From Jan. 6 to ousted Harvard president, the right and left need to escape fantasyland | Opinion

It is bad enough that Republican Donald Trump supporters and Democratic Joe Biden supporters don’t remember recent history the same way. One sees Jan. 6, 2021, as overenthusiastic U.S. Capitol tourism, while the other remembers a violent insurrection that threatened to overturn the results of an election.

One is clearly right and one is clearly wrong. One side is sprinting down the road to fantasyland and the other stands firmly in reality. But I’ve noticed that in some ways both sides have decided the destination is fantasyland. We can’t even agree on basic word definitions anymore.

The first happened in the Claudine Gay affair. You remember the former president of Harvard was caught lifting sentences and even whole paragraphs of other people’s work and using it in her scholarly articles and dissertation — 50 times. Faced with a mountain of evidence, Harvard’s governing board was like, “Nah, that’s just ‘duplicative language without appropriate attribution.’“ Other scholars began imagining complicated definitions of plagiarism that, somehow, Gay didn’t violate. Plagiarism has to be willful and flagrant, don’t you know.

Suddenly the definition of a simple concept taught to undergrads and even high school students was in dispute.

Then Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of the House Republican leadership, went on TV and called the jailed Jan. 6 rioters “hostages.”

I thought I was clear on what hostages were. On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, grabbed a couple hundred civilians and dragged them back to Gaza to be used as human shields or bargaining chips to be traded for concessions from the Israeli government.

Did Stefanik think the Biden administration was holding Jan. 6 convicts in the White House to fend off a Trumpian missile strike, or that the Justice Department was willing to trade them for a Trump guilty plea in one of the former president’s upcoming criminal trials?

Our culture wars have become so intense that it is no longer enough to have a flexible memory for recent history. Now you need to be willing to rewrite the dictionary to suit the controversy of the moment. First, we couldn’t agree on the facts, and now we can’t agree on the words.

America’s two political parties are now divided by a common language and a common problem: Democracy doesn’t work in fantasyland.

For a democracy to survive, it needs a lot to go right. In the history of the world, democracy in most places has been fragile and fleeting. In America, democracy is in big trouble.

Democracy needs a shared tongue to allow conversations and persuasion along lines of difference. The left and the right in America have both laid siege to English.

Democracy needs a shared reality where both sides can agree on the basic facts that are the basis for our disagreements. Republicans and the right-leaning media have gone off on their own here, but too often Democrats have crafted their own bubble. Remember when Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation and a newspaper that argued otherwise had to be silenced on social media?

Democracy also needs mutual respect: Both sides have to agree that their political opponents are fellow Americans seeking what’s best for America. We’ve totally lost the thread on that and it is getting harder and harder as leaders on both sides declare their opponents are evildoers out to destroy our country. Trump reached a new low over the Christmas holiday when an online rant concluded with the wish that his political opponents “ROT IN HELL.”

I wish I had a glib solution I could recommend to the hole we find ourselves in, but all I can think to say is that is up to us. Turn off the loudest, most partisan media you’re listening to. Find a friend who is on the other side and talk. Reward politicians who tell the truth even if you disagree with them. And when it is time to vote this year, vote for reality, not fantasyland.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent.