Ideas vs. Identity

Something I regularly encounter, especially as election season comes closer, are people more or less verbatim reciting party doctrines on issues, even if their opinions on them are rather unsubstantiated (not that i claim to have a irrefutable backlog of sources to defend all my beliefs either). I also see so many issues becoming intensely politicized (police brutality, racial equality, Covid-19) that are absolutely bipartisan issues. While on a good day I am relatively skeptical of the Republican and Democratic parties, at this point the parties (and greater media machines working alongside them) just seem like they aren't even trying to find common ground.

Much of this I'm sure can also be attributed to social media being a predominant source of information and the various benefits (think the ability to spread the BLM movement globally overnight) and dangers (fake news, hyper-processed information, lack of constructive dialogue) that accompany people trying to reconcile healthy relationships with this technology (and simply define what that looks like). However, I do think it runs deeper than that.

Lets be clear. Covid-19 is a pandemic. It is not political. The handling of it certainly can be politicized based on the proposed solutions that arise, but the fact that there is a pandemic is NOT a political issue. And yet you see tons of people blatantly disregarding basic protocols like social distancing and wearing a mask as it has become a political issue. The right acts as if the pandemic is an overblown sham and the left acts as if its the end of days. I see no discord, no functional education on where people are right and wrong (both in how to protect the economy and how to protect people) and now Covid-19 is a political issue.

Police brutality is not political. Its bad, and it happens too often and too disproportionately to people of color. The solutions moving forward can be political, with each party bringing up logical solutions. I'd love to see more emphasis on things like effective and consistent officer training, psych evals, etc. which seem like very logical conclusions that most people could get behind. Our officers are failing in this way, lets identify where they are going wrong, train them better, and work to improve the working conditions of one of the most important and stressful jobs in our society. Instead, the response is largely politicized into debates about "defunding the police" or statistics about people of color committing crime. There is a logical middle ground to the issue of police brutality (I won't speak to the ability to execute that middle ground for I am certainly not well versed in the budgets and procedures of police officers) but the issue has been hijacked as a synonym for issues on equality in the U.S. and has been politicized. Fixing policing won't fix the fact that people of color are more likely to be born into poverty, which has a much stronger correlation to staying in poverty than is widely addressed. Fixing policing however is still an issue that needs to be solved and will lift at least one weight of the shoulders of people of color as we move towards a fundamentally equal society. It shouldn't be political, and yet it is.

I think that, as Americans, we hold too much of our value in our identity and we draw the ideas that create our identities too heavily from the general party lines. Most people should not have ideas that are perfectly correlated with our two political parties, it should be much messier than that (I'm not a statistics expert, but I think its safe to assume that the distribution of ideas that are non binary should be normally distributed on a bell curve). It is expected that if you are conservative fiscally that you will be anti-abortion and if you are pro-immigration that you are also a believer in climate change (who would think you could be a "believer" in well recognized science???). But those ideas should not be heavily correlated! You can be the biggest conservative in the world, believe we should not globalize and only buy U.S. made goods, and still think that its important to openly welcome new talent from abroad to further bolster our economy. And you can be a total climate activist and be incredibly well versed in climate science and ecology and still be anti-abortion, an issue that is eludes sciences ability to point to a definitive solution. These ideas shouldn't be 1-to-1 correlated, and we should be free to express them openly without fear they breakdown an identity that has to follow party lines.

You are not your ideas. You don't know everything about your ideas. Its ok to be wrong (I think its actually a good thing. You can only know you're closer to the truth if you've been proven wrong.) and changing ideas does not make you lesser of a human being. If anything it makes you stronger, so long as the change is well informed. As such, issues like police brutality and Covid-19 have to be depoliticized if we are to effectively solve them. And that starts with people abandoning the status-quo party policies expressed in political discourse and mainstream media and replacing them with their organic thoughts, with all their beautiful complexities.