Ryan Price (Drake) on In Our Party We Trust: Why Debate When We Can Dialogue?

The fact is that partisanship is meant to work, and it certainly can. Partisanship is productive to the extent that it fosters vigorous debate in the United States. Conversely, however, partisanship is harmful to the extent that it limits collaborative policymaking. Unfortunately, today the scales tilt overwhelmingly towards the harmful side.

If this were not so, broadcast news would not have needed countdown clocks that nearly reached zero last August when the United States was scheduled to lose all borrowing authority. If this were not so, our personal politics would be more nuanced than what can fit on a bumper sticker. If this were not so, Olympia Snowe would stay in the Senate, Obama would lose his photoshopped-Nazi mustache, and Romney would be free of the fabricated online stories painting him as a racist.

So how do we fix it? While not audacious enough to believe I have the “silver bullet” to fix all the problem of split screen American politics, I propose one honorable way to begin. I believe responsible journalists and concerned politicians should take a lead by changing the name and format of the “Presidential Debates” this fall to something more closely resembling “Presidential Dialogues.” Albeit a small change, this would shift the paradigm in terms of how our leaders interacted and how our journalists discussed American politics.

There is no doubt that small rhetorical shifts can significantly alter our understanding of political issues. My hope is that it could change our understanding of American politics itself, too. For example, the conceptual difference between “illegal alien” and “undocumented worker” is as vast as the Rocky Mountain Range. We know too that referring to the peace-loving Muslim-Americans around us as “Americans” instead of “potential terrorists” has important repercussions for their citizenship rights. My hope is that encouraging journalists to facilitate “dialogue” this Fall instead of moderating (inevitably partisan) “debate” would have equally important repercussions on the way we perceive the media, our leaders, and ourselves as a people.

Creative policymaking has always led our country in the right direction, and we should not worry to ask our experienced journalists to facilitate such productive dialogue between our politicians.

In fact, we should seriously worry if we continue not to.