Can a Professor and Political Journalist Be Friends? A Call for Civility and Non-Violence in American Politics

By: Matthew Rozsa and Jay Bhattacharya

The two of us writing this article together should, in theory, not be friends. After all, our modern political climate holds that a professor (Bhattacharya) who has advised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on COVID-19 policies cannot be friends with a journalist (Rozsa) who has written regularly for Salon since 2016.

Yet we write together for one reason: We are disturbed at the loss today of civility between Americans of opposite political persuasions.

We are not only talking about the high-profile incidents of violence, like the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6^th or the would-be assassin who shot former President Donald Trump in Butler, Penn. We are also talking about how we treat — and mistreat — our neighbors.

Look at the 80-year-old man in the small Michigan town of Hancock who was viciously murdered in a vehicular assault by a 22-year-old suspect for the sin of putting up signs in support of Trump. The perpetrator, who subsequently committed suicide, is also believed to have committed other acts of political vandalism against both Trump supporters and cops.

There is also a trend, documented by researchers at the University of Maryland, of Q-Anon-inspired people targetting their families for violence. They are "primarily motivated to commit acts of interpersonal violence, often targeting those around them, including their own children... Traditional counterterrorism strategies are not designed to mitigate threats of violence that are primarily found in the household."

Too many Americans now believe that you are allowed to hate your political enemies. American culture – thank goodness! – tells us that we must not hate based on race, sex, or religion. But there is no norm against hating your political enemies. Therefore, the violence that erupts is almost socially sanctioned. It's corrosive and needs to stop. We need to go back to not allowing that to be acceptable; it should be shocking when it happens.

One of the authors of this article (Bhattacharya) faced a version of this spirit first-hand during the pandemic. As a professor researching infectious disease policy his entire career, he proposed an alternative path to managing the pandemic. Writing in October 2020 with distinguished co-authors from Oxford and Harvard at the height of the pandemic, the Great Barrington Declaration proposed focused protection of vulnerable older people and lifting lockdowns and school closures. The proposal was met with concerted politicized attacks, resulting in death threats and vilification against the authors and endorsers of the Declaration.

A practicing Christian, Bhattacharya believes strongly in forgiveness, even of enemies. This spiritual practice preserved Bhattacharya from the mental anguish that came with wanting harm to those who wished to harm him. It also enabled Bhattacharya to be open to reconciliation with people who wanted to harm him because of the Declaration. With this idea in mind, Bhattacharya has happily reconciled with many who did not share his pandemic management ideas.

The other author of this article (Rozsa) often thinks back to his friendship with Senator Joe Lieberman. Last month, he attended a memorial service honoring Lieberman's legacy, one attended by Democrats (former Vice President Al Gore) and Republicans (South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham). We cannot overstate the poignancy of this gathering on behalf of Lieberman. Sen. Lieberman was one of America's most famous centrists, a self-described "independent Democrat" who happily worked with politicians to his left and right in the name of problem-solving. He helped create the Problem Solvers Caucus, which dedicates itself to helping the parties work together.

Most importantly, though, Lieberman genuinely cared about humans on the level of friendship, regardless of their political views. That brings us to the genesis of this article.

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As we wrote at the outset of this article, we should not be friends according to modern political mores. After all, our modern current political climate holds that a professor (Bhattacharya) who has advised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and vigorously criticizes COVID-19 policies can not be friends with a liberal journalist (Rozsa) who writes for a legacy media publication.

Yet we are friends, and in the aftermath of the momentous and unsettling political events of the last few weeks, we'd like to share some words of advice for everyone who cares about preserving a non-violent, humanitarian, liberal society.

We offer these words in the same spirit in which Trump pumped his fist in defiance after Thomas Matthew Crooks shot him. His ear freshly wounded, Trump's message was simple: Do not be afraid.

Bhattacharya's reaction to the failed assassination was deep foreboding for the future of America had the assassin's bullet been more true, sadness for the family of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who Crooks killed, and concern for the health of the former president and others Crooks injured. The Covid era had already divided Americans to a point where a civil discourse on policy felt impossible. Bhattacharya was targeted for censorship in social media for expressing his anti-lockdown, anti-mandate views until Elon Musk bought Twitter and lifted the blacklist. Throughout 2020 and 2021, online threats were common occurrences in Bhattacharya's life. Bhattacharya feared the enflamed political passions would drive demands for more illiberal policy.

Rozsa reacted with a mix of emotions. His initial response was horror and devastation at the loss of human loss and the trauma inflicted on countless witnesses. When he heard the story about Comperatore giving his life to save his daughters, he was heartbroken. He also feels the sanctity of the American electoral process has been violated, one which holds that a lawful democratic procedure process chooses our officials, not acts of violence.

Yet he also felt tremendous personal fear, particularly as one of his past articles — written for his longtime employer, Salon Magazine — was singled out for contributing to the inflammatory climate against Trump ("Trump's Big Lie and Hitler's: Is this how America's slide into totalitarianism begins?"). Similarly, Rozsa has been the victim of political violence himself; to this day, he does not know for sure why he was targeted, but he suspects it was after his assailant saw a different article of his criticizing Trump ("The psychological reason that so many fall for the "Big Lie"").

Yet both reactions reveal some of the fundamental problems riddling Western politics. People are at an impasse because they don't listen to each other. We have constructed barriers that cause us to refuse to hear what people are saying to each other.

We make assumptions about each other that are just wrong. When confronted with our past mistakes — our inflammatory language, our factual errors, the harm we've caused others — we are encouraged to double down, entrench ourselves, and never admit to error lest it be misinterpreted as weakness.

For this reason, we forget that people fundamentally want more or less similar things. As President John F. Kennedy famously said in 1963, "If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

This does not change the fact that we have — and will continue to have — passionate disagreements about important subjects. Ultimately, there is a lot of uncertainty about a host of issues: Foreign policy, public health, and domestic policy. Because these issues are so complicated and the moral course so hard to discern, it is impossible that any side of the political divide has a monopoly on the truth. As the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote, the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart.

Sen. Lieberman once told Rozsa in a private conversation the key to having respectful dialogue. While you can question someone's reasoning, you should never attack their motives. It's better to say, "Oh, that is ignorant," rather than "You are evil," because if you say someone is ignorant, exchanging ideas and facts can fix the matter. Non-omniscience is not a character flaw.

Civility does not mean allowing bad policies to be implemented. It doesn't even mean you shouldn't warn about ideas and policies that can lead to dangerous outcomes. It simply means that, no matter how heated things get, we must not lose sight of each other's humanity.

Lieberman's observation was that if you think of your political opponent as evil, civil dialogue becomes effectively impossible.

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So, what must be done to restore civility?

First, we must be humble and forgiving. In the aftermath of the shooting, Trump showed early signs of graciousness. He encouraged his surrogates to tone down their rhetoric about the assassination attempt and not blame partisans who criticize him for what happened. He defended the Secret Service after many of his supporters attacked them for their apparent incompetence. In a leaked phone call with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump expressed a renewed spiritual commitment that suggests introspection about his mortality and a broader purpose for his political life than self-aggrandizement.

Biden and Harris similarly showed character by going on TV and saying we need to tone down the rhetoric and create situations where we can talk to each other. Biden's stepping down from the presidential race demonstrated a self-sacrificial willingness to put the country's interests above his own. Following Biden's lead, Harris, in her first stump speeches as presidential nominee, calls for healing the country's divisions.

We hope both candidates remember this spirit in the remainder of the campaign. This hope may seem naïve, but in the wake of the tumultuous immediate past, it is right to state our vision of the good, even if reality does not meet the high standard we set.

Second, we must remember that not everyone is involved in politics because they enjoy it.  One of these co-authors (Rozsa) has been a political animal since he was a teenager.  

The other co-author, Bhattacharya, by contrast, has spent most of his career publishing articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature in health economics, epidemiology, and related fields. He is not political by inclination or nature, but in the Covid era, he found himself in the middle of a massive political fight over lockdown policy.

For people who are not political by nature, the sharp gusts and blasts of our era can feel like being sucked into a tornado. Because there are probably as many or more apolitical people as political ones, our discourse should always remember that some people aren't talking about politics because they enjoy it as a contact sport. Many do so because they sincerely worry about their country and feel obligated — but still, frankly, a little scared.

This brings us to the third lesson. We, as a society, must admit that we are all scared. Liberals and conservatives are often scared of different things, to be sure, but those fears are rooted in the same underlying values. We all want a just government that brings justice to the wronged, gives opportunity to the underprivileged, protects us from foreign and domestic threats, guarantees our basic civic liberties, and otherwise leaves us alone to lead our lives as we wish.

Fear can make good people do bad things. The antidote to fear is knowledge: To shine a light on what is otherwise dark so that if it is not a threat, we can feel assured, and if it is a threat, it can be neutralized.

When it comes to electoral politics, those who seek higher office have both burdens and rights. The burden is that the public has a right to demand that they follow through on their policy promises, demonstrate their competence, respect the law, behave with integrity, not abuse their power, and provide enough transparency that we can hold them accountable (even as we balance that with respect for their privacy). Outsiders should not hesitate to claim that certain policies are dangerous (or even ideologically radical), that a politician may not be competent, that they may not be following the law, that they may not be behaving with integrity, that they might be abusing their power or that they may not be sufficiently transparent.

It is every citizen's right and duty to do these things. Yet the trade-off is that they must recognize and respect the humanity of their peers, even high-ranking politicians they despise. It should go without saying that this means violence has no place in the political process. On a deeper level, though, it means taming hate, a task that requires a high-trust society with thick civic institutions where people of very different political ideas interact constructively with one another.

We can get there, though the path ahead seems turbulent and dark. If the two of us, so different from one another, can grow to trust one another and become the good friends we are, everyone can.

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Matthew Rozsa bio:

Twitter: @MatthewRozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a professional writer whose work has appeared in multiple national media outlets since 2012 and exclusively at Salon since 2016. Throughout his career he has covered politics, culture and social issues. Today he is primarily a science journalist, one who focuses on the broad spectrum of topics related to climate change.

He received a Bachelor's degree in History from Bard College in 2006, a Master's degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and left Lehigh University as ABD in its History PhD program because his adviser and mentor John Pettegrew died. He interviewed former President Jimmy Carter in 2018, was a guest on Fox Business in 2019, repeatedly warned of President Donald Trump's impending refusal to concede during the 2020 election, spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California about QAnon in 2021, was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022, appeared on NPR in 2023 and interviewed former Senator Joe Lieberman in one of his last media appearances (Lincoln Forum Bulletin, 2024).

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