I went through elementary school in the early eighties, during the formative years of the movement that would come to be known as "political correctness." My teachers, God love them, were totally keen on the idea and worked as hard as they could to recognize and celebrate the diversity of the students in their classrooms.
Unfortunately, we lived in a small, ethnically homogeneous town in southwestern Virginia, and in second grade there were three of us in Ms Branchaud's class who could concievably be considered "diversity." On our annual Culture Awareness Day, the three of us would be trotted up to the front of the class for a special show-and-tell, during which we would show off some cultural artifact demonstrating how we enrich the fabric of American society with our weird foreign ways. On this day, Benjamin (Jewish) wore a yarmulke to class. Kanaka (Indian) brought a small figurine of the Hindu god Ganesh. And I wore an elegant Korean hanbok, an elaborately embroidered silk garment that had been passed down through generations of my family to me.
Or, to put it in second-grade language: there was the guy with a frisbee on his head, the girl who prayed to elephants, and the boy in girl clothes. Needless to say, we got beaten up almost as soon as recess started.
I want to point out, this wasn't anything having to do with racism. It's just the nature of second-graders to mock and torment kids who exhibit any difference at all. The first kid in our class to start wearing glasses, for example, got into fights every day for weeks, until Bruce broke his arm playing touch football and we all got distracted by the cast. But I think this illustrates, on small scale, why the rhetoric of political correctness is failing ethnic minorities in America.
Politicians will often make grand, sweeping speeches about the virtue of "diversity". The ethnic and cultural diversity of America, they will argue, adds vitality to American culture by offering fresh opinions and new points of view.
Hogwash. Diversity, as far as it goes, isn't a virtue at all. It's already an undeniable fact of life for residents of almost all American cities that this country is no longer a white, Christian, Anglo nation, if it ever was. "Diversity" takes no work. Moreover, race riots, like the one that gutted Los Angeles' Koreatown in 1992, are still possible even in the most ethnically diverse of American cities.
"Tolerance", I suppose, is a bit better. "Tolerance" at least moves us away from outright violence between minority groups. But mere tolerance is still not the same thing as acceptance. Consider the recent history of the gay culture in America. Will and Grace has been a hit sitcom since 1998. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the cultural phenomenon of the year last year. Ellen Degeneres' eponymous talk show has already won four Emmys in its first season on the air. Tolerance of gay culture -- or at least, of depictions of gay people in the mass media -- is at an all-time high.
But as soon as homosexual couples start demanding the right to have their relationships recognized by the law in the same manner as their heterosexual counterparts, states start passing laws defending the institution of marriage from being sullied by this queer taint. The apparent "tolerance" of gays in America is still, at best, a superficial, begrudging acknowledgment of our existence. Former blogger noahlogue went further and once referred to Queer Eye as a kind of gay minstrel show -- straight culture's ironic and patronizing appropriation of those aspects of gay culture it finds humorous or useful.
I’d like to suggest that we stop thinking about diversity and tolerance as if they are ends in themselves. If American society values diversity at all (and democracy inherently should), it has to be in the context of an active, engaged pluralism in which individual cultures interact substantively with one another while preserving their own unique and valuable aspects. I would argue that the cultivation of this intercultural dialogue should be the real ultimate goal of all identity politics.
Now you see where I’m going with this.
Diversity isn’t a goal; it’s an undeniable fact of life in modern America. But multiculturalism without intercultural understanding is dangerous, as different cultures have different and often incompatible values and interests. Recent history provides any number of examples of multicultural nations where internecine tensions remain unaddressed and eventually turn into ethnic violence. And the problem with tolerance alone without a commitment to dialogue is that it doesn’t provide a way for groups in conflict to cultivate a truly pluralistic common society.
Political values, like all social values, are culturally contingent, and insofar as American society can be thought to consist of competing “red” and “blue” political cultures, I would argue that American political discourse between liberals and conservatives demands the same kind of active engagement that the interaction of any cultures in conflict do.
What’s most upsetting about the vitrolic tenor of American political discourse, for me, is how much it sounds like the rhetoric of ethnic conflict. Both liberals and conservatives accuse one another of being immoral, leading to a contemptuous sort of superiority complex. For pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Roger Moore, and increasingly the webloggers who attempt to emulate them, political discourse is all about belittling their interlocutors and suggesting that their opponents are not only less ethical and less rational than they are themselves, but also somehow less human.
The internet has this amazing unrealized potential to become just the sort of meeting space where pluralism can flourish. Getting to know how The Other Side thinks about an issue could be as easy as hopping over to a conservative chat room or reading through any of the now countless gay blogs on the net. And message boards, to me, seem like they could be the perfect place for people from different backrounds and different political cultures to interact.
But as it stands now, the internet may only be helping to exacerbate the problem, because it's so easy for me to limit my reading to only those blogs that I already agree with. Why should I have an open mind, I might think, since there are all these people who already agree with me?
So while we here at specialagency have been a little obsessed with how the political discourse in America is broken, I'd like to suggest that the problem is really much deeper. People naturally just aren't good at dealing with people who are different from themselves, and the ability to be open-minded when confronted with difference is something that has to be learned. The impulse that drives us to be intolerant -- whether this manifests as racism, homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, or poisonous political rhetoric -- is always the same, and, unfortunately, all too human.
Ralph Wiley died yesterday at the age of 52.
Wiley has been a fixture on Page 2 for as long as there's been a Page 2. Last night, while watching the start of Game 4 of the NBA Finals, something hit. He succumbed to heart failure a short while later.
R-Dub could write. Check him out.
There's a collection of thoughts here from people who actually knew him. Bill Simmons got to me. Just a few weeks ago he and Ralph spent the day e-mailing back and forth about the NBA Playoffs. Good times. More recently they teamed up for a live chat, after Larry Bird's recent remarks. Those two were just getting good for each other. When Simmons wrote about the Simpson trial at the end of last week, he was himself. Mostly. There's a depth in that piece, almost buried, that you don't usually get from the Sports Guy. I thought then that this thing with Wiley was working well. It's a shame.
Thanks for the words, Ralph.
Who am I to ignore a challenge from Ms. Bond? She points to this article in today's Times, which suggests that differences between people on either side of the political divide aren't that significant. The author, John Tierney, cites a forthcoming book, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, and says:
The book presents evidence that voters in red and blue America are not far apart. Majorities in both places support stricter gun control as well as the death penalty; they strongly oppose giving blacks preference in hiring while also wanting the government to guarantee that blacks are treated fairly by employers. They're against outlawing abortion completely or allowing it under any circumstances, and their opinions on abortion have been fairly stable for three decades. Virtually identical majorities of Blues and Reds don't want a single party controlling the White House and Congress.
I don't have any reason to disagree. There are key philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats, but these generally relate to means, not ends. In the article, Professor Alan Wolfe asserts that gay rights are "the great exception" to this trend, but there is evidence that attitudes are softening on this issue as well. Tierny paints a picture of a nation in which we all basically get along, but are driven to opposition by the political parties and the chattering class.
What's all this about unprecedented vitriol in political discourse, then? Part of the answer, I think, is in this article by Tim Noah, published in Slate two months ago. In an article on the extent to which individual counties are becoming increasingly politically homogenous, Noah writes, "The likelihood that you will ever argue politics with your neighbor is diminishing rapidly, because it's less and less likely that, politically, you and your neighbor will ever disagree." Having divided the past seven years between Cambridge, Berkeley, and Long Island, I know exactly what he means. In the first two places I feel terribly conservative, while in the third I feel almost dangerously liberal. But while I suspect that the crews from Charlie's Kitchen (in the heart of Harvard Square) and Pier 44 (on Long Island's Great South Bay) would view each other with a good deal of suspicion, there's not a great deal of difference in what they want for this country. And that's exactly why I'm so concerned about how we talk to one another.
Tierney paints a picture of political elites engaged in an ugly rhetorical war while Billy Average shrugs and goes about his business. He blames special interest groups and gerrymandered safe seats for placing undue favor on candidates at the extreme of each party. I'm not so sure it's that simple. If political parties are increasingly creatures of their membership, as demonstrated by the rise of the primary system at the expense of party bosses, it's hard to say that elected leaders are not representative of the parties that back them. That's not to say that many people wouldn't prefer more moderate alternatives, but I'm unwilling to let the electorate off the hook for democratic choices. President Bush's victory over Senator McCain in 2000 was a victory for extremistm over moderation, but the same cannot be said of Senator Kerry's triumph in this year's Democratic horserace. The only point there, I think, is that primaries don't necessarily promote candidates on the extremes; the voters have to be willing accomplices.
As further evidence of the narrow gap between Republicans and Democrats, Tierney points to the willingness of voters to support candidates from each party. He says, "The six bluest states in 2000, the ones where George W. Bush fared worst - Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut and Maryland - all have Republican governors. Even California went red last year when Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, became governor." I don't believe it's a coincidence that there's a lot of shoreline in those six states. What the article misses, and I believe is crucial, is that our politics are regionally influenced more than anything else. I suspect that on a fundamental level, Governor Pataki of New York has a lot more in common with Senator Schumer than he does with Senator Lott. The most divisive aspect of our two-party system is that the Republicans and Democrats are expected to function on both state and national levels. As such, local and statewide elections are -- whether implicily or explicitly -- influenced by the views of people from all corners of the country. As long as southern, evangelical Republicans are vehemently opposed to abortion, the issue cannot be truly closed even in places much closer to consensus on the issue. Democrats enthusiastically welcomed Congresswoman Herseth's recent victory in South Dakota, but as far as I can tell, my Republican governor is more liberal than she is. It's a dangerous time when people are inclined to support people they would otherwise oppose on the basis of party affiliation.
This isn't necessarily anything new, but I think regional differences have been accelerated and magnified by the technological innovations of the last half century. People are much more likely to move these days, and it seems that when they do move, they wind up with neighbors more like themselves than before. The Internet has created such an echo chamber that it's possible to spend the whole day communicating and never encounter a truly broad range of opinion. It doesn't particularly matter that there's not much difference in ideology across the spectrum: in my experience -- and this experience seems similar to that of others -- people are very unlikely to consider what other people think about an issue. It's not just that people are agreeing to disagree; there's a feeling on both sides that people who disagree are not just wrong, they're bad people.
There's a reason for this, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. So much rhetoric of both liberals and conservatives is tinged with alienation. Both sides feel that mainstream America represents someone other than them. So who does it represent? Does our democracy pander to an aggregate that doesn't exist in reality? Or are people on both sides wildly overreacting in a quest for complete victory? Representative democracy never has been and never will be the best way to achieve full implemenation of one side's agenda, but it seems to me that compromise is increasingly dropping out of the vocabulary. Noah closes his article with:
What do all these numbers mean? They mean that within the universe of people who vote in presidential elections, nearly half of us are likely to be smug in our political views, while nearly one-third of us are likely to feel absolutely certain that the winds of history are at our back, rendering us utterly boorish. That's quite a market for political candidates and radio talk-show hosts to tap. Indeed, they'd be fools not to.
I do feel that the level of antagonism in political discourse is uncommonly high, and I worry that this division is fueled by something that transcends the issues of the day. If this is the case, merely pointing out the similarities between the agendas of Republicans and Democrats is not enough, as they're largely irrelevant. What's vital, and much more difficult, is to discover why people who might generally be able to find common ground are increasingly unwilling to do so.