Being editor of ALotusInTheMud.com has not made me immune from getting caught in the whirl of the pernicious problem of political polarization. At a recent family get-together in India, the conversation veered to politics, and one person close to me remarked, “Our leader is a messiah.” That was a bridge too far for me. Engaging in arguments and counter-arguments, I found the pitch of my voice rising. Thankfully, better sense prevailed, and I de-escalated. 

You may have been caught in a similar situation, too. Amid the widening chasm between political parties and ideologies in India, America, and other countries, heated arguments, strained interactions, and even rifts erupt as more and more people find it hard to respect differing viewpoints. The other is always wrong, even dubbed evil. And each side insists the leader of the opposite camp will destroy democracy while our leader is godsent to fix the country.

Now Tom Suozzi is  3rd time Member of Congress from  New York’s 3rd district, and he is known to be working across the aisles to bring about commonsense legislation in the Congress . I spoke with him on the subject. He listed a few factors fueling polarization in America, and what we can do to alleviate the problem.

Tom Suozzi on Political Polarization in his own words

The first step is to recognize that just because we disagree with others, we don’t have to hold them in contempt.

It is a very big concept of my religion. Jesus said not only to love your neighbor, but to love your enemies too, those you disagree with.

Yes, political polarization is happening in our country as everybody thinks differently. The first thing to do is to understand why this is happening.

4 factors causing polarization

Number one is that out of the 435 seats in Congress, 380 are ‘safe’ seats. They are evenly divided: 190 are safe Republican seats, and 190 are safe for Democrats. This is because the Congressional districts have been gerrymandered and because of the advantage of incumbency. You will win no matter what as long as you are in the right party. So, candidates for those safe seats don’t listen to the public as much. But they do listen to the one group that can defeat them. And that’s not the people who vote in the general election, but people who vote in the primaries. The few people who vote in the primaries for the Republicans are often on the extreme right, and those who vote for the Democrats are also often on the extreme left. So, politicians pandering to the small groups of people voting in the primary elections is a big problem.

Number two is social media. You get more followers, more likes and more people reposting your stuff if you say more extreme things. That encourages people to say outlandish things, encouraging more extremism.

The third cause of polarization is cable news. The most followed show on Fox News before he got moved out was Tucker Carlson Tonight. But Tucker Carlson had only 4 million viewers. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, which is like the far left, gets 3 million viewers. But that is out of 350 million people in America. Yet, such  extreme voices are controlling the political debate. And their job is not to educate people. Their job is to try and keep people watching by trying to get them enraged.

The fourth problem, and the most dangerous one, is that our strategic adversaries, Russia, Iran, North Korea and others are using our freedom and our social media to whip up the debate in our country. And they’re supplying people with disinformation. They take an issue that people are divided on. Earlier, it was Black Lives Matter versus Blue Lives Matter — the whole thing about the cops and the African Americans and defund the police. Now you see the same with the transgenders issue and the Evangelical Christians. Our adversaries don’t pick sides; they prop up both sides to get everybody yelling and screaming at each other. The biggest thing today is Israel and Gaza. No matter that there are a lot of awful things happening in many places in the world. For example, there have been a hundred thousand people killed in Ukraine, and 20,000 children taken hostage. But you don’t hear about any of that.

A lot of what is happening on our college campuses and on social media is really outside actors who want to make Americans fight with each other. Because the longer we’re distracted and fighting with each other, the less likely we can actually solve the problems we face in our country and our world.

Healing the divide

I am constantly working to try and heal that divide. I was the first Democrat to come out and say, I would vote to keep Mike Johnson as the Speaker of the House. I don’t agree with Mike Johnson on many things, but I said I’ll vote to keep him as Speaker because I don’t want to see the whole government come to a standstill again.

What people can do to heal the divide and save their sanity is to be careful where they get their information from. You can’t trust a lot of this stuff on social media that’s being directed at you. You have to work at trying to hear different voices.

If you listen to what they say on Fox News, Democrats want open borders and they want your children to become transgender and they don’t care about the police. But that is not true. And if you listen to the disinformation about Republicans, they all hate people with brown skin, they don’t care about poor people or the environment.

Yes, on both sides there are some people who are like what the other side is saying. But most people are not like that. They just want to say to their leaders, “Hey, can’t you work together to solve the problems?”

So, we have to recognize that we’re being manipulated.

The far left is less than 8%, and the far right, too, is less than 8% of the population in America. A majority of the people are in the middle, fed up with the left-right divide. This was reported in 2018 by a public opinion study titled the Hidden Tribes of America conducted by a group named Finding Common Ground.

The best example of this is my victory in the election in February for New York’s 3rd district. It was a very tight race. The Republican George Santos had won by 8 points last time. I won by eight points this time. That’s a 16-point swing. Why? My opponent was saying crazy, radical things that the far right says, to attack me. And I was saying, “Hey, can we all just try and work together to solve problems?” And people responded to that message.

(Parveen Chopra is the founder and editor of ALotusInTheMud.com

For more comments on political polarization from concerned citizens in America and India, please check out the web magazine.)