The other day, a reader forwarded me an article from the NY Times that discussed how the increasing political hostility in the country is affecting personal and professional relationships. I found it very painful to read, though, because they could have been writing about Polimom’s family. We’re so damaged, in fact, that I’ve been thinking of giving up the blog and turning off the political side of my mind.
I haven’t yet, obviously, but I understand far too well the damage the judgments, accusations, and attacks are causing. And mine is just an average American family — a microcosm of the wider society. From that NY Times article:
The mother and daughter had been close, but suddenly they stopped talking and exchanging e-mail messages. The freeze lasted almost a month.
“Finally, it hit me that if one of us got hit by a bus tomorrow, I don’t want my final thought to be, ‘She supports George Bush,’ ” Ms. Langham said. They resumed contact, but have agreed not to discuss the administration and the war, or even forward each other humorous political e-mail messages.
With Iraq locked in seemingly endless violence and a contentious midterm election just weeks away, a similar silent treatment seems to be spreading across certain corners of society. People who once feistily shared their convictions about politics now report biting their tongues around — or even completely avoiding — friends and relatives who disagree, trying to avoid fights over the Bush administration and, specifically, the war.
That’s it in a nutshell: George Bush and the war.
We’ve had lots of great discussions here on the blog lately about the tone of the current campaigns. We all seem to agree that yes, ’tis a nasty season. Many have argued that this is just a typical election — that politics are always ugly. While I agree with that to a point, though, this one just feels worse, but it’s been hard to put my thumb on what’s different.
An editorial today, again from the NY Times, pinned down part of what’s been gnawing at me. Where we used to passionately (and often heatedly) argue about issues like taxation or education, questioning someone’s ideology or philosophy didn’t bring cries of “traitor” or “enemy sympathizer”. But we’ve now had years of practice at seeing one another as enemies — to loved ones, values, and the country itself:
In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.
Ordinary Americans are being forced to make the most un-American of choices: question and be labeled treasonous, or support this president and his war blindly.
There have been other times in our history when we’ve become suspicious and polarized; Vietnam, for instance, and McCarthyism. Polimom’s too young to have any memories of those days that I can use as a yardstick against today. However, I have never heard that in those difficult years, a major political party — one of only two — was an enemy of the country in its entirety.
This is a whole new level of division, and it’s bringing us into dangerous, uncharted waters. It’s not clear that this country — or at least its people — qualify anymore for the “United” in our name, and it scares me.
No wonder my family is divided. We’re just a sad, shattered reflection of what’s going on everywhere.
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Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice has more.
I think it’s unprecedented, at least in my liftime; during the Reagan years, for example, political tempers ran quite high, but I really don’t recall the kinds of division that you’re talking about (and which I see also).
I’m not sure what’s different now. As you note, there’s a difference between spirited political debate (which we’ve always had, and I hope we always do) and the idea that those who disagree are “traitors.” The latter was always the view of fringe, recognized even by those who agree with them as batty. Now, it seems there’s a whole cottage industry of churning out material that questions the motivation of anybody who disagrees with the administration.
It’s depressing, and I’m not sure where it ends, other than the collapse of a political system.
I wonder if it’s related to the way that the ability to target small voter groups with very strong opinions has changed political discourse. If you realize that a swing state’s vote can be flipped by appealing to one small group, suddenly pols are talking to that group in terms designed to make them take action; so “we oppose gay marriage” presented calmly as a policy point for voters who are paying attention becomes “gays are going to destroy America so vote!” And “Bush’s foreign policy is irrational for these reasons” becomes “Bush a crazed warmongerer!” When you turn up the rhetorical heat, it tends to stay turned up for a while.
Sorry, Polimom, but I don’t buy it – at least not the part about how all this started the moment “W” took the oath of office. One of the things I remember, during the first day of the Clinton administration, was someone in the crowd pointing to the flight of F-16s overhead at the celebration right after the inauguration, and saying “It’s OK – they are our jets now.”
Does this mean that Clinton is to blame? No more than Bush, IMNSHO. The political climate has been poisoned for a long time. I suspect it got its origins in the 1968 campaign and gained more steam in 1972, with the anti-war sentiments. Unfortunately, in this regard politics reflects us – our beliefs, our values, our passions. And, we as a society have internalized the political rhetoric to the point that “loyal” has been removed from “loyal opposition”. Whether it is “NANCY PELOSI EATS BABIES!!!” or “THE REPUBLICANS WILL MAKE YOUR ELDERLY PARENTS EAT DOG FOOD!!!”, we have allowed the more, let us say, radical elements among us to define the debate. We have lost our ability to compromise, to seek that common ground – that which we can all live with. Instead of looking for a “win-win”, it always has to be about “win-lose”.
And, it isn’t just politics. I have been watching the reality TV show Top Chef, and wrote about last weeks Lycheegate episode. The tie-in was that someone noticed something was wrong, but instead of correcting it then and there, they waited until they could turn it to their advantage.
Maybe we need to re-think where we get our values from, and look to someone else other than Knute “Winning isn’t the most important thing; it’s the only thing!” Rockne as a role model and a source of our values.
And, as to this being about GWB and “The War”, I suspect that is just a rationalization: if 9/11 had never happened, if Saddam had complied with the UN resolutions, and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was simply a war-game strategy scenario, I suspect it would have been something else: the environment, Halliburton, energy policy, or “GEORGE W BUSH AND THE REPUBLICANS ARE GOING TO FORCE YOUR ELDERLY PARENTS TO EAT DOG FOOD AND BUY THEIR MEDICINE AT 1-800-PET-MEDS!!!!!”
The political landscape was already thoroughly poisoned.
~EdT.
Ed T., I’ll agree with a lot of what you say but there is one factor to add: the war. The only other time I remember the nation being this polarized is the Vietnam War. I do not mean to draw any more comparison between Iraq and Vietnam than the nature of the internal devisiveness.
Anyone who has studied war realizes that its very core, it is killing. To be for any war, you must feel the cause is worth killing others and having your countrymen be killed. To oppose any war is equally passionate as you are seeing people die needlessly, at least in your mind. As a result, i don’t find it at all surprising that the current political climate is this polarized.
Beyond that addition, I agree completely with your comment.
Polimom,
I have to agree (mostly) with EdT as well. While this may be the most poisonous political atmosphere you have experienced, those of us who remember Vietnam have another point of reference. You mentioned Vietnam and McCarthyism, but polarization and “us vs. them” thinking goes back much further. Remember the internment of US citizens of Japanese (and even Chinese!) descent during WW II. Talk about suspending habeus corpus . . .
Remember the “yellow journalism” of the Spanish-American war (a mercifully short war). And then there were the simply poisonous hatreds towards the end of the US Civil War. I could go on all the way to the Revolutionary war (where perhaps as much as 20% of the non-slave population fled the 13 colonies rather than sever the connection to the Crown of England).
I also agree with Robert A. War is essentially about killing and destroying. In order for any fundamentally decent person to support it, that person has to believe that the objectives of the war are so important that they justify organized, state sponsored killing and destruction, as well as the deaths of that person’s countrymen. That is why war should only be fought as a last resort, not as a policy choice. Much of the fury of the antiwar people today is fueled by their conviction that for the Neocons, this war was just a policy choice . . . and they may well be right.
When there is a war in progress, as I believe there is now, those who do not believe the objectives justify the killing, destruction, or deaths of their countrymen often get pretty loud about their convictions (as they should). Those who have decided otherwise tend to react badly to having their assessment of reality challenged in any way, let alone in the very personal attacks that antiwar people sometimes use, i.e. “babykillers! mass murderers” in Vietnam, or “war criminal Bush!” or “stupid, uneducated pawns!” in this war.
I suspect, at the bottom, a civil society is one of the casualties of war in a democracy. I do have hope that the US will be able to move past the polarization and divisiveness we are now experiencing. However, I do believe that a goodly portion of the poisonous atmosphere we are breathing now is leftover venom from the Vietnam war, which has never worked its way out of the US body politic.
One wonders how long the effects of this war on the US political culture will linger.
Robert – I certainly understand your point, and I do think it is relevant. However, I maintain that the current political climate was poisoned before 9/11, possibly even before GWB was elected in 2000 – and even if Iraq had not happened, we would have been just as fractured today. It just would have been over something else.
~EdT.
While you might manage the former, I doubt seriously that you (or anyone else, for that matter) would be successful at the latter. It is just too central to who you are.
Besides, if you shut down your blog, I’m gonna start thinking that I’m a jinx or something. Of course, if I really am a jinx, maybe I need to start reading Daily Kos 😉
Seriously, Polimom, you are a voice of sweet reason in a mountain range of steaming horse apples… please don’t go.
~EdT.
So what I’m hearing you say (Robert A and Ed T and The Master) is that during these prior poisonous eras, one (or both) of our political parties defined the other — and all its supporters — as enemies of the country.
Apparently, we have examples in our past of a President defining more than half of his country’s population as dangerous, and potentially treasonous.
Have I interpreted this correctly?
As I said, I’m too young to have a yardstick. But you’ll have to forgive me if I color myself skeptical.
No, that is not quite what I said. It isn’t about the President, not at all. It is about the people making this determination. And, it isn’t just this country, either. We have plenty of examples of this type of mass hysteria (just think where the term “witch hunt” comes from.)
Here are several examples:
1) The “Red Scare” of the 1950s, and its evil stepchild the “McCarthy Era”.
2) The abolitionist vs. pro-slavery conflict, which led up to the War of Northern Aggression.
3) The anti-Kaiser sentiments during WWI, and anti-Japanese sentiments during WWII. The latter was more profound, but I do recall people changing their name because it “sounded too German”.
4) Over in Europe, of course we have the whole French Revolution thing.
5) And, let us not forget the pogroms, the Holocaust, the Crusades…
6) In Asia, we have Stalin’s purges, Mao’s “Cultural Revolution”, Pol Pot’s “killing fields”, and the political turmoil in Japan during the 1920s/early 1930s.
I think the bottom line is that when we take ourselves too seriously, we start seeing our opposition not as someone who has a very similar end vision as we do yet a different route to get there, but as someone who wants to do us harm. Again, go back to my earlier post and the Knute Rockne quote: I think it sums up my view on this pretty darned neatly.
The real danger of trying to frame our malaise in terms of a specific person/event is that you in effect become part of the problem – and the only way we are going to dig ourselves out of this hole is to step back from the edge of the cliff, and stop trying to fix blame – because we are all to blame. If we can take names/events out of the mix, maybe we can start to look at things rationally and without emotional attachment, giving us a chance to address the root causes before we wind up like our ancestors did almost 150 years ago (and, if you think Iraq is bloody, remember that during the War of Northern Aggression the losses at the Battle of Gettysburg were in excess of 50,000 – and almost 700,000 died in that war. Think of a Vietnam memorial 10 times as long, or the population of Austin, TX (2005 Census estimates.)
~EdT.
Yes. In 1860-1865. Think about how we perceive “Honest Abe” Lincoln these days – back then he wasn’t nearly as popular.
~EdT.
An interesting commentary on what may be helping to drive this behavior, over at Bruce Schneier’s Security blog.
~EdT.
Here is that URL again:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/perceived_risk_1.html
~EdT.
I’d also add that there are two people on whose doorstep I think some of this can be laid: Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. I think the fact that they are both Republicans is beside the point; I don’t think for a moment that there aren’t Democrats who’d be glad to be as cutthroat (and, I think, ultimately as destructive to the country) as those two were/are. They just didn’t find people who were as good at it.
Apparently, we have examples in our past of a President defining more than half of his country’s population as dangerous, and potentially treasonous.
Can we leave Anne Coulter out of this? You have a point but beyond our personal experiences clouded by (increasingly in my case) faulty memories most of us probably don’t know enough to say either way. It does seem that traitorous if not treasonous was thrown around during Vietnam. I was too young then to really be politically astute; baseball being far more important at that time.
John makes a good point regarding current political handlers. Mr. Rove has been a master at using the Presidency for politcal as opposed to policy purposes. Individual Democrats are equally good at this, Mr. Clinton among them but as a party they don’t seem to be able to do it consistently.
Technology, I fear, also plays a role. Back in the good or bad old days, there were only three television stations (four counting public tv) and they controlled not only the content but the tone of the national conversation. Cable TV and the internet has facilitated incivility (?) in the public discourse. (Side note, it would be a shame to see Polimom end as even disagreements tend to be handled in a civil manner.)
The question I have is whether the current political discourse is simply reflecting/leading a societaly shift or is mearly an aboration?
Ed T — great post! Good thoughts in it (as always, considering who wrote it).
Robert A — I, too, remember the days of 3 channels (plus public). I agree with you that technology has had one heck of an impact. (Who said progress is always good?)
Your question about whether this is an aberration or the reflection of a societal shift, however, gave me pause. I’ve been thinking that if I, and those like me, just push back steadily enough (and long enough), we could get it backed off a tad. Perhaps not?
I appreciate what you both said about my thoughts on whether I should continue blogging. Clearly, I haven’t tossed the towel yet. (In fact, since I’m on crutches suddenly, I’ve been pretty prolific. Amazing what clipping my wings can do…)
However, this was hysterical, Ed:
Maybe I’ll put that somewhere under “What people say about Polimom…”