On July 23, Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley gave a speech to a group of high school conservatives calling on them to be the next generation of leaders who will lead this country by reaching across the aisle and working with their fellow countrymen, even if they disagree with them politically.  

According to The Hill, she asked the crowd if they had ever posted something to “own the libs” online, and a majority of the audience raised their hands.

“I know that it’s fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you’re accomplishing when you do this — are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading?” Haley asked. “We’ve all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn’t leadership — it’s the exact opposite. Real leadership is about persuasion, it’s about movement, it’s bringing people around to your point of view. Not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way you do.”

Haley is right.  The biggest problem in our country is not who is in the White House, who controls Congress or what ideology the majority of our Supreme Court subscribes to.  The biggest problem that faces us as a nation is our unwillingness to compromise, our inability to listen to each other and increasingly, our desire to deride the other side and paint them as something lesser than or diametrically opposed to us.

Many may point to the right and directly at the rhetoric of President Trump’s tweets as the root of this, but it isn’t just the right who is at fault here. Democrat Senator Cory Booker called anyone supporting the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court as “complicit” in “evil.”

Ultimately, we should not tolerate this kind of language from our elected officials, and we certainly should not try and emulate it to prove a point against those we disagree with.  Shouting down our opponents and framing them as devils doesn’t unite — it divides.

We need to be united now more than ever, as countries like Russia are seeking to take advantage of our divisions to get what they want and remove our influence across the world.

We need to reach out to those we disagree with.  I guarantee you that on Iowa State’s campus you will find a myriad of people with different backgrounds and political beliefs than your own.

Find those people.  Talk to them. Don’t get angry or deride them, hear them out.  Nobody’s ideology is perfect, so we should all want our own ideologies to be challenged and improved.

I have been reading John McCain’s memoir “The Restless Wave” recently, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in politics, even if you disagree with McCain’s policy stances. In the chapter titled “Fighting the Good Fight” McCain writes, “I believe in compromises that move the country forward, goodwill toward man, and empirical facts.”

We should all strive to work toward those three things, especially if we want this country to continue to grow and prosper into the future.  We must strive toward them individually, and the initiative should not be from Washington down, but from citizens up. It’s on us to change politics, because it’s not going to change on its own.