On About.com, Sheri & Bob Stritof offer advice that our squabbling politicians of every stripe would do well to heed:
Only their advice is addressed not to politicians, but to couples.
Politicians are supposed to deal with their (and our) different views and figure out how best to move the country forward - that's their job. At the moment, they are not doing it well. But are we, the people, setting a better example? By and large, we tend to shy away from dealing with opinions that differ from our own. With the help of the Internet, we do it so systematically and incrementally that we don't even realize we're living in what Eli Pariser has called "the filter bubble." (Some groups are trying to use technology to burst those bubbles -- for example, the flash conference on Monday night sponsored by Personal Democracy Media, which brought together Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street activists.)
Earlier this year, MTV released some findings from a study of the digital habits of Millennials, including this: They avoid controversy. According to Nick Shore, MTV's senior VP for strategic consumer insights and research:
only about one-third of respondents feel that... politics (36 percent) and religion (35 percent) are appropriate for public posting online. What we observed many of the millennials doing, however, was being controversial by proxy. They rip and re-purpose content and let that do the talking (and take the risks) for them.
Are politicians our proxies in this sense? Our way of disowning responsibility for what's at stake? If so, we'll get increasingly heated controversy, but we won't get compromise, or trade-offs.
And yet, there is some high stakes engagement going on. Not (just) in no-longer-smoke-filled back rooms, but across kitchen tables. I've been casting, so I know there are couples out there who are managing to live openly with these differences -- and make a life together. What is it about being in a committed relationship that makes dealing with political disagreements seem feasible? In the most recent survey I can find on this topic (2007), the Pew Research Centers gave adult Americans a list of factors that might be thought relevant to a successful marriage, and asked which they thought were very important to marital happiness. Being faithful, sharing a religion -- and chores! -- all scored 40 percent or (much) higher. Only 12 percent said agreement on politics mattered.
So people say -- but who actually manages to live this belief, and how? I'm casting a TV series about red/blue couples -- and they do exist. How do they manage something we -- and our politicians -- find so difficult? In this series, we're going to find out. I've advertised on both liberal and conservative blogs; I've reached out to organizations representing a range of constituencies, including the Log Cabin Republicans, to non-partisan millennial groups, and through the very diverse set of participants in previous Purple States series. The couples who have already stepped forward are an intriguing group -- and the ones we're taking to the next stage combine great mutual affection with a willingness to deal with their differences.
We're not done with the casting process yet, but some patterns are emerging among respondents -- i.e., people who are not only in such a relationship, but willing to share it with the world.
We're still actively seeking counterexamples. So if you love the voter, not the vote -- share your story!
The series will air next fall on a television network. We'll follow the day-to-day lives of several of these mixed-politics couples during the election year. Just by being a committed couple (whether married or not), each pair shares a standard of living and lives in the same part of the country. So how did their differences arise, and persist? How deep do they go, and what do they mean for a shared life? The big issues for Election 2012 -- debt, the role of government, jobs, the country's future -- will all resonate in these not-so-ordinary households.
These couples will serve as a prism for the political process and -- we hope -- deepen and complicate facile claims from all sides about what "the public" wants. The series will offer an antidote to dueling campaign/PAC promos featuring "ordinary people." Seeing the process through the eyes of these couples will enable us to look beyond the horse race. Couples -- unlike politicians -- have every incentive to find livable compromises. And for them -- unlike for the rest of us -- disaffection is not an option. How will these couples cope with making different choices and living, in close quarters, with the consequences? What happens when the survey respondent hangs up the phone and sits down to dinner with her opposite number? If we find the right couples and the right network partner, these proxies won't let us off the hook; they'll provoke the kind of conversation we all need to be having.
My mother, a public school teacher, is a pretty ardent social liberal and fiscal "moderate". My father was a mechanical engineer and fiscal "conservative". He was apathetic about social issues because he didn't think the government had a right to interfere with medical decisions, religious persuasions et al.. I didn't agree with his small-government mindset, but I respected that he wasn't hypocritical with his positions. I can count on one hand the number of arguments about politics that were had in our house.
I think the most divisive factor is that people who are told that you have to support a party or ideology. Instead of encouraging people to figure out where they stand on individual issues and then selecting the candidate with whom they agree the most, they are pigeonholed into supporting a candidate that they think they're supposed to support because they think they are conservative/liberal or Rep/Dem. Therefore, people start with a candidate(s) in mind and try to find the facts to make that work instead of trying to find the facts about all the candidates and then deciding.
I am extremely conservative. All of the women I have been involved with since high school have been more liberal than I, in some cases strikingly so. I don't think politics has affected my relationships at all. Nor would I let it.
For Red/Blue couples, nullification and secession are permitted strategies. In the back of the mind of each participant, this knowledge consoles, even if neither strategy is ever employed.