We Still Agree on More Than We Don’t (Opinion)

Half the country is celebrating that their presidential candidate won the election, and I respect the place those citizens are in right now. I, however, am writing this from the perspective of someone who is not on that winning side. As I process how we can move forward and begin to build more unity as a country, I am grieving. I sit in disbelief, with deep sadness and concern.

My current work is related to helping education leaders and others decrease political polarization and human demonization. I cannot excuse the words and behaviors of the newly elected president. The rhetoric he has used is mean, disrespectful, and divisive. I have spent 25 years in public education and I worry a lot about what our leaders are modeling for our children. I want to see a president who models character, empathy, and kindness.

And yet, I will not paint his supporters with the same brush. People are genuinely frustrated by high costs, lack of housing, and unproductive politics. They are fearful of the uncertainty in the world; they are unsure of the evolution of our country.

We are all being fed a series of lies about each other. That’s real. And I can understand that. History teaches us that in times of uncertainty, humans often pivot to fear and tribalism. No matter who won the election, undoing this tribalism is the work of the upcoming days, months, and years so that we can create greater understanding across the divide. Educators have to be the first to model this understanding.

The work I see in front of us is about coming together to stand up for humanity and for each other. We must undo how much we think we hate each other and how much we think the “other side” is evil. Our students inevitably absorb this mentality, and they are acting it out now, too.

Moving forward after this bitter loss for those of us who hoped for a different outcome, I’ll be thinking and talking to education leaders, teachers, and students about those things as I host workshops and trainings for them.

We disagree, yes. That’s healthy, if we do it right. The good news is that we are not as paralyzingly polarized and filled with hatred as we might think. Recent surveys from More in Common and Starts with Us suggest that from 67 percent to 87 percent of us are tired of the divisiveness of American politics. That gives me hope.

And though there are ideological differences on the issues that seemingly divide us (guns, environment, education, abortion, race, sexual identity, gender identity), we must be able to talk, ask questions, and show a genuine interest in understanding those differences. Only then can we begin to understand where someone else is coming from, learn from them, respect their views, and even develop some potential paths forward to find common ground.

Progress seems a whole lot better to me than paralysis. If we could just set aside the images that show a small minority of people fanning hatred, take a deep breath, and summon the courage to engage with the others and to turn off our “channels,” then we may be pleasantly surprised.

And I’ve got to believe that we can harness that 67 percent to 87 percent majority to encourage a different kind of politics and engagement. We need to help our students be curious and practice dialogue respectfully with each other to bridge these gaps.

Within the collective education sector and beyond, we have got to figure out a way to harness the vast majority of us who are willing to talk, problem-solve, understand differences, and make progress. Our sanity, country, children, and families depend on it.

In my mind, we in the education sector need to:

• Build a new political “machine” around public education. In particular, we must recruit reasonable, curious school board member candidates who understand there are nuances involved in solving every problem. Encourage students to get involved in the school board process to start civic engagement and learning there.
• Revamp the incentive structure for elections. Some cities and states are experimenting with different election methods—ranked-choice voting, for example. I’m excited to see what we learn about how such changes might allow reasonable people with nuanced views to win school board and other elections.
• Embrace a different narrative about who we can be as a country. We can discuss, disagree, listen, compromise, and find new ways to make progress on intractable problems. Many organizations and initiatives—including More in Common, Starts with Us, Unite America, Courageous Conversations, and Rebuild Congress—are working to galvanize this type of thinking. This is also the type of work we are doing with FORWARD at PEBC, where we help education leaders find solutions that offer “both/and” rather than “either/or” thinking.
• Teach students to disagree in a productive way. We need to make sure we have strong civics teaching embedded in all coursework. Gamelike tools such as MisMatch (for middle and high schoolers) and Tango (for college students) can encourage young people to have moderated conversations with each other on challenging issues.
• Reject “cancel culture.” In schools and elsewhere, we must counter the idea that if you say the wrong thing or ask a question, you are shunned or called out for making an honest mistake. Fear does not cultivate curiosity, learning, understanding, and forgiveness.

As our forefathers and mothers knew, conflict and disagreement, when done well, make us a better and stronger democracy. If we bring the diversity of our thinking, experiences, and wisdom together, we can find creative, nuanced paths forward. We are certainly not going to do it divided.

I don’t know how long it will take our country to better come together in this moment of our democratic experiment, but most people don’t want to stay in a deeply divisive space. I have hope that a collective effort with our students can give us the political will to do something different.