The Marquez kids lean right.
The Marquez parents lean left.
It seems like everyone in Tucson knows the Republican siblings Edmund Marquez Jr., a Rio Nuevo board member and an insurance agent, and Lea Marquez Peterson, the president of the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Whatβs less known is that their parents, Edmund Sr. and Priscilla, are both Democrats. They went to watch Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine at Sunnyside High School Thursday night.
This partisan divide has led to some passionate discussions and disagreements over the years, they told me. But the Marquez parents and kids (and grandkids β thereβs another generation) actually see each other regularly and get along well.
They donβt let their political disagreements tear them up as a family.
βWhen the issues come up, we have had debates,β Priscilla Marquez, 69, told me. βWeβve learned that at our little table we canβt solve it all.β
It would be nice if the Marquez family were a microcosm of this state and country, if we could all agree to disagree. But this year, it doesnβt feel like thatβs going to be easy after voting ends Tuesday.
The one thing we can agree on is we are all dreadfully sick of the campaigns. And yet Iβm sure when itβs over, the hard feelings the campaigns have brought out will not easily go away. For many, they will harden and be, frankly, dangerous to our relationships, our communities and our democracy.
Weβve abandoned our political norms this year. When Donald Trump said he would imprison Hillary Clinton if elected, that crossed a line. So did many other things he said. Proposing to ban an entire religious group was another. He trampled our norms and benefited from it, encouraging others to follow him past the outskirts of our ethics.
The Democratsβ nomination of a cripplingly compromised candidate under criminal investigation also crossed a line. Weβre used to our candidates having flaws, but possibly criminal ones have been unusual. And Hillary Clinton has displayed the characteristic Clintonian willingness to blur ethical lines repeatedly.
What has deteriorated is the center β the central agreements, the shared facts coming from shared news sources, the political and social norms that allow us to disagree but still share a community and a country.
The center must hold after this election, or be re-created in the spaces where it has disappeared. The alternative is too ugly to imagine.
Some of those polarized places are local. The Tucson Unified school board race has turned so nasty that I canβt imagine how incumbents Mark Stegeman and Kristel Foster will work together if they are re-elected.
The alternative views on the Pima County Board of Supervisors are almost irreconcilable. Depending on your party, itβs either corrupt to the gills or a board that has made mistakes but achieved good success lately. In reality, it canβt be both.
Reconciliation is going to be even harder nationally. Too many people have floated into a la-la land of fake news sources that back up their most conspiratorial and extreme points of view.
Did you hear about the Macedonian kids? It turns out that many websites whose stories Trump supporters share on Facebook and other social media are created by teens in a small city in Macedonia. They figured out thereβs an insatiable appetite for anti-Clinton, pro-Trump news, and so they provided it, never mind whether it was true.
Their websites, such as USConservativeToday.com, contain made-up stories proclaiming, for example, that Clinton said in 2013: βI would like to see people like Donald Trump run for office.β
The fact that Clinton didnβt say that doesnβt matter. The Macedonian kids have learned that people will believe it, click and share. The Macedonians make money off the advertising.
Their ability to peel Americans away from the center, where we have shared facts and news, means it will be harder to put our country together again.
We in the βmainstreamβ news media share some of that blame, too, of course. Itβs been amply documented that we tend toward the left in our political reporting.
Thatβs been exacerbated by the nomination of Trump, whom I and many others view as objectively dangerous and unqualified for the presidency.
We canβt and, in my mind, shouldnβt hide that assessment. But our urgent warnings about him have pushed his supporters deeper into the embrace of people outside the mainstream. To many Trump supporters, even Fox News has become too βestablishmentβ for them, and theyβve drifted toward conspiracy mongers like Alex Jones of InfoWars. If you go through that looking glass, itβs hard to come back.
All of it is a bad cycle. But weβve got to pull out of it.
The Marquez family has no unexpected secrets for getting along, but it helps that they have a custom of talking openly.
βEdmund and I grew up having a lot of dynamic family conversations at the dinner table,β said Lea, who is a close political ally of GOP Gov. Doug Ducey. βWe grew up talking about religion and sex and politics, whatever.β
Despite, or because of, their openness, theyβve all stayed moored to the mainstream of politics, gravitating to different sides of the center, rather than floating off into the unmoored extremes.
Edmund Jr. and Lea both referred to themselves as βbusiness Republicans.β Their mother, Priscilla, disagrees with them mostly in their prioritization of business issues over what she finds most urgent β the humanitarian concerns of the disadvantaged.
βWeβve definitely learned to respect each otherβs opinion,β Edmund Jr. told me. βMy parents and I and my sister understand that for politics to work, it comes down to understanding and compromise.β
So old fashioned, and so true for all of us. Especially after Tuesday.
