The day after Donald Trump became president, I was walking near Turlington Plaza and heard a commotion. There was a large group of people, somewhere between 100 and 150, circled around a few individuals wielding megaphones near the Turlington Potato. One megaphoned man wore a “Make America Great Again” cap, and the other three or four who stood on the opposite side of the circle were evidently anti-Trumpers. Some people in the crowd held posters with witty political jabs or slogans. The rest were recording the spectacle for Snapchat or Instagram.
It was a strange thing to stumble upon, but I quickly realized it was supposed to be a debate of sorts, to settle whether Trump would harm or benefit our country. The few with megaphones were supposed to represent and speak for their political bases. And the crowd was to be the judge of who was more persuasive.
There was a gulf, though, between the intent of the event and the outcome.
The exchange between the megaphoned pro- and anti-Trumpers was certainly not a civil conversation, let alone a thoughtful debate. Rather, it was a shouting contest, a game of loud assertion. They categorically denied the other’s arguments — then asserted their own. The megaphones could barely project over the crowd members, who either found it all to be funny or interjected with their own arguments, creating an orchestra of partisan noise.
As it turns out, the phenomenon I witnessed at Turlington is more of the norm than it should be. People are not congregating in their towns and shouting at each other, but I would submit that normal political dialogue, specifically between Democrats and Republicans, is not that distantly related — perhaps because that dialogue barely exists.
The Pew Research Center found that nearly half of self-identified Republicans and Democrats have a highly unfavorable view of the opposing party, up by more than 2 percent since 1994. In 2014, the center discovered that close to a third of both parties considered the other party’s policies to be a threat to the nation’s well-being. So polarized are the two parties that they do not even want to live in the same areas.
One could dedicate a life to studying the factors that have contributed to this; I will select the one that I think is important: Moral feeling. As a culture, we believe that ethics are personal, meaning that moral values are not to be imposed, but selected from within. We are a subjective culture. We believe that you should have the right to determine for yourself what is right and wrong.
This belief poses a problem: On what basis should one delineate between right and wrong? Our culture’s answer tends to be feeling. Follow your heart — this is our culture’s foundational belief. To follow your heart is to follow your feelings; to follow feelings is to follow what seems intuitively right and true.
Another problem arises: Why, if the standard of right and wrong is subjective feeling, should I be persuaded to take on your right and wrong for myself? Your ethics are yours, mine are mine, and we simply have different feelings about these things. What then?
This is the problem we encounter today, and the problem I witnessed firsthand on Turlington. Because we choose our beliefs based on personal feeling, it is difficult to civilly discuss these beliefs with someone who feels completely different; following our hearts tempts us into thinking that the world is self-evidently the way we perceive it to be.
It is no surprise, then, that few committed Republicans will freely interact with equally as committed Democrats, and vice versa. It is also no surprise that shouting down the other side is a popular conversational tactic. For we are not simply discussing politics anymore. Our hearts are in this now; our validity as people is at stake. This is personal.
I’m worried that our hearts are leading us into a more fractured union. Perhaps there is something better to follow in life.
Scott Stinson is a UF english senior. His column appears on Mondays.
