Uncivil discourse

On finding a way forward after Orlando

American politicians have grown fond of quoting former U.S. Senator from New York—and Tulsan by birth—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who famously quipped to a debate opponent that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. There’s an implicit and delightfully dickish suggestion in there that his opponent was flat wrong. But there’s also a hint of something more conciliatory, more hopeful: that even though we may disagree, if we could just arrive at a set of agreed upon facts we might actually get somewhere together. That people with diametrically opposed opinions about the same set of facts could reach a compromise.

The aftermath of the Orlando shooting has illustrated, troublingly, that in America, even in the face of a monumental national and cultural tragedy, this is no longer the case. We all agree—leaving aside Alex Jones and other shrieking fanatics who claim the attack was a false flag, or a the work of the lizard people or whatever—that Omar Mateen, an American-born Muslim man of Afghan extraction, claiming allegiance to the Islamic State, entered a gay Orlando nightclub and murdered at least 49 innocent people, injuring dozens more. 

In possession of this set of undisputed and tragic facts, Americans have reached startlingly different conclusions. As I write this, congressional Democrats are occupying the floor of the House of Representatives in a probably fruitless effort to force a vote on gun legislation, an emotional display of frustration and outrage combined with total, unmitigated helplessness in the face of a deadly national epidemic. Hillary Clinton exclaims her own belabored but no less fervently held belief that what’s needed is more and better gun control. The NRA and other gun rights absolutists are, as usual, going full ostrich, deflecting with a point that could not be less relevant about dealing with the Islamic State in the Levant. Republican standard-bearer Donald Trump riles up his supporters with tone-deaf self-congratulations for his warnings about Muslims in America, which, though hateful and bigoted, at least have the advantage of dealing with what we’re talking about. Less fanatical people on the pro-gun side of things believe earnestly and not without at least some intuitive sense that what happened in Orlando would have been a lot less deadly if more people in the club had simply been in the position to put a bullet in Mateen’s head. 

Let’s not waste ink sentimentally extolling the virtues of civility and how important it is that we’re having the conversation. It’s a cloying dance, as though the families of the dead in Orlando and of future victims of mass shootings, and the rest of us hoping to get by in this republic, care about the conversation by itself if it doesn’t lead anywhere. But in this fragile moment, with the nation running a fever and people in gun-friendly places like Oklahoma as fearful that the government will take away their firearms as people in Connecticut are that the government won’t, we’d do well to remember that even a seemingly hopeless conversation can lead us somewhere if we accept that we don’t have to agree, we just have to compromise. 

The makers of the American system of democracy were not geniuses nor were they particularly creative, but there’s a reason the country born of the world’s oldest anti-colonial insurgency is still standing. Though non-geniuses, the people who drew up the American constitution were readers, in particular of one French political theorist whose ideas form both the back bone and the soul of the constitution and this republic: Montesquieu. 

In a book much read by the Framers, he writes: “To prevent this abuse [of power, which is the inevitable impulse of anyone wielding it], it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.” 

From this idea we get not only our tripartite system of government and the checks and balances every school kid learns about, but a key idea running through the entire structure of the constitution and the government and the society that grew up around it, which is, basically, that everyone should be constantly putting everyone else in check so that the only way to get anything done is to compromise. That even—maybe especially—when you’re looking at the same facts and thinking “how in the name of all that is holy could this other person think what they think?” it’s a good time to reach a compromise, because the idea of compromise is woven into the fabric of this society. 

In this way, the idea of compromise is not somehow a betrayal of, or ancillary to, your own personal conception of the rights you have as an American, whether to own a gun or not get shot at. By engaging people with whom you disagree in a conversation about how, or if, to stop mass shootings and being willing to give up things you don’t think you should have to give up in order to reach a real solution, you’re not compromising on American values, whatever your notion of what those values is, because compromise is the American value. Compromise—especially on the most emotionally charged questions about which you are the most certain—is the thing that makes American democracy tick.

For more from Denver, read his article on Oklahoma's place in the South.