We live in interesting times.

From the assassination of Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman to that of Republican activist Charlie Kirk, it’s easy to feel as though our way of life is under attack. Some point to the federal militarization of our cities. Others will point to injustices of past administrations that should be boldly rectified. 

With the ongoing story surrounding BC Republicans and their speaker, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on the role of political difference. 

It’s something we’ve grown uncomfortable with. As far back as the 1966 Charlie Brown Halloween special, Linus joked, “There are three things I’ve learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.” In this century, however, polarization and the poisoning of political discourse have intensified. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explains, even though U.S. citizens are less ideologically polarized than we think—that is, we agree more on policy than we’d expect—we suffer from a particularly harmful pattern of hating each other, known as “affective polarization.”

A study by Mernyk et. al found that Americans tend to overestimate how supportive their political counterparts are of violence. Their studies—conducted both before and after the 2020 election and Jan. 6, another period of intense political turmoil—showed that Republicans and Democrats have nearly identical levels of support for, and willingness to carry out, political violence. On Mernyk et. al’s 100-point scale, members of both parties rated their own support for political violence at around a 10. But each side believed the other was far more extreme, estimating their counterparts’ support for violence at around 36. 

In other words, we think our political counterparts are four times more supportive of political violence than they actually are.

And yet, political killings are fewer than in our recent past. While the near-assassination of Trump in Butler, Pa., was “the most serious attempt to kill a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981,” as the AP put it, deaths from political violence have declined rather than risen, as many feared. Whatever you think about the Cato Institute, its analysis following the murder of Charlie Kirk showed that the number of political killings from 2021 to to the present is lower than during 2016–2020. 

There are not “hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of Americans who would kill our campus’s conservatives. Nor our progressives. Rhetoric has become crazy, but people remain sane.

In this piece, I use the term “counterparts” to describe the Republican-Democrat relationship. Perhaps the parties themselves could also be seen as “rivals.” Activists and politicians of opposing persuasions may be rivals too, in what ought to be an honest contest for hearts and minds. But don’t let yourself be persuaded that our great and different political traditions—or those who follow them—are enemies. Those who say so, like Solheim, and the common partisans who swear off the possibility of friendship with the “other” (a group with whom I’m familiar, having grown up in a left-leaning part of Massachusetts) are, intentionally or not, depriving the world of the richness of human experience. It can be understood only in pieces and only through persistent, and sometimes painful, interaction with people who are not us.

It’s not enough that we don’t want to kill each other. Boston College is one of the most politically diverse campuses in the country. We are part of a very small group of elite universities with near parity between conservatives and progressives, as the Fordham Institute points out. This should be one of our greatest strengths—intellectual diversity at a liberal arts school. Instead, FIRE gives us an “F” in political tolerance and reports that half the student body self-censors at least once a month. 

We should be the marketplace of ideas—Solheim called “long past”—even as he demonstrated in his own talk. He was one example of our potential to hear controversial ideas so that we may judge them. Instead of pursuing discourse, though, we now find ourselves ranked seventh worst out of 257 colleges for free speech by FIRE. 

It’s not that we can’t continue on in our own bubbles of ideas. We have so far, and we can continue to do so. But it is a waste. 

At BC, we have been a role model in peacefulness. We have been a safe campus, spared from that small but inexcusable incidents of targeted violence that have erupted at other universities amid the Israel-Hamas protests. But we shouldn’t settle for more “coexistence,” where Republicans, Democrats, and others live together separately, like roommates with diverging interests. Instead, we should aspire to be a role model of civility. 

We should welcome controversial speakers, and feel free to denounce their views if we find them abhorrent—just as BC Republicans, using their judgment, denounced Solheim’s. We should work to understand each other even—especially—when we feel our values are threatened. This doesn’t mean our Democrats should start loving Trump, and it doesn’t mean our Republicans should start loving Obama. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should embrace some mushy middle-ground where every partisan policy or politician is deemed equally mediocre. 

The point is that political differences are good. Partisans are counterparts, not enemies. No ideology has a full view of the best path. We need each other, both to learn what we can and to reject, after earnestly listening, what we may.

So when our campus Republicans, when our own classmates, get singled out for shaming by people from a West Virginia Congressman to the president of the Heritage Foundation; when they get threatened with excommunication by the CRA, all for voicing their rational disagreement with a speaker they boldly hosted—all for saying that they “uphold the notion of civil discourse and believe that there is always a time for respectful discussion, even with those who do not agree with us”—we shouldn’t have to sign on to the Republican Party’s platform for the sole reason to stand with our peers when they are, in this at the very least, so obviously deserving of our solidarity.

Sure, as a registered Independent who calls himself a radical centrist, it’s easy for me to shake my cane and tell the whole college to “disagree the right way.” I have a vested interest—if friends could only follow party lines, and we were unable to separate people from their least palatable opinion, I’d be—well, screwed. Please know that I’m not aloof from politics. Plenty of things that I love have been, and are being, destroyed under this administration, and only a few things are going in a way I like. It can be painful to talk with intelligent people you love and hear them rationalize what you see as terrible things. But we have to keep connections across the political divide—across all the numerous and upsetting political divides. I vehemently disagree with much of what Charlie Kirk said. But there is wisdom in his words: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence … because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.”

I’ve had the great privilege of singing in a performance of Considering Matthew Shepard. One song that stuck with me was “I Am Like You.” It reminds us that even people who do the most horrible things are human:

“Sometimes I feel (in springtime, in early afternoon) the sunshine warm on my face / You feel this too (don’t you?) / The sunshine warm on your face / I am like you (this troubles me).” 

Needless to say, we shouldn’t think of all our political counterparts as Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. But we should always think of them as people, who feel the sun just as we do and tend to have “ordinary yearning and ordinary fears with an ordinary hope for belonging” (if you’ll pardon my jump in the reference).

We, as a society, must embrace the marketplace of ideas. Here at BC, we don’t “have” to; healing our politics can always happen somewhere else, with someone else. But what a waste of $90,000 in tuition to tunnel through college unchanged and undisturbed. The point is not to agree with everything BC Republicans does—the point is that we’re worse off without them. We need not stand among them to, in our shared community, stand with them.

Jake Wiepert, I’ve never met you. I know your name only through this story. But don’t you resign—not for this.