“Michelle [Obama] always says, 'When they go
low, we go high.' No. No. When they go low, we kick them."
Lesley Stahl: “Do you think you
treated [Christine Blasey-Ford] with respect?”
President Donald Trump: “I think so, yeah, I
did.”
Stahl: “But you seem to be
saying that she lied.”
Trump: “I’m not going to
get into it, because we won. It doesn’t matter. We won.”
-
60 Minutes interview of President
Donald Trump, October 14, 2018
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National
politics have been toxic for most of my lifetime. The first presidential election
after my birth ended with the newly elected Commander-in-Chief being immediately
declared illegitimate by his opponents because he won merely 43% percent of the
vote—more than any of his opponents, but nowhere close to a majority of the
popular vote. That same president became only the second in U.S. history to be
impeached six years later. His successor would face cries of illegitimacy even fiercer
than he’d experienced when his margin of victory in the decisive state of
Florida was so razor thin that the Supreme Court was left to make the decision—and
did so in a 5-4 vote along party lines. The brief post-9/11 mood of national
unity that followed was soon shattered by the divisive war in Iraq, then by another
close, ugly election in 2004. By 2008, a new kind of candidate promised to
bring the country together as president. Needless to say, he was unsuccessful.
So
here we are today, and our national politics are more toxic than at any point
in my lifetime. There are plenty of events that have brought us here: the Gingrich
Revolution, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the 2000 election, the war in Iraq,
the Great Recession, the birth of the Tea Party, the passage of the Affordable
Care Act, the Merrick Garland non-confirmation, and the 2016 election, for
starters. There are plenty of people to blame: Bill Clinton, New Gingrich, George
W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Fox News, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi,
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump all crowd the top of a long
list.
However
we got here, whoever brought us here, we’re here now, and it’s never been
uglier. And unfortunately, with the midterms less than a month away, it’s
probably about to get worse. Get ready for a month of vicious, personal, occasionally
outright false attacks from the halls of Congress, the studios of cable news
shows, and the president’s Twitter feed. The two quotes that introduced this
blog post illustrate the mindset of Washington right now: all that matters is
winning. Morality, civility, and ethics are secondary to victory in our current
scorched-earth politics.
But
you don’t have to buy into that.
Washington’s politics don’t have to poison your discourse.
When
the party you support or the politician you voted for does something immoral or
unjust, you don’t have to stand at the barricades and defend them to your dying
breath. You don’t have to sling mud in the direction of their attackers, you
don’t have to change the subject to the sins of the opposition, and you don’t have
to make it personal. Cable news will do that, I promise. Politicians in
Washington will do it too, that’s a guarantee. But you don’t have to.
For
years now, we mostly have been. As our national politics have gotten more and
more toxic the last few decades, our discourse has followed suit. Despite a
near-universal dislike of politicians, we’ve started to act like them: obfuscating,
rationalizing, and slandering…all because we want our guy to win. But maybe
there’s a better way.
Maybe
when you see a Beto sign in your neighbor’s yard, you can remember the homemade
Christmas cookies she brings you every year before you dismiss of her as a
libtard. Maybe when you see your uncle wearing a MAGA hat you can remember the
baseball games he took you to as a child before you sneer at his small-mindedness.
And maybe, just maybe, when you take the risk of talking to somebody with
different politics from you, you can listen more than you talk.
In
national politics right now, the only thing that matters is beating the other
side. Maybe that works in the halls of Congress, but we just can’t operate that
way in our schools, our workplaces, and our churches. Because when you hate
your neighbor, there’s far more at stake than a political win.
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“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and
lose his own soul?”
- Jesus Christ (Mark
8:36)
The narrow gate, for sure. ��
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