“There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy /
There's only you and me and we just disagree”
— Dave Mason, “We Just Disagree”
Sounds great. Learn to live in peace and stop all the verbal and physical fighting. Including the horribly embarrassing displays of violence in the halls of Congress just the other day.
Stop questioning each others’ intentions and motivations, honesty and patriotism. Listen to one another. Seek to understand.
Don’t expect easy unanimity on important issues. But move together into a future where reason and compromise, not polarization and violence, steer our course.
Clearly, it is the right goal. Something to cling to as we gather at lengthened tables to give a unified thanks. To remember as we move to the season of “peace on earth and good will to men.”
Something to bring to family gatherings that might otherwise devolve into bad blood among those who should love each other the most.
There’s just one problem. There are bad guys out there. Right outside our door.
Pretending there aren’t won’t solve anything. It will just empower the villains to solve future disagreements by pushing their political rivals aside, into prison, out of the country. All while sincere peacekeepers among us try to solve this threat by offering the mad dogs a hug.
The most obvious bad guy out there right now is the most recent former president of the United States.
This is a person who called for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021. He is under more criminal indictments than we can count.
A candidate who takes whole pages out of classic fascist literature, calling his rivals “vermin.” Accuses immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.” Sends his PR people out to threaten that all those who disagree with him “will be crushed.”
Yet he is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024, polling ahead of the incumbent in some key states.
Meanwhile, members of Congress have engaged in very public shoving matches and near fistfights. The war between Hamas and Israel half a world away has left innocent Jews and Muslims in the U.S. — and the vast majority of both groups are innocent — afraid for their lives.
Into these headwinds has Utah Gov. Spencer Cox launched his Disagree Better campaign. Known online, where hashtags are expected and spaces between words archaic, as #DisagreeBetter.
Cox, a Republican, is this year’s chairman of the National Governors Association. In partnership with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat and this year’s NGA vice chair, he is using that bully pulpit to call for a deescalation of political rhetoric in America.
Cox and Polis have drawn many other governors of both parties to their cause. All correctly argue that heated disagreements, personal attacks, assumptions of bad intent, aren’t just unpleasant. They don’t just repel good people from public life and political participation. They stand very much in the way of making self-government work.
“We know that conflict resolution takes work and involves difficult conversations,” Cox said. “It’s much easier to sow division than to persuade or find solutions. But we also know that no one ever changed someone’s mind by attacking them.”
True that.
Too bad that the de facto leader of Cox’s own political party neither preaches nor practices any of it.
It will be difficult for Cox and Friends to get people to refrain from shouting “Fire!” In a crowded theater when the lobby is, indeed, ablaze.
But the Disagree Better campaign contains some good advice for all of us. Tune out of the social media echo chambers and turn away from extremist cable channels and websites.
Reach out to people with whom you disagree, especially in your own community, your own family, and maybe find out that you really aren’t that far apart on many things.
We might actually Disagree Better if we can be led to mostly ignore the most recent Republican president and remember the first one.
Abraham Lincoln did not just want us all to get along. He would not sit still for the expansion of slavery. He did not acquiesce to the division of the Union. But he is remembered for expressing sentiments that ring true today.
That we should act “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” To “bind up the nation’s wounds.”
With the hope that “every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land” will again be touched “by the better angels of our nature.”
And pass the gravy bowl carefully.
