We’re not always going to be able to find that kind of common ground. We can, however, make some attempts to look past the rhetoric and understand what’s behind someone’s political position. In the end though, there will always be extremists on both sides, and we have many existing laws to limit their ability to harm fellow citizens.
Recently there has been some effort by the left to “criminalize” words and actions which harm people’s feelings.
Regardless of Hegelian principles or appropriate conflict resolution tactics I reject wholesale any efforts to undermine rights our citizens reserved to themselves when we formed our government, and chief among those is free speech.
One of the most brilliant concepts enshrined in American governance is the idea that the people who join together to create the mechanisms of representative government enter that agreement with inherent rights, rights we labeled “inalienable”, which predate government, and which government is forbidden to infringe upon. One of these is free speech.
We drafted our constitution not to form a government which extends rights to citizens, but as citizens with existing rights, and a government with clearly limited authority to infringe upon those rights. Unlike most, our government can only exercise the limited power we as citizens grant it.
What I’m chiefly interested in is identifying ways we can change minds while respecting those rights, and I reject any attempts to abandon those efforts by silencing people I disagree with. It’s shortsighted, pointless, and incredibly dangerous.
When I talk about middle ground, in the argument about Confederate monuments for example, I’m talking about acknowledging the pain some on the left feel when confronted with those monuments, while also digging far enough that the left can comprehend and empathize with the idea that many from the deep south have an entirely different attitude toward those symbols, and one that is not based on a racist point of view. Clearly we, as a nation, are going to have to come to grips with our past, and clearly the processes we followed after the civil war left long simmering, legitimate resentment against those actions which are complicating our efforts to rid ourselves of those archaic symbols.
