Last week David French of the conservative National Review magazine wrote a piece, “Partisan Hate Is Becoming a National Crisis,” that has been well-received by a number of people, even on the political left. And taken at face value, it does sound conciliatory, that the two sides need to put aside their differences and work together for the good of the country.
But if you look at it from any historical perspective, French gets it dangerously wrong on several fronts.
1) It was never a “partisan crisis” as such as one of ideology — and even not purely “ideology” as such when it came to specific political positions. That should have been obvious with former Sen. George Voinovich saying around the time of the 2008 general election that “If [President Barack Obama] was for it, we had to be against it ... [Sen. Mitch McConnell, now Majority Leader] wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”
2) This didn’t start two years ago with Donald Trump. It didn’t start 10 years ago with Obama. It didn’t start 25 years ago with Bill and Hillary Clinton. It didn’t even start 40 years ago with Ronald Reagan.
No, it started back in the mid-1950s — in part with National Review itself, which came out of the “new right,” inspired by the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. The late founder William F. Buckley Jr. used the magazine to try to streamline conservatism, which is inherently reactionary, into an intellectual force, which sounded noble on the surface but proved ultimately unworkable because folks often vote their fears — against rather than for something.
Newt Gingrich accelerated the divide between conservatives and “liberals,” with the assistance of the “religious right,” which spent a lot of money raising funds against the political left. (To this day, I remember the ominous statement of a pastor in suburban Atlanta who seemed to be gleeful at the destruction of political enemies, punctuating one rant with “[F]or our God is a consuming fire.”) And then you had right-wing talk radio beginning in the late 1980s, sprung loose with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Later on you had the right spreading the nonsense of Obama being a crypto-Muslim wanting to impose Shariah law on the United States.
Only since Trump’s election in 2016 have liberals begun to push back with any serious force, riding his incompetence and alleged corruption to victory in the House of Representatives two years later. But that’s what happens when you spend the last few decades picking at your opponents — they’re bound to react.
Now, in fairness, National Review is trying to do a balancing act, largely supporting Trump’s agenda while denouncing his comportment — in essence, trying to stay above the fray; the trouble is, of course, is that people were attracted to his crudity in the first place because they saw it as a sign of his, shall we say, authenticity. But, like all politicians and probably more than most, he desires to be worshipped, so he has rewarded the “religious right” with packing Federal courts with conservative judges in the hopes that Roe v. Wade would be overturned (he himself likely doesn’t give a hoot about the issue of abortion in its own right).
It’s true that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said that impeachment of Trump, which many Democrats demand, was not going to happen, referring to it as “so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” French, quoting an interview in The Washington Post, saying that it reflected her high-mindedness. Nonsense — it reflected political reality, since GOP senators won’t vote for it as things stand now precisely because they owe their positions to Trump. In other words, if they were to vote to impeach him the base would revolt.
The Weekly Standard, another conservative opinion magazine but never supportive of Trump, recently folded, likely because of that stance, so NR might feel compelled to call for civility in its own right. But modern conservatism was never supportive of a civil discourse in the first place, even despite Buckley’s attempt to foster such. And that’s ultimately why French gets it wrong — at times civil discourse means telling an opponent, “You really do get it wrong.”
But if you look at it from any historical perspective, French gets it dangerously wrong on several fronts.
1) It was never a “partisan crisis” as such as one of ideology — and even not purely “ideology” as such when it came to specific political positions. That should have been obvious with former Sen. George Voinovich saying around the time of the 2008 general election that “If [President Barack Obama] was for it, we had to be against it ... [Sen. Mitch McConnell, now Majority Leader] wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”
2) This didn’t start two years ago with Donald Trump. It didn’t start 10 years ago with Obama. It didn’t start 25 years ago with Bill and Hillary Clinton. It didn’t even start 40 years ago with Ronald Reagan.
No, it started back in the mid-1950s — in part with National Review itself, which came out of the “new right,” inspired by the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. The late founder William F. Buckley Jr. used the magazine to try to streamline conservatism, which is inherently reactionary, into an intellectual force, which sounded noble on the surface but proved ultimately unworkable because folks often vote their fears — against rather than for something.
Newt Gingrich accelerated the divide between conservatives and “liberals,” with the assistance of the “religious right,” which spent a lot of money raising funds against the political left. (To this day, I remember the ominous statement of a pastor in suburban Atlanta who seemed to be gleeful at the destruction of political enemies, punctuating one rant with “[F]or our God is a consuming fire.”) And then you had right-wing talk radio beginning in the late 1980s, sprung loose with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Later on you had the right spreading the nonsense of Obama being a crypto-Muslim wanting to impose Shariah law on the United States.
Only since Trump’s election in 2016 have liberals begun to push back with any serious force, riding his incompetence and alleged corruption to victory in the House of Representatives two years later. But that’s what happens when you spend the last few decades picking at your opponents — they’re bound to react.
Now, in fairness, National Review is trying to do a balancing act, largely supporting Trump’s agenda while denouncing his comportment — in essence, trying to stay above the fray; the trouble is, of course, is that people were attracted to his crudity in the first place because they saw it as a sign of his, shall we say, authenticity. But, like all politicians and probably more than most, he desires to be worshipped, so he has rewarded the “religious right” with packing Federal courts with conservative judges in the hopes that Roe v. Wade would be overturned (he himself likely doesn’t give a hoot about the issue of abortion in its own right).
It’s true that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said that impeachment of Trump, which many Democrats demand, was not going to happen, referring to it as “so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” French, quoting an interview in The Washington Post, saying that it reflected her high-mindedness. Nonsense — it reflected political reality, since GOP senators won’t vote for it as things stand now precisely because they owe their positions to Trump. In other words, if they were to vote to impeach him the base would revolt.
The Weekly Standard, another conservative opinion magazine but never supportive of Trump, recently folded, likely because of that stance, so NR might feel compelled to call for civility in its own right. But modern conservatism was never supportive of a civil discourse in the first place, even despite Buckley’s attempt to foster such. And that’s ultimately why French gets it wrong — at times civil discourse means telling an opponent, “You really do get it wrong.”
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