More tolerance needed in politics today
Self-doubt is not a quality normally associated with our very best politicians. Lincoln? No. The two Roosevelts? Hardly. Reagan? You’ve got to be kidding.
Self-doubters don’t get near the White House. Heck, they rarely get near any of the 50 state capitols. But if ever we needed men and women bitten by the political bug to exhibit some awareness that they may be wrong at least some of the time, it is now.
We’re in an age of political intolerance. It’s happened before, and the results weren’t pretty. It’s not pretty today. Consider Rudy Giuliani, fallen from his perch as “America’s mayor” to the lowly state he reached the other day, when he said President Obama didn’t love this country and wasn’t like the rest of us Americans. He later suggested that, when young, the president was “influenced” by communism.
Some restraint, Mr. Mayor, PLEASE. A spirit of bipartisan patriotism wouldn’t be bad either. As for the organized paranoia Giuliani’s remarks reflect, more on that in a moment.
Let’s step back for a moment. A paradox is at the heart of democratic (small d) politics. Under the best of circumstances, politicians and others involved in running for public office and in governing finesse this contradiction; when they do, politics is kept within manageable bounds.
When they don’t, politics becomes, more so than normal, an obstacle course ringed with barbed wire.
We don’t want an obstacle course ringed with barbed wire. We want hard as nails yet sensible debate, hard-fought elections that leave everyone with a little wiggle room — space enough to retrench and reconsider, and maybe reach sensible compromises with erstwhile opponents.
What does this incongruity consist of? Let me explain it this way: effective politicking frequently depends on overstatement, many times blatant overstatement.
In the long-ago of American politics, Teddy Roosevelt told his successor in the White House, William Howard Taft, to check fairness and nuance at the campaign door.
Be bold, TR advised. Campaign in bright colors. No grays. No pastels. Exaggerate. Take no prisoners on the path to victory.
“Politics is a war of causes, a joust of principles,” Woodrow Wilson wrote. “Absolute identity with one’s cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership.”
“Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift,” Wilson noted. “But it is of little worth in politics.”
Yet tolerance — the tolerance to accept electoral defeat, the tolerance to concede a governing prerogative to the victors, the tolerance not to label fellow politicians as crooks (except when they are) or as unpatriotic — is the very essence of a successful democracy in action; this is especially true of American democracy, where so many diverse interests require reconciliation.
But tolerance now lies gasping for breath on the basement floor.
We’ve been here before.
One of the most salient examples of the train going off the tracks took place in the early 1950s.
Almost alone, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, unleashed a firestorm of anti-communism, starting with a speech in Wheeling, W.Va., in which he made the astounding claim that the State Department, under President Truman, was infested with communists and fellow-travelers.
In the ensuing several years, McCarthy managed to terrorize politicians of both parties, throwing the fear of being associated with communism into Democrats as well Republicans.
Famously, McCarthy cowed then-candidate Dwight Eisenhower into skipping over a passage in a campaign speech defending one of the great patriots of the 20th century (and McCarthy’s largest target) — Gen. George Marshall.
Then Eisenhower took office. A national hero as supreme commander for the European phase of World War II — the guy who defeated Hitler was bound to be wildly popular — Ike sucked the wind out of McCarthy’s sails, by his mere presence in the White House.
A period of political paranoia morphed into eight years of Eisenhower normalcy.
Today, there’s not an Eisenhower in sight, and besides it’s a risky proposition to wait for a hero to save us from ourselves. Heroes are so few and so far between.
“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in a 1964 essay called “The Paranoid Style In American Politics.”
Hofstadter made clear he wasn’t using “paranoid” as in crazy. Rather, he was referring to certain public “modes of expression” by “more or less normal people.”
Specifically, his focus was on the search for scapegoats, the use of conspiracy theories, and the deployment of strawmen and patent falsehoods by people who should know better as ways to explain the world and to frame and to influence politics.
Giuliani is probably too far over the brink to be saved by ordinary mortals. Besides, he’s making a small fortune. Turning himself into a big-city rube has been a great career move for the former mayor who once was a national idol.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books: Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com