Collegiate Times

Whether you believe that the rhetoric of this political campaign was uniquely bad or just as bad as usual, we can all agree that we really ought to be able to do better.

Whether you believe that the rhetoric of this political campaign was uniquely bad or just as bad as usual, we can all agree that we really ought to be able to do better. People can't say that they don't understand the urge toward negative campaigning -- it does work, to some degree, after all -- but almost no one endorses such tactics as being ideal. Why is this so?

One of the most potent insights in the field of government in the past generation or so has been that "the personal is political." The idea that, despite conventional understanding, some arenas of life are to be thought of as public and some as private is mistaken. Public political structures impact our lives to a much greater extent than was historically believed. Instead of merely providing opportunities for us to live out our own private lives in public, they actually alter our private lives by opening some doors but closing others.

Whether the full extent of this controversial view is accurate, another sense of the phrase certainly seems to be: We do take politics personally, and frequently our politics are to be nobody's business but our own. We are often told that it is impolite to discuss politics (and religion, too, of course) because we run the risk of offending others or being offended ourselves. This is certainly not an idle worry as we have all experienced uncomfortable situations where tempers have flared and appropriate respect has not been paid to our fellow conversationalists, but we really ought to take politics less personally.

This does not mean that we should be less passionate about politics -- not at all. Displaying a strong commitment to issues is still entirely possible and entirely appropriate, but it is not an identical emotion to displaying a strong commitment to a person. When we debate we are really debating ideas; we are not debating another person, as such. So we need to be aware and do our best to make others aware that when we are critiquing a position, we are not critiquing a person, and that any passion we display toward a view is not a reflection of how we feel about those who hold it.

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