Haven’t seen this mentioned here. I don’t know much about Nancy Gibbs or the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, but I read Gibbs’ column in the Washington Post and liked what she had to say about dealing with friends and family who have seen the light with respect to Trump. I actually don’t know that I know anyone who voted for Trump (my family is 99% progressive and I live in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, a dyed-in-the-wool haven for liberals), but obviously they’re out there, and as far as I’m concerned, any time one of them has a change of political heart an angel gets their wings. No illusions about what such a one-time change may mean for the longterm health of that person’s soul, but it gives me a little bit of hope for the fate of the nation. Anyway, I particularly liked the last paragraph of Gibbs’ piece:
There’s no room for complexity on Twitter, and it has all but vanished from our politics, which grow ever more virtual and, therefore, unpracticed with real people. But complexity is where progress incubates, where compromise lives, where hope resides.
Sometimes I think compromise is over-rated, but I’m a big believer in allowing for complexity in human beings, and I never really thought about it as an incubator for progress.