We often hear lip service paid to “finding common ground” in political disputes. If only pro-lifers and pro-choicers could sit down and find a compromise, we could end decades of anger and mistrust. If only advocates for and opponents of intervention in Ukraine would meet face-to-face, we could find a middle path that would satisfy everyone. Name any hot issue you want, there will always be someone who advocates for a moderate solution to the problem that involves both sides accepting compromise.
There are some issues for which compromise is both possible and preferable. But it’s simply unrealistic to believe that, in matters of policy linked to deeply held beliefs, we’ll be able to meet each other in the middle. And we shouldn’t even want to find common ground on some matters. For example, there was no morally acceptable common ground to be found on the matter of whether or not one human being could be owned by another. That’s easy to say in hindsight. The Civil War decided the matter, and with time virtually all of the country conceded that slavery is an abomination. But in the mid-nineteenth century, plenty of Northerners and Southerners felt that compromise was preferable to war.
Now Americans seem ready to go to war with each other on a whole raft of issues: abortion, the composition of the judiciary, voting rights, the power of administrative agencies, and on and on. And then there’s the culture war. How can we temper partisan animosity if compromise simply is not possible? Further, how can we meet each other in good faith if my preferred policy is demonstrably harmful to you? In this clip, John Wood Jr., national ambassador for Braver Angels, takes up the conundrum. He says the solution is not necessarily to seek middle ground in policy but to initiate a “spiritual transformation in our attitudes toward one another.” That sounds rather lofty, but tensions in America are now so high that “spiritual transformation” may be more plausible a solution than political compromise.
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GLENN: Either we find a way to get along or we fight each other. That might be almost a tautology. If we don't find a way of getting along, we will be at each other's throats. I'm just wondering if there aren't some issues for which there is no way to get along. One side has to prevail. I'm thinking of slavery and the Civil War and asking myself the question: Could the Civil War have been avoided? And I'm not sure I can make the case that it could have been avoided, that there was “compromise” that was possible given the array of forces and interests and values as they stood in 1860, 1861. I don't know.
Trump is trying to make this move on abortion. He's saying it's going to the states. He's saying, “I'm not for a national ban on abortion, I'm for letting the states sort it out.” You could see where that might be a kind of “can't we all just get along” solution. You’ve got 50 jurisdictions, it's democratic, people differ between Kentucky and Massachusetts, let's let them sort it out. “You don't have to win,” could be the mantra. You don't have to have an imposition of your values on everybody. You can let people out.
But I doubt it. I doubt it seriously. I mentioned some of the foreign policy fiascos. I don't know how you finesse the deep conflicts on this antisemitism question. On the one hand, you've got people who are saying, “You want the destruction of Israel. You're pro-Hamas.” On the other hand, you've got people who are saying, “Civilian slaughter. You need to ceasefire.” I'm not sure there's a difference to be split there.
And you say “mutual respect even if we can't agree.” I saw your passionate speech at the convention, the excerpts from it in that little short that you linked me to. And you were quite in Baptist preacher mode. I don't know if you've got a Baptist preacher in your background there, but you were really holding forth on behalf of the idea that we don't have to agree, but we can at least recognize that we're not bad people just because we don't agree with each other about this or that.
Okay, I can agree with that. But how much traction does that have when the conflicts that we're talking about are as sharply drawn as those that I've been referring to just now?
JOHN WOOD JR.: Yeah. Fairly few people disagree with that premise. But then at scale it becomes a very difficult idea to sell to the larger political world. I for one think it does cut against the entrenched interests of the political media and the political parties, just given the business model of those institutions being rooted in balkanizing the American people to begin with.
But then too, just to your point about slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, I think that many people wrestle with this idea of, at some point you have to take a stand against evil. Or at the very least, at some point the differences between us are so deeply entrenched that perhaps conflict of an uglier sort is inevitable. Even if you don't want to believe that's true, you might slip into not being able to see how it could be any other way.
I think that, for me, I do have this sense that one thing that is vital to my own understanding of human nature is that conscience is a real thing. I refer to the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and its substance as a guiding light for me in understanding this. The foundation of philosophical nonviolence for Dr. King was this idea that love is a spiritual force that can affect social transformation, that in being able to signal goodwill to your opponent, you're able to do two things. One, you maximize your ability to be able to speak to that individual's conscience by showing him that even if you are in disagreement, you are not fundamentally his enemy. And that, two, even if you fail to move your opponent in the space of a single interaction or encounter, you at least alleviate from yourself the burden of hatred, judgment, fear, and contempt.
In the era of slavery, you did have an issue that, as it happened, war was the pathway towards the liberation of the slaves. It's hard to prove a negative, but what also pre-existed the Civil War was a deep culture of contempt and polarization that existed between the North and the South not just along political lines but along cultural lines. It was a different class of Anglo immigrants who populated the North and populated the South. Folks, in reference, Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks & White Liberals and so forth for some analysis on that front.
There were deep religious, philosophical, and cultural divisions that eroded the relationship between Northerners and Southerners in America such that any sort of moral reconciliation on the subject of slavery, if it were possible in the abstract, could never have been possible in the culture of contempt that pre-existed the advent of Abraham Lincoln. So it's hard to answer that question definitively, but I do believe that.
And see, part of the difficulty here too is that eventually you come back to the first principles of religion and philosophy. I do believe that the answer here lies in the deeper questions of how it is you summon forth the better angels of our nature, how it is you summon forth our deeper commitment to the idea that we can see the goodness in each other, regardless of how ugly we are and how ugly we act on the surface or how reprehensible our views are. The reason I speak like the Baptist preacher when I get up there on the stage, Glenn, is because I am trying to call forth the Holy Spirit a little bit, or to allow it to be called forth through me. It takes a revival and not necessarily merely consensus meetings on abortion or policy. That's not really the test, even if it's a desirable outcome.
What we need in America is a revival. What we need in America is, even if you're not religious, a spiritual transformation in our attitudes towards one another, such that we are no longer content to believe that our humanity is defined by our politics.
That's the message. That has to get through. Because otherwise the threshold is too high. The threshold is too high if we have to achieve bipartisan alignment on all the cultural issues and all the policy issues in ways to where nobody any longer feels morally offended by anything anybody else thinks or believes, if we have to come to a place to where the material impacts of our politics no longer harm each other.
If I believe that we should defund the police, and that results in an increase in crime and murder in a certain municipality, you would have a reasonable basis for not forgiving me for ever having endorsed that position. Because in the way I'm drawing out this hypothetical context, what I believe politically materially harms you.
If I believe that we should shut down the border, and suddenly you've got relatives who are trying to get in looking for a better life or good people who want to join their family on the other side of the border, that can't happen because I've decided to support a position that's antithetical to your interests and that of your family. You may have some grounds for not forgiving me for that, right?
But if we get stuck there, then violence is the only way to break the impasse. And that's what I return to. I feel—and maybe I'm going through my own little identity crisis in all this—but I do feel that part of the reality here is trying to introduce a spiritual and a moral approach to a political and material universe. And I think that's very much needed.
Opening the door for the conversation to expand in that way, I think, is the challenge. And so again I go back to Dr. King, because prior to Martin Luther King Jr., the nonviolent movement, the civil rights efforts as they were led by Roy Wilkins and the NAACP and A. Philip Randolph and great men of that stature were nevertheless principally a legal and a political move. But the real transformation in the heart of America—and again, this isn't to say that Dr. King and the nonviolent movement solved everything, and that's a larger conversation, it didn't become ...
He was assassinated, after all.
No, you're right to mention that. But of course, even in that sacrifice, it solidified the moral case that he was making in the spiritual terms that he was making it, I believe. This idea that if we are committed to seeing the dignity in our opponents, we can push forward the material policies of American society in ways that reflect that. And even if we disagree on that, we can still find a way to strive towards the beloved community across those divisions.
If, as spiral88802 assesses, inter alia that police and soldiers will "obey orders" and shoot to US civilians then a civil war will rage for a while but the police and soldiers will be defeated. They will also face the consequences. A vast majority of armed US citizenry will fight back and when it starts it won't stop. The 'left-wing' factions will be utterly obliterated. I cannot see things progressing as they are. On a global scale, 'left-wing' philosophy is doomed.
Quite a lot of platitudes here, ultimately pretty shallow stuff.