My first semester at Grinnell, in the first floor bathroom of Burling library*, I found some graffiti on the wall that pretty well summed up what I was in for. The school administration made the idiotic choice to paint over it last year (somehow assuming that the walls wouldn’t fill up just as quickly), so I can’t quote it directly, but it started with some general message about how we need to fight Trump and his supporters. It was a common enough sentiment at the time, it being the sad month after the 2016 election when everyone was looking for some route toward progress. Right next to it, someone else argued that we shouldn’t fight Trump supporters, but try to win them over to our side. Then another person said something about how Trump supporters are beyond redemption and we shouldn’t tolerate bigots, and some wise-ass summarized the whole thing up by saying something like, “So you’re tolerant by being intolerant of intolerants? That’s a position that I just can’t tolerate!”
It’s probably a mark of how far to the left Grinnell is that the conversations usually aren’t liberal versus conservative, but liberals who can stand conservatives versus full-on revolutionaries. At first the debate seemed kind of stupid to me, having spent my formative years in Waco, Texas, where I grew up thinking that my family’s liberal tendencies were some sort of shameful secret that we shouldn’t go around spouting. Probably as a way of dealing with the cognitive dissonance between my family and my community, both of which I loved, I became a strong believer that a multiplicity of opinions are necessary in any conversation, and that strong friendships across party lines are the soul of democracy. My time in Edina did little to challenge that assumption (the asshole conservative wing of my high school hadn’t sprung up quite yet).
Looking back on it, that position was optimistic to say the least. It was hard to hold onto it in the early 2000s when Republicans were waging senseless wars that still haven’t entirely ended, and hard in the late 2000s-early 2010s when Republicans obstructed a centrist president from making mild progress. But it nearly collapsed for me when millionsof Americans (though, importantly, not a majority) voted for a man who promised to do evil things to the most vulnerable among us, and delivered on that promise perfectly. How can you argue with someone who thinks that migrant children should be separated from their parents and kept in cages, and still think that it’s a good thing that they have that opinion? How can you stay friends with someone who believes in something you find abhorrent? The idea of amiable rivalries between opposing parties really only works in the best possible scenario, in which the opposing parties hardly even oppose each other at all.
That’s not to say that liberals are always in the right. Obama’s use of drone warfare deeply troubled me, and keeps me from being too nostalgic about his term. And conservative ideas do appeal to me from time to time. The deficit is a real issue that we should be more concerned about (though if you asked me how I’d go about fixing it, I’d say to tax the wealthy and reduce military spending, neither of which would thrill conservatives). Still, I often feel stuck between the reality of politics and how I wish things were. It seems intuitively right to respect everyone’s opinion and see worth even in those who disagree with you. But I believe what I believe for a reason, and if I give too much ground, it feels like I’m selling myself out for some grand view of democracy I can barely define.
Luckily, the hardest part of this issue is the kind of philosophical abstraction that we never really have to face. Violent insurrection aside, we’re not getting rid of conservatives any time soon, so the question of whether or not we’d be better off without them is purely hypothetical. A dangerous hypothetical too, because it tempts us to retreat into feedback loops of agreement with fellow liberals about how messed up everything is and how easy it would be to fix it if only we had the chance. There are two real questions I can draw from this conundrum, though: How should we treat conservatives as people? And should we compromise with them?
The first question is a tricky one, especially after the election. We can’t deny that everyone who walked into the ballot box in November of 2016 and voted for Trump made a choice, a moral choice, with full knowledge of the extreme prejudice, inequality, and hate they were letting into office. We can’t deny that many, of them, though not all, faced legitimate problems, and may have just made a poor choice, manipulated by biased media. We can’t deny that they are human beings either, and that they have the capacity to change. And no one changes alone.
As for compromise, there’s a certain disdain for that word on the Grinnell campus. But, in a lot of ways, this college is a square mile cut out from the rest of the universe, where choices between capitalism and socialism or oppression and freedom seem simple, when really they are so complex, so compromised, that any absolute position sinks fast. Case in point: my dad has made so many meetings with the Trump administration these past couple years that I’ve stopped reacting beyond, “Yeah, okay, dad’s off to talk to Jared again. Maybe he’ll have an awkward run-in with Mike Pence or something**.” After every trip to Washington, he comes back with bizarre souvenirs and good news that the Trump administration seems just a few steps away from taking the clemency system away from the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice is run by prosecutors, who have a vested interest in keeping prisoners in prison, so it makes sense that they would be opposed to releasing non-violent drug offenders serving ridiculously long sentences. Even Obama’s widely-lauded pardons could only go so far because each application had to go through a convoluted system to reach the president’s desk. But Trump could change all that, maybe out of some sort of conscience, but more than anything as a stroke of vengeance on the Department of Justice for the Muller investigation.
This is the kind of complexity that you don’t see in bathroom wall philosophy: an incompetent and evil man is angry about an investigation into treason that he probably committed, and in his revenge he creates a system that could free thousands, maybe even millions, of unjustly imprisoned people. It’s a compromise, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do.
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* This was before I chose my favorite cubicle on Burling third floor, right by the contemporary fiction section, where I spend a little over half my waking hours.
** And, by the way, he did.
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