Oobleck, for those of you who missed it in childhood, is a mixture of cornstarch and water. It has peculiar properties. If you poke it hard, your finger will bounce off. If you touch it gently, your finger will sink in. Pulled slowly, it stretches. Jerked suddenly, it breaks. Sometimes it acts like a solid and sometimes like a liquid. Dr. Suess invented the term though he didn’t come up with the recipe.
America sometimes acts like a liberal democracy and sometimes like a right-wing autocracy. Although the liberal part of the country is larger, there’s that Electoral College thing, and the gerrymandering thing, and the billionaire money thing, swinging the balance to the Right. The two populations stand glaring at each other, each convinced that the other group is impenetrable and completely opposed to it. Each side pokes hard at the other side, with predictable results. The hard pokes bounce off with no effect. Just like oobleck.
It is no use talking to Republicans about Trump. They will put their fingers in their ears and go lalala, lalala. Their heads seem solid, impermeable.
There’s another way to cross the divide – a gentle way. Instead of talking about government, talk about dogs, or gardens. As soon as you get overtly political, what you say becomes a hard poke. When you keep the talk to the common world we share – not climate change, just the weather – you sink softly into the other person’s mindset.
This approach doesn’t work with everybody all the time. If somebody’s a hater, you don’t want to go there anyway. But with some people, after you’ve spent enough time talking about the weather, you can mention record heat and wildfires and floods. They’ve noticed. They’re worried too.
You can offer a soft landing for tentative approaches by the other side. Ideas like fairness appeal to most people, although we see different ways of making our system more just. People are also pretty sick of violence, on the whole, though we disagree on what should be done about it.
Bear in mind that many people in the Trump camp have been marinating for years in a media and social environment much different than the one dominant in the northeast and California. Right-wing preachers twist the gospel every Sunday, wringing all the loving-kindness out of Christianity and leaving only a mean self-righteousness. Right-wing media conglomerates like Sinclair Broadcast Group and Clear Channel have taken over local radio and television. Schools have been prevented from teaching civics, and forced to use books that barely mention slavery or evolution. It’s hard to hear dissenting voices. They exist; but they’re ignored by major media.
Whole areas of this country are nearly monocultures. They’re like North Korea lite. This is just how the Right wants us, ignorant and desperate, full of anger with nowhere to go. These people would tear our country apart before they could figure out who they really should be angry with.
So when we try to discuss politics with the other side, we are working from different data sets. The Right has spent decades cherry-picking, distorting, or just plain making up facts. They have constructed an alternate universe where an idealized version of 1950s white America is threatened by people of color, intellectuals, immigrants, and uppity women.
We’ve aimed our facts at the Right as though they could penetrate that alternate universe. When the facts bounce off, we assume it’s because the Right is a hard, solid thing. But it’s oobleck. People’s mindsets are fluid. We are not likely to reach the souls at the cold heart of the Right. If we reach out carefully, however, speaking the language of fairness and compassion, we might find some allies where we least expect them.