You can be angry, but be fair and listen to others

Americans have spent a lot of time fuming these past few weeks. I know I did. A flurry of executive actions by President Donald Trump saw the reinstatement of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines, a press blackout and grant-freezing at the Environmental Protection Agency, a head-scratching reorganization of the National Security Council, a backward withdraw of funding for essential aid organizations in the developing world and a broad-stroked travel ban that at its best bars legal U.S. residents from returning home and at its worst sees America turning its back on its founding principles.

But many Americans also spent a lot of time cheering this week. After all, pipelines bring jobs, EPA grant money can be redirected to infrastructure projects that hasten economic growth, the NSC needs a shake-up in the way it crafts policy to deal with the complex threat of terrorism, funding for aid organizations may be better spent on domestic programs and allowing immigration from countries with interests hostile to our own while crafting immigration policy is akin to building a plane while flying it.

Full disclosure: I winced typing that second paragraph without qualifying it. But I’d be doing a disservice to readers and myself by pretending there isn’t some rationale to the arguments in favor of the policies I oppose. There are intelligent people across the political spectrum, and their numbers don’t taper any more to the right than they do the left. Civil discourse depends on mutual acknowledgement of that fact, but today it seems such acknowledgement has eroded.

Look no further than the opening paragraphs of this piece to feel the disconnect for yourself.

If you’re anything like me, the second paragraph isn’t only misguided, but it’s angering, and I suspect the reverse holds true for my right-leaning counterpart. “You’d have to be crazy not to see how obviously wrong that is!” I hear my evil twin muttering under his breath.

Why must this be the case, though? To assume my opposition is crazy is to preclude any possibility of debate or compromise, and thus to excuse myself of the hard work both require.

During the election season, we on the left were particularly guilty of this mistake, to our own detriment. I wouldn’t pretend to know the causes of Trump’s election, but a plausible contributing factor seems to be a curt dismissal of the problems felt by swaths of rural America. So when voters in Mississippi cite concern over a looming threat of terrorism, rather than reach out, sympathize and engage them in debate about whether such a threat really looms, we rattle off a list of terror statistics and turn away derisively from those unwilling to acquiesce to our side.

After Trump’s election, this trend has continued. The heels-in-the-ground objection with which we respond to unacceptable decisions (the appointment of a climate change denier to EPA chief, the withdrawal of funding from aid organizations essential for the reproductive health of whole regions, etc.) is being overextended to debatable ones (a border wall, the pipelines). While I categorically oppose both the former and the latter policies, I recognize they hinge on substantively different beliefs: the first, on science denial and an outdated view of women’s rights; the second, on debatable differences in immigration and economic policy.

We have four years of this, and it isn’t going to get easier. We cannot wait until a new president takes office to address our division; we need to deal with it now, and the first step in that process is understanding that smart people disagree with us for good reasons. It is possible to be both angry and fair, to advocate passionately for the policies we support without plugging our ears to their counterarguments. In doing so, maybe we’d realize there’s more value in celebrating and confronting our division than in eliminating it.

Champe Barton is a UF economics and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience junior. His column appears on Thursdays.