Polarization of U.S. society is a problem, not a distraction


What’s so dangerous about polarization?

I see the divides between factions of Individuals as a troubling downside that we should always all be striving to handle. However recently I preserve working into sensible individuals who disagree.

Earlier this month, I used to be on a PEN World Voices Pageant panel on the L.A. Central Library with writer and TV producer Reza Aslan and Hollywood’s Black Record founder Franklin Leonard. Every mentioned specializing in “polarization” can promote a false equivalency.

Stipple-style portrait illustration of Jean Guerrero

Opinion Columnist

Jean Guerrero

Jean Guerrero is the writer, most not too long ago, of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.”

“It’s a undeniable fact that different Individuals are a direct risk to my lifestyle,” Leonard mentioned. “It’s not a undeniable fact that my lifestyle is a risk to theirs.”

Aslan agreed: “I’m unsure what’s so mistaken with polarization. I actually don’t perceive what the problem is … if the opposite particular person on the opposite facet of the aisle doesn’t even perceive my dignity as a human being, then I’m completely wonderful being in a special camp. Like I would like polarization.”

Quite a few latest tales in left-of-center media have been making comparable circumstances: The issue isn’t polarization however, moderately, the GOP-led assault on the rights of tens of millions of Individuals.

I agree that this assault is the larger downside. But when it turns into a fake pas to care concerning the distance between us and the individuals who’d like to limit our rights, how can we hope to beat political stalemates and win fundamental protections — not to mention progress? Polarization inhibits engagement with the opposite facet, and engagement is how I’ve at all times imagined coalitions type to result in change.

When so many sensible folks on “my facet” are embracing this sort of distance, I’ve to surprise: Is it strategic? One latest Salon article in protection of polarization cited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” So I learn it.

From a jail cell in 1963 after his arrest for protesting segregation, the preeminent civil rights chief eloquently responds to white clergymen’s complaints that although his protests had been peaceable, they someway nonetheless “incite to hatred and violence.”

King elucidates the absurdity of that declare, whereas acknowledging that his protests promote “constructive nonviolent pressure.” He writes: “I need to confess that I’m not afraid of the phrase ‘pressure.’ ”

For King, polarization wasn’t an issue. It was a crucial byproduct of the battle for equality. However he refused an us-versus-them conception. The evil wasn’t the opposite facet. It was some people’ resolution to interrupt with those that had been completely different from them, moderately than bridge divides. Birmingham leaders repeatedly made that selection by refusing to have interaction in good-faith negotiation with Black activists.

King is an often-cited determine amongst Republicans who prefer to twist his phrases to characterize affirmative motion and reparations as racist. They’d profit from revisiting his physique of labor. So would many liberals, who pay lip service to his religion in love as a transformative social drive however domesticate a vitriol for opponents mirroring the MAGA faction’s.

In his 1958 e book “Stride Towards Freedom,” the pastor wrote: “To satisfy hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing however intensify the existence of evil within the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a larger toughness.”

Violence takes polarization to an excessive. Whereas some civil rights activists again then embraced violent techniques, it was nonviolent demonstrators who remodeled public opinion and secured unprecedented legislative wins, alongside the NAACP.

“The individuals who advocated violence had no vital successes,” Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Mission at UCLA, advised me. “When there have been violent protests or riots just like the Watts riots in Los Angeles, it empowered issues just like the rise of Reagan. It empowered an intense white response that went to help the conservative facet.”

King warned towards not solely bodily violence but additionally verbal violence and even towards “inner violence of spirit,” together with the impulse to humiliate our opponents. Activists underwent rigorous coaching to make sure they’d stay poised.

Lots of right this moment’s loudest progressives enjoyment of humiliating their opponents, sure that they occupy the ethical excessive floor at the same time as they use the GOP’s tone and techniques. I’ve been there. I do know a budget factors to be scored by shaming Republicans as a mass of fascists and neo-Nazis.

Vilification sells books, will get clicks, goes viral and turns bizarre Individuals towards each other. In the end, no matter which facet you’re arguing, stoking division with hate solely props up the established order.

It’s price remembering that individuals on the “different facet” are much less excessive than we predict; the general public face of politics — on TV and Twitter — doesn’t symbolize the bigger public, however its most fanatical components.

Once I known as Aslan after our panel, he advised me that when he referred to the “different facet,” he was pondering of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and her ilk, not the bizarre folks manipulated by them. He believes many who fall for Greene’s paranoid narratives could be remodeled by means of popular culture that humanizes their imagined enemies. The answer is attending to know the opposite: in actual life, and even on TV.

I really like the thought. However I wouldn’t depend on Hollywood to resolve issues, given its obsession with violence and lack of racial variety.

It’s going to take all of us. We should rekindle our religion within the humanity of our foes, and construct relationships. We should recall that King’s nonviolent actions weren’t passive. They weren’t advantage signaling. They had been arduously bodily and harmful. They price King his life.

We should revive his concepts and salvage his dream. We have to have courageous, empathetic, in-person confrontations with the opposite facet. That’s how we wage love. If we interpret polarization as an indication that the opposite facet isn’t price our time, there’s no hope for transformation.

@jeanguerre