Shall I tell you a story. It’s an American story, but it’s generally applicable. In the US, there was once a President called Barack Obama.

While he was President, the number of people crossing the Southern  Border into the US continued the decline that had started under his predecessor, George W Bush, falling from 723,000 in 2008 to just 416,000 in 2016. 

Then Donald Trump became President, and made a terribly big fuss about the Southern Border. 

Democrats weren’t very keen on President Trump, and engaged in a bit of Oppositionalism: if he’s against it, we must be in favour of it. 

(As an aside, President Trump was rather better at making noise than actually solving problems: under his watch, the number of Southern Border crossings almost doubled to 859,000 in 2019 – the last year before Covid. But that’s not the story here.)

The story is that the Democrats – by opposing and reversing Trump’s policies – ended up creating a genuine Southern Border problem. From that 859,000 number in 2019, the number of Southern Border crossings jumped to over 2 million in 2022. This crisis (and it genuinely is a crisis this time, unlike 2016, when it very definitely wasn’t) may very well cost the Biden administration the States of Arizona and Nevada.

But it’s not just Democrats that engage in Oppositionalism. The Republicans are guilty of it too. Under Barack Obama, there were a lot of measures put in place to encourage alternative energy sources and electric vehicles. 

And now Donald Trump is promising to roll this back and get oil and gas and coal moving again. If the Democrats are in favour of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels… the Republicans must be against it.

Coal is an increasingly rubbish way of generating electricity. And while there are good arguments for ensuring some energy supply diversification for national security reasons, they fall down if your country has lots of much cleaner, much cheaper natural gas. (See my video here https://youtu.be/E3G70uXf0s4?si=n7EazNNfduybh4TP). 

The US – because of a desire to oppose everything that the Democrats have done – is about to end up falling ever further behind China and even Europe in terms of the clean electrification of their economy. And which – by the way – means that businesses and consumers will pay more for their energy: something that is highly unlikely to have positive impacts on their trade balance.

Here’s the thing: just because your opponent is doing something, it doesn’t mean it is wrong. This is a symptom of a deeper malaise: thinking of your political opponents as enemies, and thinking of them as not merely misguided but actively malevolent. And if someone evil is proposing something… then what they propose must also be evil. 

I don’t know what the solution is. But I do know that we’d all do better to remember that our political opponents are human beings too, and they are no less worthy of respect and of having their voices listened to than ourselves. 

Robert