There's a tendency on this site and others, and among my friends, to cast all Republicans as being cut from a different cloth, as being wholly evil, as though their decision about their political party made them a member of another species. I have a hard time doing this, despite my Democratic upbringing, my lifetime as a liberal, my gradual movement leftward as I have grown and learned more. Partly, perhaps it's because my family has always been an outsider group in our extended family, and I have strong disagreements, to varying degrees, with most of my relatives. When your family and your politics conflict, the kind of absolutism that we might want, for sake of clarity, becomes not just inconvenient, but impossible - if family is something that you value, which it is for most people.
With our families, we tend to seek common ground, because we need to coexist. But it's not just family with whom we share that need. Over the flip I'll describe a recent interaction with a Republican stranger, and what it taught me.
I was recently doing my laundry at the local laundromat, and went to get a cup of coffee at a store in the same shopping center (yes, you can actually leave your laundry to wash - a welcome change from previous places I've lived). The coffee was being brewed, and a woman asked about a T-shirt I was wearing, a shirt that had on it an activist-oriented, but non-partisan and non-confrontational slogan. We started talking, and she said that she was a very politically-minded person. I assumed at first that she was a limousine liberal type (I live in Princeton, and there are plenty of those around, and she looked the part), but it turned out that she was a member of the Princeton Republican Committee. As we spoke, it became clear that many of the same issues were on our minds - Iraq, the War on Terror, the media - but there were certainly other issues, such as poverty, education, and the environment, that were not discussed.
I'm sure she and I would have voted differently on many issues (especially related to business and the environment, if I know my region well), but we had a good conversation about the mainstream media, the politics of fear, the current leadership. What really struck me was how we overlapped on so many issues, and that we both framed the issues as open questions - what is the role of the media? How do we prevent terrorist attacks? How can we balance safety and liberty?
Again, in the end, our answers would probably be different. We didn't get that far. But what I realized is that the absolutism that we infer from reading the nasty right-wing blogs, watching the nasty right-wing politicans and TV hosts, and even from the absolutism that we find on our own side, makes "Republicans" seem much more ossified in their beliefs than they necessarily are. This story doesn't provide any data to suggest that everyone is as open-minded, or seemingly so, as the woman with whom I spoke. But I do feel that it's important not to assume that the public faces of the Republican Party are the faces that best represent the dialogues and inner monologues of Americans, even in the Red parts of the country, or the Red counties in our Blue states.
When we really roll out the 50 State Solution, it's going to involve a lot of dialogue with a lot of people. It's going to involve listening, and letting people realize that what is important to them isn't likely to be what the politicians want to tell them is important. In the end, I think we have a lot more common ground than we realize. And it will be critical to find that common ground, and to speak to each other on those issues.
Now, I'm not saying that everyone can talk to everyone. One critical element is going to be to find the threads that connect us across various lines. So I shouldn't be the one to go talk to the Evangelicals, because I'm a Jew from New York City. We simply won't have a lot of common ground. But maybe I can go talk to the Lieberman Dems who vote on Israel - that's half my family. Even if we're villifying those people now, they are very much in our camp on a lot of issues. And it's critical that we speak to each group on their own terms, which means finding the people on our side who share those terms, instead of getting people to put on masks and dress up like a Republican, or to dismiss the "others" altogether.
