This op-ed by Quentin Young appeared on Colorado Newsline on July 18, 2024.
When history gazes back on the darkest times, it remembers best the people who exemplify peace and unity.
The United States is experiencing a hyperpartisan rift, political violence is on the rise, and last weekend’s attempt on the life of former President Donald Trump added to a sense that the country is accelerating toward an ugly future.
Many people reacted to the shooting shamefully. They reinforced a foreboding atmosphere with unhinged social media posts, reckless public statements or incendiary commentaries. There was knee-jerk blaming and calls for retributive violence. There was the dehumanization of political opponents, which now is the only way some Americans know how to engage with the other side.
But there was also goodwill.
The more conflict rends a society, the more commendable are voices of peace. Their rarity speaks to the ease by which people can fall to mob hostilities, and their courage inspires the admiration of anyone — today and years ahead — who’s moved by gestures of our shared humanity.
Former state House Minority Leader Patrick Neville this week provided an example. The Republican was often a polarizing figure in the Colorado statehouse. In 2022, he supported the short-lived nomination of far-right podcaster Joe Oltmann, who has called for the execution of political opponents, for Colorado governor.
But this week, Neville came to the defense of one of the state’s more progressive lawmakers.
Democratic Rep. Steven Woodrow of Denver in the hours after the attempted assassination compared Trump to the devil in a tweet that Woodrow quickly deleted, along with his entire X account. (He later apologized for the tweet.)
Blistering blowback followed. But it was too much for Neville. On Sunday he posted on X that he didn’t agree with Woodrow’s comments, but “any threats against him or his family are more deplorable than what he said.”
It was a simple but profound message in the midst of escalating vitriol.
In an interview this week, Neville, whose own family has been the target of threats, said political division in Colorado became especially pronounced during the pandemic. He thinks social media and other modern technologies have widened the divide.
“It’s one thing when you can just make a comment from behind a keyboard to when you actually have to make the comment to someone’s face,” he said. “I think those human interactions are going to be more and more and more important as time goes on.”
The unifying influence of face-to-face contact was demonstrated to him in the Legislature, where he served from 2015 to 2023.
“If you were willing, you could go walk across the aisle and just have a chat,” he said. “I had some Democrats approach me and do that when I first started on. I was kind of surprised. And then I definitely started doing that later on, and you just get to know them personally, and there at least are a few things you can agree on, and then if you disagree, you can disagree civilly.”
This is largely the spirit behind Disagree Better, an initiative championed by Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis and Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox. It seeks to remind Americans how to “persuade without hating each other.”
“Our nation was founded by people who profoundly disagreed,” Polis says in a Disagree Better video, in which he and Cox introduce the initiative. Cox advises listeners to take a deep breath when someone raises an uncomfortable political topic, and Polis adds, “Be curious. Ask questions. If you still disagree, that’s OK. But you might find that you aren’t as far apart as you think.”
The Colorado House Republicans released a statement in response to the assassination attempt, and the caucus largely struck the right tone. Most importantly, it avoided any rhetoric that assigned blame for the violence to rhetoric from President Joe Biden or Democrats or liberals, as did many individual Republicans in Colorado and throughout the country. The shooting highlighted an “urgent need for unity and the rejection of political violence,” the Republicans’ statement said, and it called on “all citizens to prioritize unity and peaceful engagement in the political arena.”
Such hopeful perspectives were the exception.
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Windsor, a staunch Republican ally of Trump, attributed the shooting to “evil” and blamed “those who hate God.” Other far-right Colorado figures on Saturday alluded to retribution for the shooting. Oltmann wrote on Facebook of those he viewed as culpable, “These are evil, disgustingly vile people and they need to be held accountable.” Election-denying Colorado insurrectionist Shawn Smith in response to the shooting referred on X to “Cool heads. Dry powder. Steel hearts.” Powder in such a context refers to gun powder.
History has a deep reservoir of low esteem for such attitudes. But there’s an alternative.
When Ulysses S. Grant met Robert E. Lee at Appomattox to formalize Lee’s surrender at the end of the Civil War, Grant could have imposed harsh and humiliating terms. The rebellion had cost more than 600,000 lives, and the generals’ men up to that moment were mortal enemies. Instead Grant chose a path of such magnanimity and reconciliation that his conduct that day has become a high point of the national story.
If Americans could summon such grace to end a war, they should be capable of the same to participate in an election.