Each week we’ll hear a new This I Believe essay – today from Robin Mize. She’s a marriage and family therapist in Takoma Park, Maryland. Mize comes from a mixed family: most are conservative and some are liberal, but despite their political differences, she says they are bound by love for each other. Mize believes it’s important for all of us to be able to peaceably disagree, an important belief, but one that is largely being ignored during this divisive election campaign. Click here to read a transcript and to listen to the audio of her “This I Believe” essay.
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I sympathise with Ms Mize 's distrust of the crowd, but I take issue with her conclusions. People stage large rallies as a way of attempting to move the levers of power; if one side's ideological or æsthetic distaste for such leads to their refusing to use this tactic, they had better have an equivalent or better one ready…which I don't think is the case. The Left had better keep up or step up its rallies even as it retains that level of healthy scepticism that will keep our politics from being corrupted by them.
As for her family, or disagreeing people more generally, her reluctance to call them 'The Enemy' is good and reasonable, for the most part—I except those groups who would wish one dead if they had their way (Nazis if one is a Jew, Aryan Nations if one is Black, Christian Reconstructionists or al-Qa'edists if one is gay or a blasphemer or a disobedient son…). But those murderously pathetic sorts aside, I would ask her to consider that she need not consider those disagreeing with her 'The Enemy' to continually remember that they _are_, in fact, in the relevant areas, her opponents.
The danger of calling someone 'Enemy' is that there is an implicit licence to utterly destroy them, that their continued existence represents a threat to one's survival; once you find an Enemy you can very easily find yourself engaging in any sort of barbarity in order to stop them.
By contrast, you can and do live with your opponents, those who oppose you on one or two or many fronts, but whose existence is not inimical to your own. This never should blind you, however, to the fact that they want something very different for the world than do you, something you find very disagreeable or even inimical, and as such it is incumbent on you to keep them from winning by whatever _civil_ means are at your disposal.