KENNEBUNK — It happens every four years. Politics-as-usual comes to a halt, and we go into overdrive. Insults fly over the airwaves, vitriol trumps the news.

In the presidential primaries, anything and everything is fair game. GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum says that when he first heard President John F. Kennedy speak on the role of faith in government, he wanted to throw up. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich calls fellow GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney a liar; Another candidate, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, claims Santorum is a fake.

Think whatever you like about the candidates who would be president. Each time we go through this quadrennial exercise, the process becomes more rank. And it’s not just the public side of politics. In private life, regular citizens have cranked up their rhetoric, as well. Friends and family are getting into the act.

Recently, for instance, a friend and I were talking about Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator. I mentioned that, although I disagree with most of his positions, I respect the man. I appreciate the complex, difficult decisions he’s made in his personal life and the boldness of his conviction.

Whether I agree with those decisions seems, to me, beside the point; people make all kinds of choices for themselves that don’t suit everyone. Which is why I like Santorum, the man, but not Santorum, the candidate.

My friend, Val, was having none of it.

She cited a litany of facts and quotes, ranging from Santorum’s remarks on the snobbery of higher education to his views on contraception. As she bounced from topic to topic, her decibel level rose.

“Why are you yelling at me?” I asked.

She apologized. But as she continued, her tone escalated, and the shouting resumed.

I tried a different tack. As she named yet more particulars that she loathed, I added to her list. Yes, I said, he apparently missed the memo about separation of church and state. Yes, he’s out of touch on women’s issues.

“Then how can you possibly respect him?” she asked.

“It’s easy,” I said. “The man and his politics aren’t one and the same.”

In fact, Val and I basically agreed on all of the specifics. I was merely injecting a shade of grey in an apparently black-and-white debate.

For the record, I should state that Val, an avowed Democrat, and I, a left-leaning Independent, both plan to vote for Obama. For some reason, though, she needed to convince me that disrespecting, or at least disliking, Santorum was part and parcel of disagreeing with him. She couldn’t grasp that it was possible, even desirable, to contain the two ideas — disagreement and respect — at once.

While our conversation ended in detente, it echoed larger issues that we all face.

Somewhere in the course of our national dialogue, stridency has become the default mode. Val is a good example. With her zealous tones, she italicized her points, set them in boldface, and launched them with exclamations. Her ramped-up delivery wasn’t more persuasive — it was just deafening.

More troubling, though, is the underlying contempt for opposing views — and those who espouse them.

Rarely, these days, do people “agree to disagree,” as the saying goes. It’s a form of peacemaking that fosters amity in dissent. It’s also a very old idea at the core of all diplomacy and compromise. Without it, arguments become personal, unmoored from their political intent.

It’s not hard to see how Val could adopt the rigid, nuance-free position she took in our conversation, since it’s become endemic in our political culture. We no longer simply disagree with one another; we hurl accusations — liar! fake! — and badger our opponents so that the constructs of debate, argument and civil discourse gradually erode.

Rick Santorum is no paradigm of tolerance. But the man and his message aren’t interchangeable. Nor is any candidate wedded to all the statements and malarkey that a presidential campaign churns out.

Keeping this in mind could perhaps lessen the polarization of our politics, not to mention the noise level.

Joan Silverman of Kennebunk writes op-eds, essays and book reviews for numerous publications.

— Special to the Press Herald