I’ve made a new online friend and we have some fascinating discussions. Those talks have gotten me thinking about how we disagree in this country and why political discourse is such an ungodly mess.

Ken and I couldn’t be more different. He’s a retired engineer who lives in Chicago and quite politically conservative. In fact, he’s mentioned that he’s been to some Tea Party rallies and, while he’s certainly sympathetic to some of the Tea Party’s politics, I don’t know if I’d actually consider him a Tea Partier (he’s more a libertarian, than anything else). A retired engineer, he’s certainly more thoughtful and articulate than many of the Tea Party types one hears about. And here I am, a stereotype come to life, a liberal college (soon to be professor) type with a ponytail.

What enables our friendship, I think, is a shared sense of humor and a great deal of respect for each other’s’ intelligence. He might tell me I’m wrong about something, but he never tells me I’m stupid or bad, which would have shut off the discussion a long time ago. What’s really refreshing is that he actually backs up any argument he makes with facts and Lord knows that’s a rare thing these days. I don’t think we’re ever going to convince each other to switch sides, but one of the reasons I so enjoy talking to him is that it always makes me think. I hope I do the same for him.

Part of what interests me about Ken, and I’m still trying to get a handle on this, is that many of our differences, I think, come from fundamentally different views of the world and certain issues. When he cites a fact, I often don’t have a counter-fact and thus we begin talking about the assumptions behind the arguments. For example, part of what puts him in line with the Tea Partiers is his fundamentally jaundiced view of government. He doesn’t believe government does much right and thus wants to see as little of it as possible. As a liberal, I believe government has a definite role to play in leveling the playing field for people and thus am more apt to prefer government play a bigger role in people’s lives. His default position is that government will nearly always screw up. I think the screw-ups really are fewer than the successes.

Now, think about that; that has to do with basic assumptions about what the role of government should be. The discussion may be about taxation or social policy or any of a hundred other things, but it really comes out of some honest differences Ken and I have about what’s really a philosophical issue: How much control people have over their own lives and why and how much the government should change the amount of that control.

While things like that are often the subject of the screaming match that public discussion has become in this country, you don’t hear much discussion of that deeper level. Now, quite frankly, I blame the right wing in this country for that. Because of its alliance with religious fundamentalism, which sees the world in stark black and white, the right wing portrays its opponents not just as wrong, but as evil. It always makes me crazy when I hear idiots like Sean Hannity talk about “taking this country back,” as though it’s been stolen from real Americans by a cabal of people like me, who are not just on the other side of the argument but also on the other side of the divide between good and evil. We aren’t just wrong, we’re The Enemy.

Of course, that kind of thinking makes it very easy to be comfortable with your own position, even if it’s weak. If you really think I’m a bad guy, that removes the need for you and me to compromise. On the other hand, if you admit that you and I might just see things differently based on our life experiences, you have to actually think about what I’m saying. That’s hard. And it might make you a little uncomfortable.

To cite one of my discussions with Ken as an example, I don’t believe that in this day and age most people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That comes out of my experience of four years in the working poor class. Ken, on the other hand, did pull himself up by his own bootstraps (I’m not sure how, but I intend to talk to him more about this). Different life experiences, vastly different conclusions. I honestly don’t know if Ken has ever faced the hopelessness of being working poor, the sense that life is all one step up and two steps back. I have. But I want to know more about his experience because hey, maybe my experience led me to a wrong conclusion. I don’t think it did, but there’s real value in getting the opinion from the other side. And at worst, it will be a really interesting conversation.

If one thing could help heal this badly broken country, I think, it’s a willingness to examine our own basic assumptions and compare them with those of the people we disagree with. There are, I think, some evil consequences of positions I disagree with, but that doesn’t mean the people who hold those positions are evil (I’ll make an exception for Dick Cheney). It may not even mean they’re wrong. It may just mean they see things through a different lens than I do.

If we can start comparing those lenses, maybe we can start learning from each other. And when that starts happening, we’ll be on the road to fixing what’s broken.