Love seems overrated these days. Intense political partisanship has infected our country. People from all sides of the political spectrum are failing to recognize the common bond they share with their fellow U.S. citizens, utilizing any and all tools at their disposal to attack their opponents. Political partisans have become gymnasts, contorting themselves into all sorts of contradictory positions in their efforts to defeat the other side. This kind of behavior is poison for democracy.
When citizens of different ideological persuasions begin seeing the other side as illegitimate or evil, they’ll do whatever it takes to defeat them. They’ll shed core principles and disregard rules until suddenly the democratic process becomes a life-or-death battle for control. Though intense partisanship feels good and righteous in the short-term to those who soak in it, it is a road that leads to nowhere but decay.
That is our core problem. Hatred and tribalism feel too good to let go of, especially when our teams are tied up in substantive moral questions about the nature of reality and the purpose of government. The desire to find a group and fight vociferously for it and its purported values is deeply ingrained in human nature. The feeling of knowing one is right and fighting for the right team is intoxicating. Our brains are wired with cognitive blind spots that compel us to reject new evidence and seek out only that evidence which confirms our previously held beliefs. As a result, we become righteous crusaders, believing what we believe only because we believed it before, and taking these principles as articles of faith in our separate, mutually exclusive, political religions.
These feelings are hard to combat. Being on a team and fighting for what you believe in is right is an integral part of being a human being. That desire can devolve into an almost pathological need to defeat those who disagree with us, even if we’re not sure ourselves about the foundations of our value systems. This can confuse us, because as a result of our propensity to sort people into categories of good and evil, we assume that those who don’t agree with us must have malicious intent, that they couldn’t possibly view themselves the same way we view ourselves: righteous. But of course they do. Much evil has been done in this world by men and women who knew — who were sure — they were doing the right thing. “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith,” writes the science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut. “I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
We must always question our assumptions about the world, ourselves and other people. We must always look for new evidence and challenge ourselves to see the world how others might see it, to submit our own beliefs and values to rigorous evaluation. But most importantly, we must meet our fellow human beings with open minds and open hearts. To combat the hatred that is bubbling in the toxic swamp of partisan politics, we must approach our interactions with our fellow U.S. citizens with love and patience. This does not mean that one must sacrifice his or her values. It does not mean one should stop fighting to see his or her ideals made real in this world. What it does mean is that we must live every day knowing that we are engaged in a grand human project, in which each one of us is just a small part. It means we should all learn the virtue of humility when approaching the biggest challenges that lie in our future. It means doing your best to find out what is right, even if it leads you to challenge your orthodoxy. If we keep our hearts open and our minds unclouded, we’ll do a great service to ourselves, our country, our communities and our world.
Aaron Bondar is a sophomore double-majoring in economics and political science.