Partisan Aggression
George Will has condemned the misbehavior of both parties, giving an extensive list of both democratic and republican offenses. In describing one outrage, he says, "Nothing this undignified has happened in American politics for, well, two weeks."
Will fears that the overturning of established custom - such as the custom that district boundaries are reset only once a decade, after each census - causes permanent damage to civil society. When custom is overturned, "it is replaced either by yet more laws codifying behavior that should be regulated by good manners, or by a permanent increase in society's level of ongoing aggression."
I find it hard to disagree. In my lifetime, stretching all the way back to the chaos of the late sixties, political discourse has become progressively more polarized and acrimonious. "Each vandal seems to think that his or her passions are their own excuse for existing. As Santayana said, such thinking is the defining trait of barbarians."
Oh well, the world must be coming to an end.
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It's possible to look at the
It's possible to look at the 20th century as an aberration in political history. The Founders feared "faction," which meant Cromwellian armies and coups. That was their only experience with what we know as "parties."
Once the nation got going and party politics took form the result was immediately ugly. Interparty acrimony got so bad in the early days that Jefferson and Adams didn't talk for years.Of course, those weren't so much parties as they were cliques of men who had been sparring since 1770.
The elections of the 1820s-- the first truly "modern" party elections-- were marred by speech, slander, and crass marketing lies at least as outrageous as we have now.
Then there's the canings, shootings, brawls, the entire 1850s, a Civil War, the Bull Moose Party...
The American political scene has been lucky on two counts. First was the rise of a national press who saw themselves as impartial mediators. Of course, this was only an ideal, but the politely partisan newspapers of the 20th Century bore little resemblance to the slander sheets of the 18th and 19th, or the yellow journalism of the Gilded Age and shortly after.
Second, and partly as a result of the first, members of different parties have long had amiable relationships outside the chambers of government. You fight tooth and nail over an issue, then go get hammered together at the press club. You get to know the guys you're against and understand them as people, not as abstractions.
Obviously, by 1994 this was well on the way to breaking down (though I won't blame Newt directly for this-- he was merely a beneficiary of the decline in amiability).
But the press has been growing ever more shrill and partisan on both sides since 1990-- do you REALLY think Bill Clinton had one of his own aides whacked?? Come ON!-- and members of different parties no longer mingle socially. In the first instance, papers have become driven less by an abstract sense of duty and more by the need to move copies. In the second, the polarizing effects of the Sixties and early Seventies have come home to roost now that those same kids now run Congress.
It makes it kind of easy to demonize the opposition if you don't actually KNOW them as people.
Before I turn into Steven den Beste, I'll sum up. It looks like politics are reverting to historical norms after a long quiet spell. I don't like it, it's not good for the country, but I don't much know what to do to reverse it.
MC P-saurus, thank you for
MC P-saurus, thank you for providing the meat around the bone of my "Oh well, the world must be coming to an end" summation. My statement has the advantage of brevity, yours of information.
That's kind of what I figured
That's kind of what I figured, chief.
The world's never going to end. It's just going to suck more and more to keep on living, until the last organism just gives up and croaks.
I'm an optimist!
But remember, we are both
But remember, we are both descended from a line of stupendous badasses going all the way back to the first stupendous badass. We can take it now, due to our long and distinguished lineage of badassery. Our descendents might be even more stupendous badasses than we, and capable of enduring more grievous suckitude.