“Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.”
President Dwight Eisenhower
We are living through a real time, real world, global collective action problem. If you think the way forward involves “putting politics aside” you are missing a very important point. Collective action is by definition POLITICAL. Democrats and Republicans in Washington cannot and should not “put politics aside” in responding to this crisis any more than Americans could or should put breathing aside to prevent the spread of COVID-19. You do not have to surrender your political perspectives, or even your partisanship, to be properly attentive to the present situation, but you do have to surrender the misconception that there exists a neutral, non-partisan perspective or route to enlightenment that could be exploited or adopted.
The only Americans able to adopt something akin to this sort of political neutrality are those with the least knowledge and understanding of our political system. In other words, the state of supposedly non-partisan enlightenment actually requires profound ignorance of both how our political system is supposed to work and how it actually works. This fiction of a non-political or non-partisan “objective” reality is the fundamental driver of political rhetoric (good, bad, & ugly), which is why it’s VERY easy to manipulate average voters’ perceptions of government and politics.
The ongoing argument between Democrats and Republicans in Washington about how best to solve this global collective action problem is a substantive one with real logics, assumptions, claims and proposals. It CANNOT and should not be dispensed with! We CANNOT and should not simply all come together in the public interest because in America the public interest is and should be ALWAYS contestable and contested. This constant state of contestation is the defining characteristic of liberal democracy. This means that the only real coming together Americans can and should attempt is coming to the realization together than politics, while certainly messy and often ugly, is important enough to understand and become knowledgeably attentive to.
The anti-politics cynicism masquerading as wisdom and realism on both ends of our political spectrum, long pandered to out of political expediency, is a disease that has become a chronic illness, an intellectual immune deficiency if you will that seriously retards our collective efforts to solve the mounting existential collective action problems of our age. Until average Americans come to see politics as much more than a “necessary evil” achieving the kind of results so many imagine possible if politics were suspended will remain a goal beyond our reach.