Politics must rise above us versus them

By Bill Prezant

Friday, June 30, 2017 | 2 a.m.

Having spent a lifetime engaged in my community, volunteering and serving on community boards, participating in the political process, working for candidates and advocating causes, I have learned that in this pluralistic society, diversity of views is a given.

There is no one set of experiences or DNA. The beauty of our country is that despite our differences, we have ultimately come together on a few shared philosophical principles like liberty, justice, equality, religious freedom, etc. In a phrase, E Pluribus Unum: “out of many, one.”

Today, we face a long-festering problem. Partisan political divisions, accentuated by multiple media outlets, have created a view that self-government is a binary choice. Your team is either a winner or a loser.

Does it have to be shirts or skins? Neither doctrinaire Republicans nor doctrinaire Democrats will solve our problems. The collision of political views is inevitable. James Madison observed in the 10th Federalist Paper that in a modern democracy there are no permanent minorities or majorities, but only shifting coalitions based on the continuing process of compromise and conciliation. Values will inevitably conflict.

The difficult choices are not how to do a good thing rather than a bad thing, but how to do a good thing without jeopardizing another good thing.

As Mortimer Adler, the Aristotelian scholar, said: “When both liberty and equality are limited by the restraints of justice, they are not incompatible. The actual conflict is between libertarianism, which asks for unlimited liberty, and egalitarianism, which asks for complete equality. There is never a conflict between limited liberty and limited equality.”

So does this mean that people should not maintain strong philosophical views? No, that is a freedom conferred in this democracy.

But to maintain a democratic system of government, we must distinguish between the passion individuals in the system may have and the system itself. The classic example is John Stuart Mill’s dictum that the individual ought to be free to do whatever he or she wants as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

At the core of a functioning democratic government is the need to find a just accommodation when you may be in conflict with your fellow citizen. The Czech political leader Vaclav Havel observed that democracy depends on citizens sharing such values as “decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance.”

Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, please be a good citizen. Now, more than ever, we need to show one another that we can tolerate a different point of view but have the capacity to find a common ground.

We’re in this together, and we all want to live in a civil and just society.

Bill Prezant is a native Nevadan. He practices law in Reno.