A Modest Suggestion for the Politically Inclined

I have a suggestion for those who are politically interested: surround yourself with people who are disagreeable.  Surround yourself with a lot of them.

That means that if you’re in college, odds are you should be seeking people who go to meetings of College Republicans (yes, those people exist, in surprisingly large number).  If you’re a working adult who find yourself getting your news from Fox News, you should be looking for people who worship MSNBC (those also exist, although increasingly in smaller number).

Why do I think it’s a good idea to become ideologically uncomfortable among the company you keep? Because only the people with whom you’ll never fully see eye-to-eye can provide you a sense of self-perspective, keep you honest and make you empathetic.

I know this from personal experience.

Ever since college, then graduate school and now in my career, I’ve been surrounded by people who are borderline socialists who think President Obama isn’t liberal enough.  These good friends of mine at some point became hopelessly misguided, but I also concede that they are intelligent people perfectly capable of articulating rational and coherent thought.  It is that realization that has kept me thinking my views may be, just may be, a bit extreme and therefore, I should keep a sense of humor about them.

But reasons for listening to voices that are disagreeable goes much deeper than needing to learn how to agree to disagree. One really needs a voice from a mind that is not his own to gain a self-perspective because only such a different voice can ask the right questions.

Take, for example, the Hillary Clinton e-mail-server-at-home scandal.  The question that liberals should be asking about this issue is not whether the person they hope would become the first female president of the United States did anything illegal or only did what all other cabinet members did.  Rather, the question for liberals to objectively judge the issue is this: how would they think of Dick Cheney saying, “Trust me, I’ve provided all e-mails relating to the Iraq War that’s stored in my server in Wisconsin from which I’ve only deleted e-mails that I have judged to be personal.”

Or take President Obama’s use of executive orders to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.  The question that conservatives should be asking about this is not whether the act to unilaterally implement a policy they dislike by a president they detest was an unconstitutional executive overreach.  Rather, the right question is whether they supported Ronald Reagan using an executive order to deny federal funding for organizations that support abortion or giving much of the legal authority the National Security Agency has today.

If you’re remotely interested in being objective, not only do these questions need to be asked, but they need to be answered honestly.  The dialogue can’t end up as a meaningless exercise of conjuring up distinctions without differences.   If your ultimate honest answer as a liberal is “I trust Hillary Clinton but not Dick Cheney,” that’s perfectly fine, but you need to concede that such answer leaves you on no stronger moral footing than my answer that I like Reagan’s policies but not Obama’s.  Both responses ultimately come down to partisan bias.

I also suspect that surrounding yourself with disagreeable people you like will make you behave more civilly.  After all, you usually don’t engage in name-calling with people you like.

Some very vocal conservatives have called President Obama very unflattering things for his rudderless foreign policy of appeasement, yet I have friends who hold very similar world views.  I don’t think my friends, like Obama, are “un-American” or “Muslim” (as if that was such a terrible thing) for thinking like that; I just think they’re clueless.  And I’d like to believe that my friends that I have judged as clueless do not think of me as a racist because for believing that the presidency of Barack Obama, who just happened to be black, has only been a step above disaster.

One thing that’s consistent across people of all ideology on the streets is that they always complain about the toxic rhetoric in Washington.  Yet what’s ironic about this complaint is that the 535 federally elected officials, who come from every part of the United States representing vastly different views from Birmingham, Alabama to San Francisco, California, are in a far more ideologically diverse environment than most of us ever put ourselves in.

Liberals on the streets religiously read Paul Krugman, a partisan hack who has never seen a Democratic policy he didn’t like, and conservatives worship Rush Limbaugh, a man who has never said much of anything too insightful.  My modest suggestion would be for liberals to listen to Limbaugh and conservatives to read Krugman.  That won’t be time well spent, but at least that’ll give them the opportunity to see how preposterous their extreme world view is after experiencing the equivalent on the other side of the isle.