Learning to love the enemy
A latte-sipping liberal explores Red America
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Have you found yourself peering (perhaps with arched eyebrow or flaringnostril)attheothersideofthepolitical spectrum and muttering, “What the hell are they thinking?” If so, you could probably learn something from Ken Stern’s “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right,” from the opening pig hunt to the closing sentence:“Thereisstillhopeforusyet.”
Like many of us, the former National Public Radio CEO found himself living in an ideological “bubble” —- in his case a blue one — unable to locate even a single Republican on his street in Washington, D.C. These days, he notes, nearly two-thirds of Americans live in counties that are dominated by one or the other political party. Unlike most of us, the lifelong Democrat decided to break out, and spent one year immersing himself in the lives and thoughts of conservatives, from the think tanks of the Beltway to the evangelical megachurches of Oregon.
It would be easy to play such a concept for laughs. Mr. Stern gets his laughs — but by and large, they are at his own expense, and not that of the people he’s chronicling. His intent is to understand the right, including its critiques of the left, to find common ground, and often to poke at the assumptions of those entrenched at either political extreme.
He starts with the gun debate, exploring it from the vantage point of a Texas ranch where he overcomes his unfamiliarity with firearms in time to take three shots at a rampaging hog. He works his way through well-endowed churches, impoverished neighborhoods, coal towns, Trump rallies and partisan media before returning to our unsettled capital.
Unlike some commentators, Mr. Stern doesn’t dismiss the concerns of the tribe Hillary Clinton famously called “deplorables,” perhaps more accurately described as angry, white, working class men. “They measure themselves against previous generations, against their own expectations, against the promise of the American dream, and they find it all wanting,” he writes, shortly before taking the reader to a Youngstown bar. “It is the relative decline, the sense of failure, the loss of the opportunities they once had, that fuels the sense that things are unraveling.”
When things unravel, many of us reach for the things that give us an illusion of control. Mr. Stern, though, doesn’t parrot President Barack Obama’s “cling to guns or religion” explanation for the Rust Belt’s rightward lurch. He argues that the right is sometimes right — or at least no morewrong than the left.
On guns? There’s little if any statistical evidence that weapons bans would work, per Mr. Stern. On global warming? While the far right dismisses accepted science, the left ignores the fact that gas fracking has reduced greenhouse gas emissions. On poverty? Neither side has a monopoly on effective policies, but the conservative push to force people to work has, at least, not brought disaster.
There is a very dark side of the right, Mr. Stern writes, but it thrives primarily in its own bubbles, where it roars without much risk of reaching a lefty’s ear. “If I found a dystopian view of America during this year, it was not in my encounters in Pikeville (Ky.), or in Texas, or even at Trump rallies, but on my social media feeds and on the comment boards of major media sites,” he writes. He notes, though, that The New York Times comment section can be nearly as merciless as Breitbart’s.
He cites a 2012 poll in which Republicans most commonly described Democrats as “clueless,” “liars,” “spineless” or “idiots.” The words Democrats most often used to describe Republicans weren’t much better — “disgusting,” “greedy,” “crazy” and “selfish.”
Why is that, and what does it portend? “As other sources of identity become less salient — religion and unions, for instance, have become far less important — political labels provide an enhanced meaning and we thus see less and less in common with the other side,” he writes. “Politics in this way becomes more about winning and defeating others, and less about finding common solutions.”
Approach “Republican Like Me” from the right or the left and you’ll be amused, educated and, hopefully, motivated to have a conversation — one in which you’ll listen to the other party, rather than trying to talk over them. As Mr. Stern writes: “If we can’t believe that the other side includes people of good faith, or we can’t respectfully disagree with one another, then our democracy is at risk.”