Where's the Balance?
Political polarization is only increased with one-sided debates
Earlier this week I attended the Idaho Policy Forum, hosted by the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy (ICFP) at the College of Idaho in Caldwell. The title of the forum was “Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization.” Unfortunately, most of the dialogue went in only one direction.
I’ll go into more detail about some specific things that the panelists said in a future article. My point today is that this forum gave the pretense of balance to a decidedly non-balanced discussion. The organizers surely wanted students and the public to come away with a sense that they had heard both sides of an issue, and were now fully informed, but that was not the case at all.
The main organizer was an assistant professor of political economy named Stelios Panageotou, who opened the forum with a speech about how American discourse has become more polarized in recent years. His own political views are obvious — a seemingly defunct Twitter account shows him to be solidly anti-Trump and anti-Republican. However, I found myself in agreement with his diagnosis of the problems in American society.
He discussed the increased polarization and how modern society has harmed families and communities. The manufacturing jobs that once powered America and provided a stable living for millions of families have been replaced by a service economy where employers have no loyalty to employees, and where stability is replaced by constant change and chaos. He said that we live “atomized lives” in “modular existences,” cut off from family and community.
I agree with all of this, which is why it’s so disappointing to see students presented with strawman arguments. We agree on the problems, but we disagree on what caused those problems and how we can fix them. Conservative figures such as Tucker Carlson, Blake Masters of Arizona, or our own Theo Wold could all have made convincing arguments about these social issues from a conservative perspective, but the organizers either did not know anyone like that, or they deliberately decided to frame each discussion from a left wing perspective.
During the school voucher discussion, none of the panelists attempted to figure out why tens of thousands of families leave the public school system each year. Instead, they built a terrific strawman. Nancy Gregory, president of the Idaho School Boards Association, said it was all about greed. “There’s a massive pot of money, and there are those who want access to that pot.” Rep. Julie Yamamoto, who chairs the House Education Committee, agreed. “Is it for the children, or is it for the power and money?”
The presence of Audra Talley, a director of Homeschool Idaho, provided a pretense of balance, but she too firmly opposed any form of voucher, education savings account, or tax credit.
Do you see what the students there must have come away thinking? Anyone who supports school vouchers or education tax credits is so wrong that they are not even worth listening to. Do you think this will tamp down on our political polarization, or exacerbate it?
I emailed the moderator, May Roberts of ICFP, to ask if they attempted to invite a proponent of vouchers or ESAs to provide that perspective, but as of this writing I have not received a response.
The panel on so-called open primaries was almost as badly stacked. Former governor Butch Otter and Luke Mayville of Reclaim Idaho presented the view in favor of the current initiative, while BSU Professor Matthew May was ostensibly there to provide factual history of our election systems and was unable to fully refute the other two.
I would like to note that the moderator of the open primaries panel, Boise Council Member Patrick Bageant, did a fantastic job. He pressed both Otter and Mayville for clarifications, presented opposing arguments, and even asked Mayville to articulate the strongest argument against his own position. You could not discern Bageant’s own views from the way he handled each panelist, which is exactly what you want from a moderator.
The frosting on the cake, however, was the keynote speech by former attorney general and State Supreme Court justice Jim Jones. Whereas Otter used most of his time to tell stories and Mayville attempted to maintain a nonpartisan veneer, Jones gave the whole game away in a rambling twenty-minute rant. He name-dropped Dorothy Moon three times, explicitly stating that the blanket primary initiative was necessary to break her “stranglehold” on Idaho politics.
Unfortunately many of the students in the audience seemed to appreciate this vindictive vendetta. Hopefully a few of them ask themselves if one-sided forums and angry figures such as Jim Jones are not the cure for our polarization, but the cause. Many thousands of Idahoans support conservative values and Dorothy Moon. Rather than inviting them to a forum to explain why, they are mocked and demonized, made the butt of jokes and the scapegoats for what is wrong with our society.
Maybe the fault is ours. Maybe we should be hosting forums like this, presenting truly balanced views to the next generation of Americans. Otherwise another generation will come of age believing conservatives to be nothing more than ridiculous caricatures, not understanding why we fight or what we are fighting for. We’re going to have to get in the game if we want any hope of saving the country we all love.