Rumours of Grace: What's the matter with America?

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With the end of the U.S. presidential election right around the corner we are soon to see who is going to win: someone who has been involved with countless controversies or someone who says whatever they feel in the moment regardless of whether or not it is true.

Americans love their politics almost as much as Canadians love the Tragically Hip; they participate in it with religious zeal.

The Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump race to the White House has not been pretty. What is happening to make the election such an uncivil, polarizing and contentious process?

For one thing, to borrow a line from Charles Dickens, Clinton is a bit “economical with the truth”. It appears that she feels she needs to keep a lid on some of the information about controversies that have followed her. At the same time, Trump can’t seem to remember that in the distant and recent past, he has made comments and tweeted opinions that flatly contradict what he has been saying in recent weeks.

The mood of the country is sour. The more attention Trump gets, the more embarrassed his supporters and party become. And Clinton remains stuck with a public persona that leaves many ordinary Americans feeling cold and distrustful.

What’s going on? Two recent comments that I’ve come across shed some light on the matter. The first comes from a conversation posted on the PBS website. David Brooks and Mark Shields, two seasoned journalists, were discussing the Clinton and Trump campaigns. While acknowledging that Trump is worse when it comes to insults, they lament that both have served up a lot of poison about their opponent.

They see this as part of a bigger trend, the “coarsening of American culture”. It is easy to imagine what they mean by “coarsening”. They no doubt have in mind shows filled with profanity, vulgarity, cheap shots and other forms of expression that degrade as they entertain.

We can also add here the sarcasm that late night TV hosts such as Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers and, until recently, Jon Stewart trade in. They especially enjoy targeting Trump. I take it that they are seeking to do what is best for their country by taking a serious political stance. However, aren’t they further polarizing the U.S. populace?

Many Americans are awash in hyper-sexualized images of the human body. Pornography and violence are staples of the media diets of North Americans and millions of American citizens have been trained to deal with problems by means of aggression and deception.

Some say that the Republican Party created Donald Trump, but they are not the only ones who have had a hand in enhancing the coarseness gene in his DNA.

It seems that Americans are having trouble remembering the biblical insight that we must love our neighbour as ourselves. This inability to love the neighbour, even if we disagree with them, increasingly infects the political discourse we are hearing from our friends to the south.

For me this became even clearer as I listened to the CBC’s Michael Enright interviewing Arlie Hochschild, an American sociologist (Sunday, Oct. 23). She spoke of how she travelled from “safe” left-leaning Berkeley, California to the poorer state of Louisiana. What she found there is the basis for her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

Hochschild’s comments revealed that she has a remarkable gift for empathic listening. Empathy is the gift that allows a person to listen in such a way that the feelings and deep, perhaps even unspoken, concerns of the other person are understood.

What Hochschild found in Louisiana were not the “hicks”, bigots, political dupes and religious “fundamentalists” that a listener might expect a sociologist from Berkeley to find. She found people who feel strongly that they have been “forgotten” and “pushed” to the back of the line. They feel like strangers in their own country.

Louisiana is among the poorest of the American states: oil has polluted its land and waterways, families are fragile, the state government is a “do-nothing” entity, taking few initiatives to lift the people, immigrants are taking jobs and alcohol is easy to get, poorly regulated and abused by many.

Hochschild found that for many people in Louisiana the message of Trump is a quasi- religious message of salvation. He is the one who says that if he is elected he will put an end to the ills that plague the people. He will bring back factories and jobs. He will affirm the religious right and the family. He promises to remember those who feel abandoned.

We can wonder if Clinton would have been less inclined to call Trump supporters “deplorables” if she knew better the people Hochschild researched. And we can wonder if Trump would be less inclined to say some of what he has been saying if he visited American-Hispanics more and listened more carefully to immigrants, women, Native Americans and African-Americans

Perhaps if there were more emphatic listeners in the United States, the right and left would stop vilifying each other. Politicians might better understand where their opponents are coming from. Citizens would be able to go to the polls without hatred for those who will vote differently from them. I am not optimistic that this will actually happen for reasons I can consider another time. But it is, nevertheless, one of the key things I believe that is needed.

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