collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative
The Case for Polarization:
We should be more divided, not less
Erin West
My post-college Sunday routine goes like this: wake up late, groggily stumble downstairs to the coffee maker, and plop down in the living room where my parents are reading the Sunday New York Times. I skim the international news, hoping that simply staring at the headlines will make me more informed, but I soon pick out what I’m really after: the op-ed section.
After drinking my coffee too fast, I proceed to rail to my moderate-to-progressive audience about how, page-by-page, more than half the opinions expressed are ABSOLUTE TRASH or other choice words. I comb through the articles, laughing at absurd claims and muttering about centrists. To their credit, my parents humor me.
In a recent episode of this series (Russian Doll gets political) I complained about a piece that defended the institution of fraternities. The writer claimed that despite the many bad fraternities out there, some were good: “many fraternities are encouraging brothers to defy stereotypical hypermasculine standards and to simply be good people.”
“That’s completely beside the point!” I cried in exasperation, throwing the paper aside (for dramatic effect only, I did intend to finish reading the section). “Fraternities as an INSTITUTION uphold male power,” I shouted at my mom. “I don’t care how much they try to do better, gender segregation itself is a foundational element of sexual violence in the first place!” I probably sputtered some other pontificating statements as well, including something to the effect of “revolution, not reform!” and, “assholes!”
In general, my parents have given up on reasoned debate with their obstinate daughter. They used to interject my rants with calmed reminders of “hearing both sides of a story,” and warnings of “dogmatic thinking” or “echo chambers.” Historically, this only got me more riled up. So on that Sunday my mom nodded absently and then offered me more coffee.
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In the past two years—ever since Trump got elected, really—I’ve started to speak in polemics. More and more, I’ve become irritated with ‘open dialogue,’ completely uninterested in ‘the devil’s advocate,’ and I grimace at the word ‘nuance.’ Despite my commitment to complex thinking, I’ve come to believe that most issues are relatively simple: they’re about power. And honestly, I don’t want to hear what power has to say.
The moderacy of my Obama-voter parents—including their faith in reasoned debate and fear of echo chambers—is everywhere. National media likes to claim that America is more divided than ever. In response to these alarmist calls, pundits and politicians say we must ‘bridge the divide’ by ‘finding common ground’ or ‘reaching across the aisle.’ Above all, they say, we must unite.
The more I heard this discourse, the more it irked me. But at first, I didn’t know how to articulate my critique. Calls for people on both sides to come together and listen to each other sounded similar to some of my deeply held feminist commitments: the validity of personal experience, the possibility of multiple truths, the ability to hear dissent. Coming out of politician’s mouths, however, I had a sense that their vision of reconciliation was different.
Here’s that difference: the version of ‘coming together’ promoted by WASP-y liberals, politicians, and NYT op-eds attempts to obscure power relations, and quench difference; in effect, it depoliticizes dissent. The commitment to varied experience that I believe in does the opposite: it challenges structures of power and it embraces difference. Most importantly—it politicizes.
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Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, social and political tensions within the US have gained increased attention and appeared more vitriolic in tone. In the days after the election, thousands of people across the country poured out into the streets protesting his win and denouncing his hateful political platform. While protesters chanted, “Not my president” or “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,” news outlets both liberal and conservative counted this event as more evidence that the American public stood more polarized than ever.
Most reporting on the election and its surrounding events directly stated—or insinuated—that division is detrimental to public discourse and national politics, but I don’t agree. And not just because this idea is untrue, but because it’s dangerous. We should not assume that discord and even outright conflict constitute an unfavorable politics. Instead, disagreement is central to effective politics—and when I say ‘effective,’ I mean a politics that advances justice.
If we avert division, things will never change. The protesters who stormed Trump’s inauguration gates brought the world’s attention to him in a new way. Suddenly, he was no longer a farce that Americans laughed at; he was a bigot who represented nothing but hate to broad swaths of the American public. In attempting to shut down the ceremony, the protesters demanded that their opposition to his presidency be heard. I’m arguing that direct actions like these raise division to the fore and in doing so, can move us towards a more just world faster than bipartisan bills in congress and with more direction than reporting on small Iowa diners.
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Academics call this idea that disagreement and conflict is good for politics “agonism.” This more recent development in political theory is partly a shift away from the liberal values of ‘democratic dialogue.’ Advocates of agonism argue that conflict has unique ability to expose and challenge unequal power relations. But we don’t need academics to explain this to us—we can see it ourselves in the streets and on our Twitter feeds.
Two years before #DisruptJ20, there were cars on fire in Ferguson and people staging die-ins in New York City. Protest over police violence brought racism to the forefront of our national conversation with new urgency, and it wasn’t the cordial diversity discourse from the early Obama years—it was confrontational.
Critical in what these protests did, was put power at the center of their conversation. No, it isn’t about individual cops, they said, it’s about the historical oppression of Black people in the US and law enforcement’s specific participation in the legacy of white supremacy. In this way, the Black Lives Matter movement rejected the individualizing narratives of liberalism and promoted a systemic analysis of power and abuse.
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Division, in many cases, is a euphemism for racism. Besides police killings and Trump’s election, think of other topics termed “divisive” by media coverage: the removal of historical statues, free speech on college campuses, and anything around immigration. They all hold race as their central point of tension.
Responses to such ‘divisive’ conflicts fall into one of two categories: liberal calls for dialogue (i.e. what happens when we put a small town Trump voter at the same table as a coastal Obama supporter?) or conservative calls for unity (there were bad actors on “both sides”). Both positions fundamentally misrepresent the issue at hand by presenting racism as an issue to be worked out between equal parties instead of presenting racism as it operates: the intentional structuring of unequal power.
Liberals (such as my parents) would ask that disagreements be resolved in ‘civil’ dialogue. But asking two sides of a debate to share the same platform for voicing their opinion and demanding that they meet somewhere in the middle ignores the unequal positions of power that two sides of a debate enter from. It also forgets that marginalized voices are not afforded the same level of legitimacy or attention, if they are listened to at all.
Direct conflict, in contrast, highlights power imbalances and is uninterested in compromise—only in full justice. And it turns out that if your 'inside voice' is ignored, you have no option left but to scream.
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It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the recent American obsession with division began, I'll risk placing it roughly during the Obama administration. Whether causal or correlated, America’s first Black president watched conversations about race shift dramatically over the 8 years he held office. His early years were the era of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’—a version of depoliticized liberal discourse which claims difference as individualizing, potentially profitable, and existing outside of context and power. Post 2014, new terms populated conversations about race: reparations, anti-blackness, and white supremacy. This new language held privilege and power under a microscope.
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I won't try to speculate why that shift in conversation occurred, but what's striking is that it did not spark parallel change in the ideology of liberal discourse. That is, mainstream dialogue about dialogue still hasn't seriously taken power into account.
There aren’t many similarities between Obama and his successor, but one thing they share is a love of unity. In Obama’s farewell speech just before giving up the Oval Office to Trump, he gave a treatise on the dismal state of democracy, blaming polarization caused by social media and asking Americans to start finding common ground. One week later, President-elect Trump condemned protests of his inauguration, calling them “Very unfair!” and blaming their origins nebulously on ‘the liberal media.’ But a few days later, Trump toned down the vitriol of his language, calling instead for the American electorate to come together and put aside their disagreements: "This will prove to be a great time in the lives of ALL Americans. We will unite and we will win, win, win!"
These two statements by Obama and Trump are different, sure, but they hold the same assumption: that political division is undesirable. There is a certain way in which calls for unity, coming together, reaching across the aisle, etc. are contradictory in that they ask for both relativism (giving equal weight to all opinions) and for totalization (coming to consensus). Although these two values may appear to be in conflict, they work together to mitigate unequal power relations, instead of toppling them.
Both ideologies—unity and diversity—obscure power relations and depoliticize discourse. In this way, the shortcomings of political discourse extends pre-Trump Era as the multicultural ideal represented by the Obama administration also presents a threat to fully engaged political dialogue.
When Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave her victory speech after the 2018 midterm elections, she as well called on Americans to unite, claiming, “we have all had enough of division.” To her, I say: We haven’t had nearly enough yet.
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Thankfully, liberal ideals of dialogue and compromise might be a dying breed.
Green New Deal advocates aren’t interested in stop-gap measures; they’re asking us to commit to a decarbonized world. full stop. They might not have the most specific picture of what needs to happen, but they know that whatever it is, it needs to be big, bold, and new. The "what" has to be the first step, they say, let’s figure out the "how" later. If we do it the other way around, we’ll never get anywhere.
This is the sticking point that my parents and I come to in our discussions as well: they want reconsideration, the nitty-gritty details, opinions from all sides. And on those Sunday mornings, sprawled on the floor in my pajamas and with my hair in tangles, all I can seem to manage in response is: “CAN’T YOU SEE? WE JUST DON’T HAVE TIME.”
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