A Washington Post analysis this week of how the Trump and Biden campaigns each plan to bridge America’s divides on matter of political polarization, racial division, and other issues across the socio-political spectrum could serve as a textbook case of the absurd “both sides do it” framing that has wreaked so much damage on our country, particularly in the age of Trump. After setting out the undeniable premise that America is riven by all sorts of divisions, the piece relates the responses its writer received when he directly asked both the Biden and Trump campaigns what they would do to heal our differences. Both campaigns, not surprisingly, issued milquetoast responses that they would work to unite America.
The analysis makes slight nods to the possibility that Donald Trump’s avowed desire to bring the nation together has been contradicted by other things he’s said and done, and also suggests Trump’s role as president means he has “more power to resolve existing tensions than Biden.” Still, the article arrives at this desultory conclusion: “Perhaps there aren’t good answers either candidate can provide.”
Yet, to any fair-minded person, such a conclusion only makes sense if you separate the Biden and Trump campaigns’ statements about their plans to heal America from any actual history or actual facts. Donald Trump’s ceaseless, conscious effort to divide the country into those who support him and those who oppose him, largely on racial lines, from the day he was inaugurated through the present, has been the overriding feature of his term in office. Receiving from the Trump campaign a statement about what he will do to bring America together, and not comparing this with his open declarations and policies of the past three and a half years — that he is only the president of those who vote for him, that Democrats are to be considered the enemy, that Muslims, Hispanics, and other minority populations are not real Americans, that protestors are enemies of America, that a Biden victory in November should automatically be considered illegitimate — is to engage in a nonsensical exercise that serves to confuse, not edify, the reader.
If you exclude the fact that in reality Donald Trump has intentionally sown division as a key political strategy to an extent greater than any American president since Richard Nixon, then it becomes possible to suggest that Joe Biden doesn’t have any more credibility than Trump to tamp down America’s divides. But if you allow this undeniable fact of Trump’s intentional divisiveness, then it’s as easy to reach the opposite conclusion: that simply by acting like a normal president, and not like a man who governs only for those who vote for him, Joe Biden actually does have a plan to heal America’s divisions.
Yet ignoring the basic and undeniable fact of Trump’s intentional efforts to sow division among Americans allows the reporter to assert that Biden’s very efforts to return America to normalcy would actually. . . be divisive:
Biden’s campaign rhetoric is heavy on the ways in which he would roll back the shifts to public policy and political norms Trump introduced. But that highlights a key problem. Trump’s focus on gutting what Barack Obama did as president was part of his appeal in 2016 and part of his process of further endearing him to his base. Biden suggests taking a similar but narrower approach to Trump’s administration. If you view Trump’s work as good and Obama’s as bad, you’ll see Biden’s pitch as divisive. If you view Obama’s work as good and Trump’s as bad, you’ll see what Biden proposes as necessary.
Now, it’s true in a very general sense that anything Biden does that is not supported by Trump’s voters will by definition be “divisive.” But to say that a Democratic president attempting to pass policy and enforce norms after his election by a majority of voters is being “divisive” in the same way as a president who calls for Muslims to be banned, immigrants to be deported, women to be despised, and elections not to be trusted is to confuse the conflicts of ordinary democratic politics with the deliberate arousal of hatred and vengeance of Trump’s authoritarian politics. These two things are not the same. The Post’s argument falls apart even more when you stop to consider that some of the norms that Biden would surely attempt to restore include no longer engaging in politics that seek to divide American against American!
As upsetting as this misleading equivalence between the Trump and Biden campaigns is, more upsetting still is the way the discussion obscures the very real and difficult questions of what it might mean to bridge America’s divides. The piece gets closer to the real issues when the author writes that, “The divide is not mostly one focused on policy but on the intangible sense of what it means to be a member of either party and what cultural values that identity represents.” But once we are in the realm of true conflicts over identity and values, questions as important as how to bridge them must include asking what “bridging” really means, as well as whether bridging such divisions is even desirable or possible.
Take an extreme but salient example: if some Trump voters would rather give up on American democracy than share power equitably with non-white Americans, because they believe only white Americans are real Americans, what would it mean to heal this division? Those who love our democracy and its ideals of equality cannot compromise on either issue. But if Trump voters are also not willing to compromise, then the divide is not one that can be “bridged” or “healed.” Instead, it needs to be resolved by one side winning elections and promoting its vision in law and policy. In such a case, in fact, there is great merit to making the terms of the division crystal clear, rather than letting the underlying fight be obscured by misleading talk about undocumented immigrants voting or Black Lives Matter protestors being un-American.
There is a separate issue of what politicians can do, in the realm of rhetoric and style, to promote certain values while attempting to persuade or assuage those voters who fundamentally disagree. During his term in office, Donald Trump has used lies, propaganda, overt racism, and misogyny to promote his vision of the world. This was undeniably divisive, in that it broke Americans into the camps of the protected and the attacked, the real Americans and the traitors. Does anyone honestly believe that Joe Biden, or any other foreseeable Democratic president, would ever engage in anything similar to what Trump has done? To return to the example above, would it really be divisive for a President Biden to talk about the importance of one person, one vote, and to argue for a diverse and egalitarian America? A Biden being “divisive” by fighting for democracy and equality would be a universe away from Trump being divisive by trying to turn our country into a white supremacist autocracy.
Ultimately, the notion of healing or bridging divisions as an end in itself may not be nearly as helpful as it seems, even as it speaks to the natural desire of most of us to not be in conflict with our fellow Americans. Crucially, some conflicts of fundamental values cannot ever be bridged, as with the irreconcilable gap between those who support democracy and those who don’t. Conflict over whether the United States government should see whites as “real” Americans and everyone else as second-class citizen is another such divide. Americans who hold such opposing views cannot be reconciled to each other; rather, they must argue and fight for their beliefs in order to persuade a majority of voters to support their side. This is called democracy, and it is what this country should be committed to.
The central importance of openly arguing about our conflicts as a way to, if not bridge our divides, then to at least engage with them is yet another reason why putting aside Donald Trump’s undeniable record of using lies and propaganda to divide Americans makes absolutely no sense when attempting to compare our prospects for civic reconciliation under a Biden versus a Trump administration. Whatever opposition Biden would inevitably provoke from Trump supporters, his clear commitment to the norms of American democracy in itself would be a quantum improvement over the current president. Trump has encouraged his supporters to view his opponents as enemies to be defeated, not as fellow citizens to be negotiated with or persuaded. Biden has shown no such illiberal attitudes. In fact, quite the opposite; he’s been criticized by some Democrats for thinking too highly of his ability to find common ground with Republican politicians.
Look, there is a real and difficult question to be faced by a Biden administration over how to govern when a significant portion of the country has been primed to believe his election is illegitimate if not outright illegal, and that appears increasingly ready to throw out majority rule in favor of an autocrat like Trump who protects the interests of an overwhelmingly white base against those considered less American than themselves. In fact, this is a problem that all believers in American democracy need to grapple with. It may be the biggest question we face.
But suggesting that Biden and Trump are just two sides of the same problem ignores the fact that some of the most profound conflicts dividing Americans actually have a right side and a wrong side. This unwillingness to make a moral or value judgment is part and parcel of why articles like the Post one I’ve been using as my own personal piñata today obscure far more than they illuminate. As writers like John Stoehr have been arguing, this moral vacuum has had profoundly negative consequences for news coverage of Trump and for American democracy. This Post article isn’t the worst example of its kind, but it’s pretty decent as a case study.