It feels as if we all just dodged a bullet. Given America’s dominance, its politics affects everyone, and had that shot on Saturday been one inch to the right, the resulting turmoil would have been catastrophic in an already troubled world. So what do we do with this second chance?
Trump himself said he rewrote his July 18 Republican National Convention speech to make it more “unifying” and one hopes he manages to strike that tone. Initial responses from many politicians including President Joe Biden seemed to, by and large. But no one leader created the current poisonous political atmosphere and none can dispel it unaided.
To be clear, political atmospheres have always been infamously poisonous. Not just the constant terror in a tyrant’s court. The tone of democratic or semi-democratic politics, from the astounding abuse current in the Roman Republic to the French Revolution, to scathing and often utterly mendacious claims current in the early American Republic and beyond.
It may seem cold comfort to say it’s always been this way. And a bit of a stretch, because some eras have been a bit better, like the 1920s or the 1980s, than say the late 1940s or 1960s. But if you go back and look at the political commentary it is still often hair-raising.
As for political violence, I can’t now locate the remark that after the nearly fatal 1856 caning of abolitionist Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, right in the Senate chamber, by slave-owning Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, praised in some Southern newspapers, the only men who did not carry a pistol and dagger into Congress carried two pistols.
Still, as Gandalf says, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” At a time of acute political polarization and unbridled self-indulgence, the obvious solution is to excoriate our partisan foes with even greater vehemence. But perhaps another path leads through greener pastures.
Now might be a very good time for both Democrats and Republicans to find firm language in which to object to proposals from the other side without suggesting it itches to abolish democracy.
I have offered before as an antidote to partisan excess a habit of judging a proposal, statement, deed, or candidate from our side as if it came from across the aisle. But if we could at least ponder it in the privacy of our own minds, and quietly with our colleagues and take it seriously, we might be less willing to excuse tactically advantageous fibs, bad math, bad language, and so forth from our own side of the sort that cause a spiral downward or sometimes a sprint to the bottom.
In an ideal world, we’d say it out loud. But ours is not an ideal world, and to repeat, politics has never been an entirely pristine business. Recall Lord Melbourne’s advice to his ministers that “It doesn’t matter what [expletive deleted] lie we tell, so long as we all tell the same [expletive deleted] lie.” And he was British Prime Minister from 1835 to 1841.
It might seem that in today’s world of “gotcha” politics and “gotcha” journalism it would be fatal naivete to admit even to doubt let alone confess a flaw in one’s platform or team. But the angrier politics gets, the more normal people dislike it, and just possibly actual honesty, especially about something every sane voter knows anyway, might resonate.
Speaking of sane voters, it is of course true that some deranged people will always attach themselves to a cause for what are essentially private reasons and may do something crazy. For instance, the delusional Charles Guiteau assassinated President James A. Garfield in 1881 ostensibly over civil service reform. No amount of prudence or decency in public life can entirely guard against extremism, including assassination.
Some may blame the Trump shooting on Americans’ attachment to firearms. But Britain in the 19th century had no gun control yet political shootings were almost unknown, while guns hadn’t been invented in ancient Rome yet political killings were common, and political assassination is far more common in many places today than in the United States.
In any case, if we are all breathing a sigh of relief and thinking we should try to do better, let’s focus on what we can control. Namely our own propensity to lose our cool, or keep it, over public affairs.
I’m not saying be timid or bland. But practise proper political hygiene, scrubbing your own mouth before grasping at the jaws of others, soap in hand. Also, everyone including Melbourne should stop cussing.
