1. Introduction: perspective.
A Holocaust survivor explains why he rejected God:
God had allowed SS troops to snatch a baby from his mother and then use it as a football. When it was a torn lump of flesh they tossed it to their dogs. The mother was forced to watch. Then they ripped off her blouse and made her use it to clean the blood off their boots.
http://www.economist.com/node/16886073?story_id=16886073
This paragraph makes my blood freeze and my mouth gape. Such cruelty is unfathomable.
Of all the reactions this description evokes from me, the one I will write about is this: it puts our American era, troubled as it is, into perspective. In particular, the suffering of this unnamed woman, this tormented victim, rebukes a troubling political habit of our time (though one not unique to our time): namely, to harshly judge those on the far side of the political spectrum from us. There is a left/right divide; we are less willing to reach across its span as time goes by. We are becoming a nation of shouters. But harrowing manifestations of real evil like this forbid our overreaction to mere political disagreements.
I don’t say this to be trite. I say this because political disagreements grow into monsters of the mind -- in too many minds, at least. And this harms democracy in America.
2. The infernal politics of division.
Some politicians and media (large and small) so focus Americans on our intramural divisions that we lose sight of our common ground and even of our mutual humanity. This explains today’s highly divisive tactics. Here are some of the tactics that political dividers employ.
a. Wedge issues.
Political dividers resort to wedge issues. The term explains itself.
A premier example of a wedge issue is the demonization of Muslim-Americans. Muslims are only a means to an end in this scheme; though it afflicts them, its objective lies elsewhere. The scheme is in part a high-stakes dare to democratic politicians to stand up for Muslims – and either they gamble their political fortunes for this good purpose (too few do this), or they cave in and look craven. The scheme behind the demonization of Muslims is also to ignite ignorance, fear, and hatred to multiply political followers – in a word, demagoguery. And it succeeds like a lit match put to tinder.
Political dividers accuse the proposed Manhattan mosque's backers, and American Muslims generally, of seeking to impose sharia as the law of the land.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/lee-smith-sharia/ (Sharia is the code of law based upon the Qur'an.) This is an utterly implausible objective, because it has no remote chance of success. Despite its implausibility, it provokes popular outrage.
Political dividers conflate moderate American Muslims with the murders of 9/11.
They assert, in defiance of fact, that the moderate Muslims behind the proposed Manhattan mosque plan it as a triumphal monument to the 9/11 attack.
http://boston.com/news/nation/articles/2010/05/25/nyc_community_board_oks_ground_zero_mosque_plans/ They portray these moderate Muslims as cartoonish villains sinisterly conniving to torment America in its midst.
They accuse the Muslims among us of plotting world hegemony.
http://michellemalkin.com/2007/03/08/gingrichs-baggage-gotten-on-my-knees/ In fact, our Muslims neighbors mostly share more modest goals with the rest of us: to live in peace, to win such prosperity as we can, to raise and protect our families, and to worship the god of our forbears.
Making Muslims a wedge issue serves the politics of division.
Not only Muslims but any minority might be placed as a bet in the political game of wedge issues. Hispanic infants have become fabled “anchor babies” – not conceived for the usual reasons of love or family or slipshod birth control. According to this political urban legend, these babies are products of calculation, conduits when they achieve adulthood for their parents’ citizenship. This fable floats in an evidentiary vacuum. It inflames a certain kind of White voter.
And, of course, the joining in marriage of two persons of the same gender continues to sunder the nation.
b. Provocative language.
Political dividers deploy provocative language.
“Liberal” no longer evokes sufficient loathing. Now, they use “socialist”, evoking the Soviet Union’s Vladimir Lenin and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Minimal familiarity with these tyrants illuminates these tyrants’ tactics, which go far beyond what any American politician could inflict upon an American public accustomed to freedom, due process, and electoral power. Anyone who knows of these tyrants cannot rationally equate them with any American political leader. But political dividers exploit an un-critical audience with their incendiary language.
“Tyranny” is a vogue word. In its current usage, it purports to describe the actions of the party in power, which exercises its prerogative after a majority of Americans democratically put them in the White House and in the majority in Congress. This definition of “tyranny” defies any dictionary. But it provokes loathing. It implies illegitimacy. It stokes a sense of grievance. So political dividers use it.
c. Lies.
Political dividers lie.
It is hard to argue against making health care universal, so that sick people don’t die because they are poor. So opponents of health-care reform invented “death panels”, because “death panels” sounds vile. Death panels were imagined, not legislated. The fabled “death panels” provision of the health-care-reform bill merely paid Medicare doctors when they performed an ordinary, otherwise-unpaid responsibility. That was to help seniors make advance end-of-life decisions, so not to burden their family with those decisions if they themselves became incapacitated.
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/palin-vs-obama-death-panels/
d. Shouting down democracy.
The oracles of division disrupt democratic processes. Democracy can’t happen if its voices cannot be heard. So democracy suffered at open forums on health-care reform when speakers were shouted down. In miniature, the same thing happens when TV pundits loudly talk over each other to keep each other from expressing a point. This tactic divides us by ensuring that robust, open debate cannot anneal division. It insinuates that some opinions should not be heard.
3. De-legitimization.
One objective of these tactics is to de-legitimize the opposition.
People disagree. That is part of democracy. Though there is large consensus in our democracy – think about all the basic things we generally agree on – debates roll, and sometimes they rage. To say someone is wrong does no harm to democracy; debate nourishes democracy.
But de-legitimization repudiates nourishing democratic disagreement by repudiating those who disagree. It demonizes opponents. It divides and destroys.
De-legitimization lies beneath claims that the President is Kenyan by birth – even though his Honolulu-newspaper birth announcements can be examined by any blogger, citizen, news organization, or random rabble-rouser.
De-legitimization lies beneath claims of dreaded socialism.
De-legitimization lies beneath claims of tyranny.
Disagreement is an American tradition, as American as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. De-legitimization is the opposite of Lincoln-Douglas. It is House Committee on Un-American Activities territory – a territory to which political dividers would exile mainstream leaders, media, and innocent fellow-citizens.
4. A grassroots solution.
We must not tolerate these toxic practices in ourselves or in our own leaders. And we must take grassroots measures to moderate these practices.
a. Engaging.
We must engage our brother-and-sister Americans in non-judgmental civic discourse. We can do this in common areas of condominiums, over coffee in kitchens, in break areas at work, on social networks like Facebook, or in any other forum.
We must defy the temptation to mix only with the like-minded. That habit is reassuring, and it soothes the spirit, but ultimately it inhibits the grassroots free-flow of information and ideas. And that free-flow is oxygen to democracy.
When we participate in civic discourse, we necessarily imply that we are willing to be persuaded as well as to persuade.
And civic discourse serves a purpose beyond persuasion per se. Civil, respectful engagement interrupts the demagogues' claim that decency reposes in only one side. To civilly, respectfully engage undercuts demagogues and dividers.
b. De-legitimizing the de-legitimizers.
We must de-legitimize the de-legitimizers. We can do so in various ways.
I mentioned interrupting the claims of demagogues by practicing civil civic discourse. When we are reasonable and decent, we prove that we are not what the de-legitimizers say we are.
We also can de-legitimize the de-legitimizers by respectfully but firmly rejecting incendiary labels, for ourselves and for our leaders.
And we de-legitimize the de-ligitimizers by speaking the truth in the face of falsehoods. As Justice Louis Brandeis said: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
c. Being informed.
We must be informed. Effective civic debate requires knowledge. We must be more than opinion.
This takes effort. Being an informed citizen requires more than listening to pundits opinionate. I don’t mean to hector. But sustained effort can convert a chore into a hobby. After a time, the pursuit of political knowledge begins to match the pleasure with which many of us hoard sports knowledge.
To stay informed, I like the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/. I subscribe to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Economist, Rolling Stone, and Foreign Affairs. Some of these are surprisingly cheap.
There are also non-partisan fact-checking websites that scrutinize political claims and counter-claims. For example,
http://www.factcheck.org/ is published by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Also,
http://www.politifact.com/ is published by the St. Petersburg Times. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
d. Minding the higher objective.
We must keep in mind our higher objective. When we debate, of course we want to persuade. But in divisive times, the higher object must be to cultivate goodwill among people we disagree with. Goodwill among adversaries fortifies democracy, and the importance of a robust democracy dwarfs the importance of success on any particular issue or issues
A conservative friend of mine once boasted that, in Supreme Court case conferences among his fellow justices, conservative justice Antonin Scalia wins every argument. The rejoinder is the question: but did he persuade? The two are not the same. Scalia might undermine his powers of persuasion by his highly readable but highly scathing dissents. Contrast Scalia with epochal chief justices like John Marshall and Earl Warren. Their greatness lay in their ability among politically-divergent colleagues to produce unanimous opinions on controversial issues.
Goodwill is our goal; but goodwill and persuasion go together.
5. Conclusion.
No President presided over a more divided time than Abraham Lincoln. Nor did any President speak greater words of reconciliation than he did. These words are from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, delivered when hatred and opposition rent the nation:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stre[t]ching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
This must be our maxim.
We should also, of course, remember Abraham Lincoln’s resoluteness. Speaking reconciliation, he also waged war. Personal decency therefore does not imply weakness or tepid opinions.
We can have it both ways. We can dedicate ourselves to our principles, pursuing them relentlessly, modifying them only for good reason. But we can pursue our principles with decency, we can pursue our principles with civility, we can pursue our principles without breaking bonds of affection with our adversaries of good will. We can reforge broken bonds.
