In one scene of the movie "Game Change," which dramatizes the McCain/Palin presidential campaign of 2008, the John McCain character is campaigning in close quarters with his audience. He has handed his microphone to a woman who declares her support for him by heaping personal invective on then-senator Barack Obama.
The McCain character is startled and troubled. He feels he should demur. In the middle of her rant, he gently takes the microphone away from her and says (I am paraphrasing), No ma'm, he is none of those things. He is a good and honorable man with whom I happen to disagree.
The scene invites us to consider how far we've descended into politics of sneer and insult. Invective has followed Obama into the White House. And now the Republican presidential primaries have tested our collective gag reflex.
There is precedent, alas. The second President Bush was routinely vilified and ridiculed. In fact, the tactic of personal attack has waxed and waned throughout the country's political history. But as citizens we can only deal with the issues of our own times, and we have reached extremes we should want to correct.
To my ear, the tone of discourse began to sour in the 1960s, with objections to the Vietnam War. Opponents went from calling the war a terrible mistake -- which it surely was -- to calling it "immoral." This was a short step from saying that policymakers who favored the war were themselves immoral people.The step was soon taken.
Easy notions are infectious. It is seductively easy to say that people who disagree with us are deficient by virtue of their disagreement. We don't have to grapple with contending ideas. We don't have to do the work of tolerance.
When political opinions thus become dogma, something is lost in the conversation of democracy. Respectful disagreement is an early casualty. Factions want their way, and they want it now, because their way is the one true way. Differing opinions are to be vanquished. Opponents are enemies.
It is natural for me to believe that my opinions are superior to yours. However I should not demand that you believe it, too. Nor should I expect the government to demand it of you in my behalf. The American political system is not supposed to choose a master ideology for the country. It is supposed to mediate among the varied ideologies that should be safe among us.
This principle does not suit dogmatic politics. They foster single-issue extremes: Witness attempts to write religious precepts into civil law on issues of abortion and gay marriage. They license officeholders to slight a duty to serve all the people: Witness efforts by a willful Republican minority in Congress to sabotage the work of a duly elected President Obama. (At the same time, in a particularly sharp irony, doctrinaire voices in the left wing of his own party scold the president for being less liberal than they are. In this they ignore that the American electorate is less liberal than they are.)
Our political system is intended to permit or even force differing opinions to work together. Dogmatic politics are impatient with the very idea, and impatience is by nature disrespectful of its object.
Being thus ill-equipped for the better vocabulary of the system, dogmatic politics lapse into their own.The whole point of discussion is subverted. Invective does what invective always does: It camouflages a bankruptcy of useful language.
The politics of sneer and insult are offensive in being vulgar. They are deplorable in being empty of legitimate public purpose.
Thanks for sharing. Great post.
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