I went to sleep on November 8th before the presidency was called. I was too tired and apathetic to keep myself awake to see the results (as I had a strong dislike for both candidates), and I knew that all I had to do in the morning was open up Facebook to see what happened. However, the rage that ensued on my feed the next day was appalling: The usual short remarks from Democrats about how Republicans are all "racist, uneducated white men" and from Republicans about how Democrats are "whiny, dependent millennials" escalated to long posts of how each side is directly responsible for the deterioration of our great country.
It made my heart physically ache to see such a fiery divide occur.
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Stephen Colbert ended his show on election night talking about how poisonous our politics have become: We drink a little bit of the political poison each election, just enough to hate the opposing side. “There’s a gentle high to the condemnation,” he says, but this year “we overdosed… we drank too much of the poison.”
55% of Democrats and 49% of Republicans say that they are legitimately afraid of the other party, and 4 in 10 people believe that the political views of their opposing party are so "misguided that they threaten the nation's well-being." A 2014 Stanford study showed that political views - more than race or religion - dictate whether or not someone finds a stranger to be trustworthy.
We dehumanize those who think differently than we do [ironically] in attempts to show our character and belief system to be superior to those we accuse of dehumanizing us, resulting in a circular argument that only escalates with time. Liberal and conservative media sources fuel confirmation bias in both parties, and when we shove the faces of those who disagree with us into our pile of biased facts, a backfire effect occurs leaving both sides angrier than before and more convinced that their opinion is correct.
This is the angry nation we have all helped to create.
Up until around the 1960s, political moderation was the norm in American politics, with both parties being composed of liberal and conservative party members. After a series of elections in the 60s, liberal Democrats got the upper hand in Congress over the conservatives in their party, causing a domino effect that lead to the people realigning and splitting strictly into “liberal” and “conservative” sides. Since polarization seems to establish itself from the bottom up, politicians in each party started to polarize to align with the people, laying the foundation for the politics we see today.
Now, Presidents rely on negative campaigning knowing that, due to this polarization of the opinions of the people, their statements can provoke the outrage needed to entice voters. They tap into the mindset that people of the opposing party have an ideology rooted in and fueled by hate, while one’s own party functions out of love, a phenomenon known as political motive asymmetry. Both parties feel this way. Instead of recognizing the biased propaganda and attacks on character rather than political agendas, we feed off of the negativity: It's the poison we drank too much of this election season.
Trump can "Make America Great Again," but it won't happen as a direct result of his presidency.
Having Obama in office didn't instantly change race relations in our country, proving that a single man is not powerful enough to change the minds of millions of people. We the people must do that on our own at the ground-level. Trump's election came as a shock to us all, but we can use our new reality as the slap in the face we all need to start changing things for ourselves.
We have spent so long trying to prove our family members wrong on Facebook that we've forgotten how to listen. Every person has a motive and a cause they stand for: If we can find out what is fueling hate and discrimination, we may be able to find better ways to fix them than telling them they're terrible people, which only makes their will for their cause stronger. If someone else's viewpoints are causing harm, they are more likely to change their minds if they feel like you [are at least trying to] understand their viewpoint and listen, putting you in a position to propose your solution to their problem.
Let us all represent our respective people groups with dignity and love instead of spouting off fruitless words of hate at one another. We all want what's best for our country and its people. Only when we stop seeing the opposing political party as "the enemy" and start empathizing with and listening to what's important to them can we find common ground and see that we're not all so different and start moving towards real, permanent change.
Only then can we make this nation great again.
