Fondness for Battle

Standing on the bluffs above Fredericksburg, watching futile Union charges uphill into his thundering cannons, Robert E. Lee observed, “It is well that war is so terrible; else we should grow too fond of it.”  I’m afraid we have, nowadays in the pitched battles waged daily between our political parties.  Neither blood nor ink is spilled any longer in these unceasing wars – it’s so much easier to pour out the mutual hatreds and slanders via the internet – but the consequences remain terrible.  Families go without food stamps they need for feeding their children, drinking water is polluted, health care is lacking, diseased poultry is uninspected, businesses are bankrupted, future disasters are precipitated by current inactions.  The parties each charge the other with actions designed not for the benefit of the country but to promote the party’s own fortunes.  And both parties are right about that.

The problem is that large amounts of money must be raised in our current campaigning by advertising mode of electioneering.  The days are long gone when campaigning was done by shaking hands and kissing babies and issuing occasional quotes.  Now, due to the length of the election cycle, the numbers of people to be reached, and the Citizens United decision, endless cash is required, and it is easier to raise money by instilling hatred of an enemy than by seeking a common goal with those who differ.  Party professionals know that, and hatred is their daily product.  I get at least half a dozen political fundraising emails every day, and none of them is even close to the “love your enemy” message I get in church on Sunday – even when the political email arrives on Sunday morning.  They have grown too fond of their warfare.

George Washington’s farewell address included his famous warning against letting the strife of “party factions” undermine the Republic that he and the other Founding Fathers had devoted themselves to building.  Washington went on to say “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.”  More recently, John Dingell, announcing his retirement from Congress after 58 years, proved Washington right by saying he did so because Congress had become “obnoxious” in its partisanship.  Dingell pointed out that the current Congress had set a record by passing only 57 pieces of legislation and blamed a common “disregard of our country, our Congress, and our governmental system.”   That 57 pieces of legislation going to the White House was less than the number of times the House passed a repeal of the Affordable Care Act knowing in advance it would go nowhere in the Senate.

G.B, Shaw wittily observed that a nation is created by people divided by a common language and united by a common enemy, but when the common language is mutual hatred, the nation can also be destroyed.  We live in dangerous days.  Everything from class warfare to climate change to global terrorism to unending economic stagnation threatens us.  In some possible outcomes, our survival as a democracy is indeed threatened.  Those dangers can be both a threat and an opportunity to us.  One more quote – Aristotle was the first to get into the act of combining “common” and “enemy” into one sentence by writing “Even the bitterest of enemies can be united by a common danger.”  Our fondness for battle has got us into the wrong wars against ourselves.  We need to raise our sights to see the dangers we share and to relearn how to work together on them.  Politicians need to remember, like Dingell, why they set out into politics in the first place.  If it was purely from hate, they are in the wrong business.

By itself, of course, just hating each other less is not enough.  We need to try out things that have worked elsewhere, like the British practice of severely limiting the election cycle, or requiring media to provide free or low cost political ads as a requirement for licensing.  And Citizens United, and the underlying definition of corporations as political people, needs serious rethought. When you need lots of money to campaign, the temptations of lobbyists and PACs are too great.  And “here there be tygers.”  The need for money to get elected has itself become one of our greatest dangers.  Defeating it should unite us.