Imagine for a moment that you’re the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth (for today, anyway). You’re faced with two (or three) wars, ridiculous budget deficits, a terrible economy, a huge jobs shortage, and an intransigent opposition who is not only bent on your destruction, but also determined to undermine whatever small gains you might have made for your agenda. What would you do?
Would you lash out, go balls to the wall to fight, adopt a take-no-prisoners attitude and attack the enemy with all your might? Would you hold up their every hypocrisy for criticism, raise the volume another thousand percent, make the divisions even more strident and acrimonious? Would you hate on the haters, mock them for their inability to understand the needs of the least among us, and call them out for the fat cat, high-living bastards you know them to be?
Or would you maybe take a step back and take a deep breath, and try to see where they’re coming from, and even if you don’t agree with them or their point of view, try to find a common ground, a place of agreement where you can start from, and make an effort to help them understand that you hear them, you can speak the same language, you understand their concerns and you’re willing to try to work with them to address their needs and find a way to work together, so you can get (in the famous words of the Rolling Stones) not what you want, but what you need?
I’m a hardcore liberal at heart, and I get that we actually do need to reshape the debate to a more liberal Overton Window, and we need to make our society a more equitable one, and the rich do need to bear a bigger part of the burden, and right now they’re getting away with murder. But if you were the one sitting on top of the whole dog pile, what would be the way to get to that point? Would it be to make enemies of all the people on the other side of the argument? Or maybe, just maybe, would it be to start by trying to find a middle ground?
The problem that we on the left face at the moment is that the playing field has shifted decidedly against us. But the question is, in the long run, how do we get back the advantage? Is it by continuing to play the game of demonizing the other side? Or as Van Jones put it in a brilliant speech last year, is our best path to winning the long game to end the pie fight?
If we descend into the same tit-for-tat tactics that the other side has perfected, we’re fighting a battle on their turf, and we’re bound to lose, for two key reasons: one, they’ve been doing it a lot longer, and they’re a lot better at it than we are; and two, they don’t care if the whole thing comes crashing down. If the other side believes that there’s no such thing as ‘good government’, they can’t lose a battle where the stalemate results in government shutting down. It’s kind of like suicide bombers—if they have no fear of death, then you can’t use the threat of dying as a way to win the argument.
But, if you can keep them engaged for long enough, you can get past the white-hot part of the debate, where rational discourse can’t penetrate, and eventually get to the point where it’s possible to have a real conversation about things like what our priorities as a nation should be, and whether we want to put the least among us into the street in order to protect the interests of those who already have more than they need. We can finally bring it back to an honest debate about the fundamental principle in the title—if we were in those shoes, how would we like to be treated?
And I put it on this community to consider the same question—if you were in that chair, making those same calls, how would you like to be treated? Would you want to be recognized for the things you’ve achieved, while also called out for the things you’ve failed to do, and encouraged to attend to those shortcomings, or would you prefer it if everyone assumed the worst of you, and derided you for selling out every principle you’ve ever stood for, even when there’s fairly plentiful objective evidence to the contrary?
Obama is not a saint, and he’s not even necessarily the progressive champion that many of us would have wanted him to be. There are a number of things I would like to see him take a stronger stand on, and I will acknowledge that he’s come up short even in several areas that he campaigned on. But having said that, he’s still light-years better than the alternative would have been, and he’s twice that compared to what will come if the extremists of the other side take charge (I point you to the examples of Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and Florida in case you’re not clear on what the alternative might look like). We should hold his feet to the fire on the issues that we disagree on, but we’re not going to get what we’re looking for by resorting to the scorched-earth approach of the other side.
As I see it, Obama’s goal has always been what I started with—Do Unto Others. He’s trying to treat the other side with respect and dignity, even if they don’t always respond in kind (or with anything approaching ‘in kind’). But in the end, that’s the only way that we right the course of this country—protracting the pie fight doesn’t get us to where we need to be, where we can have a serious debate about the priorities we need to set as a nation. If all we’re capable of is being as loud and angry and obnoxious as the other side, then we all lose.
The only way we can all win is if we can figure out how to elevate the level of the conversation, and stop the petty wars. And that starts by putting yourself in his shoes, and framing your critiques as you would like to have those criticisms addressed to you. Don’t hold back, but do it in a way that recognizes and respects the reality that he faces, and acknowledges what has been accomplished. If we can manage to do that amongst ourselves, there’s at least a hope that we can start to shift the overall dialogue with the folks on the other side…