Can/should we talk to each other?

 Guest wrote some weeks ago: 

I despise Trump and all his works, but once you stop talking to your opponents, the only further possible step is violence, so I reject that.

Here are a pair of essays on how we need to talk to each other, and one essay on why not. 

George Ball: 

1. https://www.insidernj.com/gop-ffebly-enabling-corrosive-acid-drip-top-down/ 

2. https://www.insidernj.com/race-as-reconciliation/ 

 Rebecca Solnit: 

3. https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-on-not-meeting-nazis-halfway/

A little from each side.

Ball: 

We better start talking to each other, even if we often can’t find common ground. Because if groups this large {Trump, Biden voters} and this divided do not work harder at validating and accepting each other as human beings, then we will not have a country. Or a future.

You do not have to be a moron to share Trump’s vision of America, or an antifa cancel culture socialist to support Biden’s.  There are millions of well- meaning people with different life experiences that inform their views.  We can agree to disagree without questioning each other’s humanity.  And many of us are willing to listen so long as they, too, are heard.  Whether you do so is a matter of individual choice about how you want to live and what you want this country to be.  No group or movement can make that decision for you.  In America, we are that movement. All 330,000,000 million of us. And we always have been.

Solnit: 

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.    

 

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?