One nation, two realities
Friends bridge the political divide
FREDERICK, Md. — She fired up her laptop to scour the internet for bits from right-wing websites and conspiratorial YouTube channels.
The inauguration of Joe Biden was just days away, and Natalie Abbas was feverishly searching for 11th-hour interventions that could prevent the swearing-in of a president she’ll likely never accept.
She sent a video to her friend and political sparring partner, Jim Carpenter.
Five miles across town, the local newspaper was on Carpenter’s sofa and The Washington Post on his doorstep.
When he clicked on Abbas’ link, his jaw dropped and his white eyebrows darted up and down.
“This is nonsense,” he said, shaking his head. Then he laughed so hard he bent at the belly and slapped his knee. “It’s really nonsense.”
Abbas and Carpenter are local ambassadors for a program designed to bridge the nation’s extraordinary political divide, and the gulf between them is about as wide as one gets.
Carpenter is a 73-yearold retired statistician who believes what dozens of courts have found: Biden is the rightful winner. Abbas, 59, says her conviction that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump is as strong as her belief in God. Together, they ponder the greatest challenge facing Biden and American society: how can they find common ground if they no longer exist in the same reality?
They don’t agree on basic facts. They don’t even share a vocabulary. They use the same words — truth, proof, patriotism — but they don’t mean the same thing.
In this sick and scared country, many have retreated to their bubbles, surrounding themselves with people certain the other side is their enemy — inhuman, un-American. Polls show roughly two-thirds of
Republicans express doubts about the election.
So Carpenter and Abbas decided to navigate one of the tensest weeks in American memory together, as the Trump administration ended and Biden’s began. Abbas, who flirts with the QAnon conspiracy theory that a cabal of child-killing pedophiles runs the world, still desperately wanted to believe it wouldn’t happen. Carpenter could barely wait for the new president, one he believes is a man of character capable of leading the country off this dark and dangerous path.
“People are getting threatened on both sides,” he said. “People are going berserk.” “It’s crazy,” Abbas replied. “So tell them to stop. Can you tell them to stop?”
“Can you tell your people to stop?”
They both sighed.
“I think we can lead by example?” Abbas offered.
Carpenter nodded. He’d written himself a personal mission statement that to him seems as true as any mathematical equation: “create a world of connection and respect by seeing the light in the eyes of others.”
“Where is the light?” Carpenter said. “I’ve got to find it somewhere.”
Carpenter and Abbas, who hadn’t seen each other in months because of COVID19 restrictions, sat down a few days before the inauguration in the lobby of his retirement community. An hour away, thousands of National Guard troops were fortifying Washington, D.C.
The week before, on Jan. 6, Trump’s supporters had stormed the Capitol building at his urging, chanting “stop the steal” and threatening the lives of lawmakers while Americans watched in real time on TV. Abbas was at the rally, though she was not part of the siege.
“What do you mean the election was stolen? How was it stolen?” Carpenter asked her. He called Trump’s claims ’the big lie” that led to rebellion. She gasped.
“Wow.”
They are part of a national initiative called Braver Angels, inspired by a passage in President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address in 1861, when he appealed to the “better angels of our nature” as the country was tearing itself apart.
After the riot, Braver Angels scrambled together an online program and 4,500 tuned in. Carpenter learned of the program and decided to start up a Frederick County version. When he searched for a Republican counterpart, Abbas raised her hand.
They hosted workshops in libraries and their partnership appeared on the front page of the local newspaper. Neither expected to convert the other, but both believed that trying to understand the other side was the only way to prevent the country from splintering irrevocably apart.
He was intrigued by her fearlessness, and how she could rattle off what she called evidence to support her claims. Carpenter delighted in having a window into a different world view.
“I just breathe deep and say, OK,” he said. “I don’t have to believe her. But I know that’s her reality. And I have to accept that because there are a lot of people with her.”
His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness, and he came to believe that blind faith can lead to magical thinking and fevered prophecies. Politics has become like religion, he thinks, where people like Abbas hold unprovable yet impenetrable beliefs. His father was an atheist and psychology professor, and he spent years searching unsuccessfully for ways to blend those worldviews together.
Abbas unspooled for him the election fraud arguments and rumors that she dug from the internet: dead voters, rigged machines, an Italian satellite, Rudy Giuliani’s promises, corrupt courts. The headline streaming on the television behind them read “Trump’s final days,” but she still hoped it wasn’t over.
“Woof,” Carpenter sometimes interjected, “this is a little hard to believe.”
“He’s a really good guy,” Abbas said. “He gets cranky once in a while.”
He laughed.
“It’s the age,” he said. He squinted behind his wire-rimmed glasses, a pen in the front pocket of his button-up shirt. She is bubbly and youthful, in a pink leather jacket, skinny jeans and kitten heels, her long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.
“Love ya,” Abbas said as she left.
“You too.”
A few days later, Abbas sat at her kitchen table with a legal pad, two computers and two televisions on, one switched to uber-conservative Newsmax and the other to Fox.
But she thinks even mainstream conservative sources like Fox News aren’t telling the whole truth, especially since the network reported Biden’s victory. So she looks elsewhere.
If she were alone in her thinking, she might have felt she was “in no man’s land all by myself.” But there is so much conspiratorial material, she says, and so many others on this road with her.
“Sometimes you feel like, gee, am I crazy?” she said. “We know we’re not insane, but our world has become very chaotic and we’re just trying to sort it out.”
Carpenter’s phone beeped with a message from Abbas. She thought she was delivering proof: A fake map ricocheting around social media showing Trump winning nearly every state.
“Why we claim a win,” she wrote.
“California red?” Carpenter shot back. “Doesn’t pass the sniff test.”
They don’t agree on much, But they have come to see each other as friends, not enemies. They wonder: could that be enough?