POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES
I'm not sure what else anyone could expect, Mr. Crook.
The cast of characters on the national political scene, especially those on the right, makes mighty poor material out of which to shape a civil political life.
Winning is everything, sophomoric arguments are common, and insults are basic building blocks of American politics, not to mention election fraud.
This political phenomenon is not new to America.
Perhaps many abroad have no real feeling for the history of America's national politics.
Abraham Lincoln, now the nation's most beloved president, was commonly called an "obscene ape" during his campaigning. Grotesque cartoons and vicious commentary played regularly on the theme.
There was an undercurrent in all that hatred of Lincoln's having been believed to be an abolitionist. He most decidedly was not, but that mere fact didn't stop the hate and excess of opponents just as facts do not stop the hate and excess of today.
Hatred was so intense, Lincoln went to Washington for his inauguration hiding his identity.
Andrew Jackson, as near a mad president as ever there was, fought duels, horse-whipped one politician, and threatened anyone who said anything he regarded as an insult.
Thomas Jefferson had a full-time paid hack to dig up dirt on his opponents, including the man he worked for as Secretary of State, George Washington. When the hack didn’t feel fairly treated by Jefferson, he sold his services to others, disseminating such dark facts he had discovered as Jefferson’s liaison with a teen-age slave girl, Sally Hemmings.
Look at the way the opposition treated Senator McGovern’s running mate, Senator Eggleton, a thoroughly decent man who had experienced some depression. Look at the way nasty graffiti artists treated Senator Muskie during his campaign, reducing him to public tears. Look at the words of Tom Delay - now a convicted felon – about Bill Clinton’s big trip to Africa, words dripping with hate and racism.
There are countless examples of this political insanity in America just during my lifetime. There was the idiot Republican Senator who accused the Clinton administration of running a concentration camp after the poor Cuban boy, Elian, was taken from his kidnappers and sent to a quiet place of refuge following months of being held to ransom and hearing his loving father regularly insulted by shouting voices.
And this stuff is not without real consequences, sometimes far greater than the recent shooting in Arizona. Richard Nixon made a career early on of defaming his opponents – his early election to Congress featured insults and lies toward the woman against whom he ran. Nixon accused her of being “pink down to her underwear.” His reputation as a gutter fighter was so established that President Johnson, in sending the beginnings of an army to Vietnam, was known to be motivated by political fear of being castigated for “losing Vietnam” the way “China was lost.”
The late Governor George Wallace and serious presidential candidate had a famous quote justifying his extreme actions towards desegregation: he famously said he would never be “outniggered” again after losing in an early political fight owing to his then moderation.
America is simply too young a society to have developed genuinely civilized political customs, and there is a raw quality to it that almost encourages the kind of behavior of a Sarah Palin having a cross-hair sight over a politician's face on her web site.
The effects of this rawness are reinforced by America’s wealth because wealth enables people to publish and disseminate filth and stupidity in vast quantities. They are also reinforced by the totally dominant ethos of, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
I see little hope for any change, except after the passage of a century or so.
America’s now-certain relative decline in the world should help a bit along the way: nothing is unhealthier for manic behavior than quasi-religious faith in being number one.
