A large part of the appeal of Donald Trump even to those of us who oppose much of his style and substance is that he and he alone appears prepared to fight the Left and fight to win, which of course means using all their dirty tactics against them. He alone seems to grasp that we are in a war, and that civility has no place in a war, except for a mock civility deployed when it is advantageous to do so. The politics of personal destruction has been a trademark feature of the Left since at least V. I. Lenin, and Trump has shown that he is skilled in this nasty art. Case in point: his swift elimination of the gentlemanly but effete Jeb Bush. Poor Jeb went from Jeb! to Jeb in no time despite all the money behind him. One hopes that Trump can destroy the despicable Hillary in the same way.
But surely the politics of personal destruction is a sub-optimal form of politics, to put it in the form of an understatement.
Given that we agree on very little in this age of rage and polarization, are there any prospects for peaceful coexistence? Peter Wehner:
There’s no easy or quick way out of this. It will require some large number of Americans to re-think how we are to engage in politics in this era of rage and polarization. Toward that end John Inazu, an associate professor of law and political science at Washington University in St. Louis, has written Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference.
Professor Inazu’s book explores, in an honest and realistic way, how we can live together peaceably despite our deep differences. He concedes we lack agreement about the purpose of our country, the nature of the common good, and the meaning of human flourishing. But this is hardly the first time. (To take just one example, America in 1860 was far more riven than it is today.)
What is needed is to reclaim what Inazu calls three “civic aspirations” – tolerance, humility and patience. The goal here isn’t to pretend our deep differences don’t exist; rather, it’s to approach politics in ways that takes [sic] into account our constitutional commitments (including allowing individuals to form and gather in groups of their choosing) and civic practices. It is to give people space to live their lives and think about things in different ways. It means accepting our disagreements without degrading and imbruting those with whom we disagree. It obligates us, in other words, to understand what pluralism requires of others and of us. (The requirements we place on others is the easy part; the requirements we place on ourselves is the more challenging part.)
This all may sound hopelessly high-minded to you, eliciting a dismissive roll of the eyes. It’s so unfashionable, so unrealistic, so out of touch. It’s chic to be cynical. Except for this: Disagreeing with others, even passionately disagreeing with others, without rhetorically vaporizing them is actually part of what it means to live as citizens in a republic. (Once upon a time this was part of civics education.) The choice is co-existence with some degree of mutual respect — or the politics of resentment and disaffection, the politics of hate and de-humanization.
Right now, it appears an awful lot of people are embracing the politics of hate and de-humanization.
I am not as sanguine as Wehner or Inazu. We are told that the goal is "to approach politics in ways that takes [sic] into account our constitutional commitments (including allowing individuals to form and gather in groups of their choosing) and civic practices. It is to give people space to live their lives and think about things in different ways."
But precisely here is the problem. The Left will not allow it! They don't give a rat's ass about the Constitution or its commitments. There are leftist scum who now argue against free speech. There are university administrators who either have no understanding of the traditional values of the university, including open inquiry and free debate, or else are too cowed to enforce them. Not to mention the leftist termites among them out to undermine the West and its institutions. There is nothing liberal about these so-called 'liberals.' Furthermore, leftists have no qualms about using the power of the state to erode the institutions of civil society. Disaster looms if the Left gets its way and manages to eliminate the buffering elements of civil society lying between the naked individual and the state. The state can wear the monstrous aspect of Leviathan or that of the benevolent nanny whose multiple tits are so many spigots supplying panem et circenses to the increasingly less self-reliant masses. Whichever face it wears, it is the enemy of that traditional American value, liberty. To cite just one example, the Obama administration promotes ever-increasing food stamp dependency to citizens and illegal aliens alike under the mendacious SNAP acronym thereby disincentivizing relief and charitable efforts at the local level while further straining an already strapped Federal treasury. A trifecta of stupidity and corruption, if you will: the infantilizing of the populace who now needs federal help in feeding itself; the fiscal irresponsibilty of adding to the national debt; the assault on the institutions of civil society out of naked lust for ever more centralized power in the hands of the Dems, the left wing party. (Not that the Republicans are conservative.)
Wehner fails to grasp that the Left is fundamentally destructive of the spaces in which people "live their lives and think about things in different ways." This is why there can be no peace with them.
It is hopelessly naive to think that we can have comity without commonality. There are certain things we cannot be expected to agree on. We will never agree on the purpose of human life or the nature of human flourishing. This is why the Declaration of Independence speaks not of an unalienable right to happiness, but of an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness which includes a pursuit of the question as to what it would be to be happy. But we have to agree on the purpose of government and a small set of core American values. One of them is liberty, which entails a commitment to limited government. A second is e pluribus unum which expresses the value of assimilation. A third is that rights are not granted by government but have a status antecedent to government and the conventional. Does the Left accept these as values? Of course not. The Left is totalitarian from top to bottom. It is anti-liberty. The Left promotes a mindless and destructive diversity. The Left, being totalitarian, cannot brook any competitors, not the private sphere, not private property which is the foundation of individual liberty, not the family, not religion with its reference to Transcendence, not any realm of values beyond the say-so of rulers.
I am not expressing cynicism, but realism. Inazu and Wehner are engaged in a vaporous feel-good sort of preaching lacking any connection with reality. They fail to grasp that we have reached the point where we agree on almost nothing and that the way forward will be more like war than like civil debate on a common ground of shared principles.
Maybe the alternative is this: we either defeat the Left or we balkanize. To put it oxymoronically I have toyed quite seriously with the idea that what we need is the political analog of divorce, not that this is an optimal solution. See my A Case for Voluntary Segregation. I am speaking, of course, of political segregation, not racial segregation. I have to point out the obvious because some stupid race-baiting liberal may be reading this.
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