Uncivil Politics

Today was a strange mail day. I got letters from Nancy Pelosi and Steve Forbes. They were both asking for money.

Nancy’s letter was pure invective. She called Republicans, their allies, or their agenda right-wing, extremist, alarming, divisive, reckless, destructive, blind, and ultra-conservative. (That last one is especially effective. It makes me think of laundry detergent.) Pelosi had the laughable temerity to imply most Americans support Democratic policy. Check some polling numbers on gay marriage and partial-birth abortion and write me back, Nancy. She calls the fight against the GOP a “crusade” and asks for money to help overturn the GOP control of the Congress.

But hers was at least a brisk two pages. Forbes’ letter was a six page opus that seemed to be (I could be wrong) an historical essay proving that radical Islam and the American Left were both clear results of original sin, which was committed in 1962.

I jest. A little. Forbes begins by noting the phenomenon of crazed Bush-hatred, broadens the aperture of his aim by invoking a “30 year” struggle with the Left (hasn’t it been more like 40 years?); notes that “the problem goes way beyond politics” and promptly begins an undergraduate lecture in moral philosophy; defends Bush, Rush, the right and Heritage (slyly capitalizing the “Left”— a large, monolithic, dangerous, conspiratorial pronoun—but leaving the “right” a lowercase, unassuming noun, like you and me), damns Saddam and Osama, and waxes to a thunderous peroration: “the fight [is] for our culture against those who hate it and want to destroy it”—and it is not at all clear if he is talking about Al Qaida or the Democratic Party.

War may be a continuation of politics by other means; must the reverse be true? I am tempted to quote some Founding Fathers and retire in informed contempt (Lincoln: “We must not be enemies. We are not enemies, but friends.” Jefferson: “We are all Democrats, we are all Republicans. We are, my brothers, Americans.”)

The heart of negative campaigning is the ploy of imputing insidious motives to those with whom you have otherwise honest disagreements. Politics might take a step towards civility if its practitioners admitted that they never truly have access to the inner motives of their opponents, and indeed that it is best to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe the best of them—which cannot be said of Pelosi or Forbes. Their purple rhetoric is corrosive to our politics and spreads cynicism of our institutions. One might wonder why, and even start to speculate about their motivations—they were asking for money, after all. But we won’t indulge in that thought, and at least extend to them the courtesy they deny to each other.