Make October ‘Think Outside Your Tribe’ Month
With the 2022 midterm elections fast approaching, we have an October challenge to all our fellow Americans: Think outside your tribe, at least a little, this month.
“We the People” don’t agree on much these days, except for the fact that America’s culture and politics are deeply, perhaps dangerously, divided. Each side sees the other as occupying a bizarro, inverted intellectual moral and political universe. Even scarier – each side sees the other as a threat to democracy.
How did we get this way? Many books and doctoral theses – and countless articles – have been devoted to the phenomenon of hyper-partisanship and polarization. Some of this scholarship is solid and thought-provoking, while some of it is merely designed to contribute to our mutual alienation. The short answer, at least as far as the media is concerned, is that a blend of 21st century technology and ancient human nature has created a segregated experience for consumers of news, tailored to a person’s individual liking – and to our collective detriment.
Although there’s no easy fix, let’s make the month of October the time of year when we all dine outside – and cheat on – our curated smorgasbord of cable, print, podcaster, and Twitterati diet.
In so doing, we can bolster the work of some of the enlightened souls who are trying to appeal to what Abraham Lincoln famously called “the better angels of our nature.”
Inspired by Lincoln’s vision, and despairing that we are facing a second great crucible, a New York group called “Braver Angels” encourages Americans of divergent political outlooks to share a meal together. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace offers ideas to lessen the raging political fevers and “save America from itself.”
Our own Andrew Walworth, RealClearPolitics’ content officer and the moderator of our “RCP Takeaway” podcast, ends each Friday’s episode with an appeal to listeners to read at least one article published on our site “from a writer with whom you disagree.”
It’s a good place to start and won’t cost you a dime. So, let’s make that a thing for everyone, starting this month. Each day, we’re asking you to make it a discipline to read, listen to, or watch someone speaking from the other side of issues that most concern you.Read up on the concerns and priorities of the other side, which each side tends to ignore.
Where can you find such a conversation and pairing of rival media and authorities? RealClearPolitics.
Every day, RCP covers the biggest issues of the day, bringing you the best of the right, left, and center: news, opinion, polling, and on-air video clips – including those featuring commentators you love to hate and never watch.
In the short run, we admit, some of it might make you even angrier. But we submit that if you make it a habit to listen with an open mind you might learn that you share more with your fellow Americans on the other side of the aisle than you knew. You might also learn that your side is not infallible.
Or, as Ben Franklin put it, “Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.”
