An alternative to steak? Maybe not. There’s some value in our stubbornness, it seems. (Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash)

Near the little Corn Belt city where I was born, there was a crossroads that was home to stockyards and a meatpacking plant. The stench of bovine offal was so awful as we passed through that we kids would wrinkle up our noses and yell, “Peee-YOU!” My dad, smiling, would reply, “Ah, the smell of money.” Farmers raising cattle, he figured, were better off than our kin, who stuck to corn and soybeans.

Yet for all my farmland bona fides, I didn’t know the word “abattoir” when, as a young man, I found it on my itinerary during a study tour of South Africa aimed at building international understanding. Our little group of Americans was accustomed to being shown the points of pride in one community after another during our visit, but that fine summer morning featured almost three hours in a slaughterhouse — the familiar odor defining “abattoir” for me.

Maybe you know the saying, “Laws are like sausages: If you want to respect them, don’t watch how they are made.” A corollary may be that if you do watch how sausage is made, you should not be expected to politely consume a slab of prime rib just then for lunch, with your host proudly noting that it was fresh from the site of your morning experience. I stuck with the mixed greens and an avocado. It was a tough day on the goodwill tour.

There are good arguments, of course, against consuming meat — avoiding it makes sense for economic, environmental and health reasons — but if my unsettling morning in an African abattoir didn’t dissuade me from enjoying a sizzling steak or a sausage off the grill, I don’t suppose any rational argument will. Almost all of us should exercise more, too, and drink more water and consume less sugar — yes, we know this — but it’s pretty comfortable to worry less about all that and stick with what we already are doing. Humans are stubborn creatures.

Increasingly so, in fact. As our political polarization has grown, so has our obstinacy, and that is emerging as a great impediment to progress. This unwillingness to question assumptions and stray from the orthodoxy of our political tribe is surely one reason that only 16 percent of Americans say that our democracy is working quite well, according to a new poll — a dark view shared by people on the left and the right, rich and poor, urban and rural, old and young.1

So often, though, we seem to judge our democracy’s strength by whether our side is winning. That’s a flawed notion. What really powers democracy is the tug and pull of competing views, which may turn today’s winner into tomorrow’s loser, yet leave everyone stronger in the certainty that we will have a fair fight for our principles on another day. Continuity, not continual victory, is the mark of a healthy democracy.

That continuity is threatened by the poison of Donald Trump’s lingering lie about the 2020 election. Those of us who aren’t impressed by his puffball populism can’t imagine how he has made cowards of so many Republican officials, who mostly have chosen to embrace his lies rather than risk his ire. Their acquiescence leads ever more rank-and-file Republicans to join in the charade and support Trump’s “I-was-rooked” whine, cheering the claim that democracy was upended by Joe Biden’s election, rather than, in fact, being sustained.

Giving even an inch to such cynicism seems like surrender. Any deviation from our own side’s orthodoxy might make us vulnerable, we figure, so we burrow ever deeper into our partisan and social cubbyholes. But that all but ruins any chance of achieving the kind of compromise that has always made democracy work. There are few signs that we can anytime soon dig ourselves out of this deep divide of distrust.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the just-reported study in which researchers two years ago paid regular Fox News viewers to change channels and watch CNN instead for a few weeks. The results were encouraging to those who see Fox’s calculated bias as a destructive force advancing Trump’s truth-averse universe. Here’s what the researchers found: As they were exposed to better journalism, the Fox-to-CNN group began to doubt the extremely negative and dubious information about Joe Biden that they had heard, and to waver in their unquestioning allegiance to Trump. That could be an encouraging sign to anybody who imagines that what America needs to begin to recover from our rabid political distemper is a new CEO at Fox.2

But the research ended on a dispiriting note: As soon as the test period ended — when the research subjects stopped getting paid for switching to CNN — the Fox viewers reverted to their original preference, and their opinions began to once again line up with what they were told to believe by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and their ilk. There’s that human stubbornness again, see?

Only occasionally do events generate the kind of change in attitudes that shift the political landscape. It took the Civil War to dislodge slavery, the Great Depression to establish government’s responsibility for its citizens’ well-being, World War II to squelch isolationism. But more often we aren’t swayed by seemingly seminal moments: The horrific slaughter of 20 innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 didn’t alter the gun control debate, and repeated warnings from scientists of an impending climate catastrophe seem not to be swaying most government leaders to embrace the bold steps that are really needed. A pandemic that has killed a million Americans, which you might imagine would fuel support for an improved healthcare system or policies to reduce economic disparities, seems instead to have further divided us.

Some scholars who have studied polarization around the globe say the divisions in America are different from what’s seen elsewhere. The seeds for our current divide were sown long before Donald Trump got involved in politics, they note, arising more from ordinary citizens’ concerns than from a divisive leader — beginning, this theory asserts, with the cultural transformation of the country in the 1960s and 1970s. As Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue wrote in an influential 2019 Foreign Affairs article drawn from their book on polarization, “Partisan sentiment bubbled up from the belly of American society, not the head.”3

If that is so — if Trump’s lethal leadership is a result of our divisions, rather than its cause — then the same forces that brought us here can lead us back. In other words, it is by using the tools of our democracy, and through the individual actions of citizens, that the system can come to work as it did, quite well enough, for generations. The authors note some advantages America has in that struggle — especially, that “above all, the country has a deep attachment to the rule of law, constitutionalism, and the idea of democracy itself.” That is why the January 6th insurrection cannot be tolerated, and why its advocates ought to be severely punished: It was an attack on the constitutional order, which is our fundamental backstop against tyranny.

Which means we are now obligated to do the best we can from where we are. No conflagration we might imagine is likely to bring Americans together, and certainly no download of new data seems about to dissuade anybody from being sure that their views are right. Maybe the current divisions reveal only the messiness of contemporary democracy. Perhaps we’re just at an uncomfortable stage in our history, seeming all the more troubling only because today’s digital media landscape puts it all in front of us, day after day.

So we might as well embrace our stubbornness. Just like the stench of an abattoir didn’t turn me off from my appetite for a steak (one lunch aside), the stink of America’s politics surely ought not to discourage us from engaging in the civic world. This no time to settle for an avocado, tempting as that may be. Here we are, aware of how messy the sausage-making is, disappointed in it, but stubbornly keeping at the task of trying to make things right, anyway. That’s what’s required of us just now.

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