes, but not as important as ensuring the long-term health of our legislative system.
Some of my best friends are Republicans. We may disagree, and we may argue, but at the end of the day, we all want the same things. A safe place to live. Food on the table. The opportunity to spend time with our families without losing our jobs. If we spent less time demonizing one another and shouting over each other, I believe there is some middle-ground that we could find on those issues.
If we can begin to look past party at individual people, we might be surprised to find what we have in common.
