Finding Common Ground in Times of Anguish

I am a middle-aged, divorced, conservative man, who has been using apps such as Bumble, along with other similar sites, to enhance my dating life. Moreover, I am someone who has been criticized on the Facebook page of my alma mater, Columbia University, for defending capitalism. I can say with absolute certainty that in today’s political climate, it is very difficult to be in a relationship with or to be friends with an individual whose political beliefs differ from your own. This past January, I was dating a woman whom I met on a well-known dating website. Things were promising, and we were getting along well. However, on our fourth date, we got into that inevitable conversation about politics. The next day, she decided to break up with me. The reason she cited was that she has a rule she never breaks: She does not date Republicans.

This notwithstanding, I firmly believe that liberals and conservatives can be friends, as evidenced, for example, by the decades-long friendship between the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a committed liberal. Similarly, though our classroom days have ended, I enjoy corresponding with one of my Columbia University classmates, whose political views are vastly different than mine. This can only be possible, however, when both individuals seek to usher in change without starting a revolution or by destroying the best features of American life. I have always subscribed to the notion that there is common ground between all well-meaning people. When it comes to social issues that we collectively recognize as problems such as income inequality, disparities in access to healthcare, etc., it is easy to agree on the general principle that something must be done. On the other hand, it is not so easy to agree on what should be done, who should do it, how the efforts should be financed, and the like. As a conservative with liberal friends, I typically bristle at the suggestion that I must check my white privilege—or acknowledge the systemic racism that they allege has been part of the United States since its inception. With that said, the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, on May 25th has forever changed the way that I look at police brutality in the United States.

As protests have erupted in scores of cities in the United States and across the globe, I find myself in a familiar position among my progressive friends. Although we agree that something must be done to halt the trend of white police officers killing unarmed black men, we cannot seem to agree on exactly what the solution should be. For many of them, they view American society through the lens of Marxism and see the social system as a class hierarchy, in which one class holds most of the power and uses it to control the other classes. They believe that fairness is unattainable in our present system, and that true equality can be achieved only if our society restructures its existing institutions to redistribute wealth and power. As such, a friend approvingly posted the recent New York Times op-ed calling for the defunding of police departments across the United States. This is an idea that has gained traction through the work of Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College. In an October, 2017 interview with The Intercept, for example, journalist Rashmee Kumar asserted that Vitale’s 2017 book The End Of Policing “calls for an ideological reframing of policing as an inherently punitive practice that criminalizes the most vulnerable and marginalized people in the U.S. in order to maintain the status quo for white elites.” Another acquaintance, who is a college professor at a local community college, said that George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police made him want to listen to the 1992 anti-police song “Cop Killer,” which graphically describes killing police officers, in a since-deleted Facebook post.