It's OK to be able to change your mind

In his daily commentary on Jan. 21, veteran political commentator Chris Cilliza pointed to a recent poll by Gallup that reflected an 82-point partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats over approval of the job President Donald Trump is doing.

Overall, 89 percent of Republicans approved of the job the president is doing while 7 percent of Democrats feel the same way — the largest presidential approval gap in the poll’s 74-year history. Cilliza is quick to point out, correctly I will add, that this phenomenon is not an invention of the Trump presidency or something that has occurred during it.

“The 10 most partisan years in history have all occurred in the last 16 years, as measured by Gallup,” Cilliza writes in Jan. 16’s The Point. “Those 10 years include years from the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama as well as Trump.”

Cilliza notes that four post-World War II presidents — Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush — averaged more than a 40 percent approval rating from the opposite party. And from my own recollections, even the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan garnered more approval and support from the opposite sides of the aisle than we seem able to put together today.

This partisanship isn’t just manifested in the other Washington either. I see it in this state, in this region and locally. The revived discussion of dividing Washington into two different states is one outcome of this divisiveness.

It’s natural for people to hold different viewpoints and beliefs about how things should be. It’s probably even more so in a nation such as the United States, where — despite comments to the contrary — there is no one main group identity.

We are a melting pot of black, white, Hispanic and Asian, Catholic and Protestant — and the many subdivisions of the latter, Irish, Italian, German, Scottish, British, Egyptian, Hungarian, Russian or insert your country of origin here.

Was it always so? And if not, how and when did it start getting this way?

In his column, Cilliza points to the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton 21 years ago as a “broadly cited” beginning of our current polarization. I would go back further, to the 1970s and the emergence of the “Moral Majority” which not only aggressively sought to infuse religion into politics but by doing so, and using a specific brand of Christianity, really made government into a struggle of Good vs. Evil rather than simply running human affairs.

But it doesn’t matter where it started or how. What matters is how and when we resolve it.

I can’t help but thinking that we in the media have some culpability in this. We are, after all, the wordsmiths, the implementers and experts in using language to get a point across, to tell a story and to relay an idea.

How we do that can betray our own bias and agendas. Take for instance the phrase, “once again.” Harmless looking standing alone, but pair it with something like “In Olympia, Republicans/Democrats once again attempted to pass/passed” and you can begin to hear the voice of accusation of wrong doing or malfeasance when the reality is, one or other of the party is simply trying to legislate according to the beliefs they hold.

The phrases and words used don’t necessarily assign any blame or accusation on their own, but rather seek to insinuate that what is being done is somehow morally wrong, rather than a difference of opinion. And that’s where I think the partisanship begins — in believing that, first off, someone who believes differently than you is an opponent and second, that somehow their belief is immoral, when in fact it’s most likely simply a belief something would run better this way than that.

Where words and phrases interfere is with allowing a notion that other ideas could also be valid and useful in getting things done, at least as far as the various forms of governance and policy. They also interfere by raising the specter that compromise is a form of weakness and capitulation to immorality — rather than realizing not everything one wants can be had.

I don’t see this partisanship changing anytime soon, mainly because nobody really wants it to change. To make such a change, we have to be able to change our own minds while allowing others to change theirs without leaving the feeling that one of us is wrong.

And that’s a tall order right now.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].