Does anyone think a healthy nation with a healthy political culture would elect a man like Donald Trump not once, but twice?
The eternal return of President Trump is a sign of our national sickness, and a recent Pew Research Center study shows us exactly what that sickness is. We despise each other, and demagogues rise when hatred increases. It’s as predictable as night following day.
In a 25-country survey, which included a cross section of European, Asian, African and American nations, the United States was the only country in which a majority of adults surveyed said that the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens were either bad or somewhat bad. Even countries torn apart by violence and civil strife — countries such as Nigeria and Mexico — had higher views of their fellow citizens.
We’ve known for a long time that America is deeply polarized, and we’ve known the problem is only getting worse. For example, in a 2022 survey, Pew found that large shares of Democrats and Republicans thought of each other as close-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent, and the measurements were getting worse every year.
Both sides hate each other so much that it’s almost meaningless to ask who hates whom the most. In the morality and ethics survey I mentioned at the start of the column, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were more likely to believe that other Americans were unethical or immoral than Republicans. But in the 2022 survey, Republicans were more likely to believe that Democrats were dishonest, immoral and lazy.
If you’re a Republican or a Democrat, the best way to imagine the other side’s view of you is to simply mirror your own attitude. They despise you with the same intensity that you despise them. They view you with the same sense of threat and alarm that you view them.
To say that both sides view each other with equivalent disdain is not to say that both sides are equally dangerous. When a hateful, vengeful man is in the Oval Office, wielding the awesome power of the presidency beyond its constitutional limits, then he immediately becomes the most dangerous person in America.
But the urgent necessity of defending our republic from his assaults on the Constitution, from his intense cruelty, and from his profound corruption shouldn’t blind us to the divisions that helped bring him to power.
American hatred is growing so great that partisans, perversely enough, often view kindness and tolerance from political opponents as a threat. The only good people are people who agree with them. The supposedly decent person on the other side? We have a name for him or her, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
This reality came home to me once again after the column I published last week. My argument was simple: I very much disagree with James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas on many important issues, most notably his stance on abortion.
At the same time, however, I very much appreciate his condemnation of the politics of hatred and vitriol, and his appeal to the better angels of our nature is giving voters hope that this miserable political moment may one day come to an end.
In a CBS interview days after his primary victory, Talarico said: “My faith teaches me to love my neighbor as myself. Not just my neighbor who looks like me, or prays like me, or votes like me.”
“I’m tired of being pitted against my neighbor, he continued, “I’m tired of being told to hate my neighbor. And I think in Texas across the political spectrum, there is a deep hunger for a different kind of politics.” One that’s “rooted in love.”
“That old politics that we’ve been suffering under for the last ten years — politics as blood sport, as trolling and owning, as total war, that politics is dying.”
That isn’t just a virtuous approach to political differences; it’s a deeply Christian approach to political differences. After all, what does it mean to love our enemies if we do not demonstrate patience and kindness toward them?
The online response to my argument, however, was volcanic. I was accused of legitimizing heresy. Another writer said that I’d suffered an apparent “brain injury.” My appreciation of Talarico’s approach even put the soul of evangelicalism at risk. Once again, I was written entirely out of the Christian faith by angry Trumpist evangelicals.
(I did have to laugh at the Babylon Bee’s joke headline: “David French Praises Satan as ‘Most Christian Person in History.’”)
In their minds, I was elevating “niceness” over justice and righteousness. To this way of thinking, Talarico’s manner makes him more dangerous, not less, and it was my responsibility to warn Christian America away from this dreadful man.
In their anger and vitriol, I saw the mirror image of the far-left intolerance I’ve encountered through much of my career. There are people who can’t conceive of the idea that a pro-life Christian can be a decent person, or that a person who, for example, opposes surgical and medical interventions for youth gender transition, or trans women’s participation in female sports can have any redeeming qualities at all.
I’m fully aware that to them, I’m the wolf in sheep’s clothing because I hide what they see as religious and political extremism behind a veneer of civility and pluralism. Civility itself is a questionable value. It’s a version of “respectability politics” when the times call for direct, aggressive action against your evil political opponents.
This approach is profoundly dangerous to our republic. The American constitutional system is, at its heart, a dispute-resolution mechanism. It takes all the differences and divisions inherent in a continent-sized multiethnic, multifaith democracy and channels them into a political system marked by checks and balances and firewalls against tyranny.
In the United States, there should never be any such thing as a winner-takes-all electoral result. Even the worst losers and everyone else in American politics enjoy the protections of the Bill of Rights and the opportunity to try to win again, very soon, in election cycles that arrive with clockwork regularity, every two years.
But hatred puts this system to its most severe test — a test we’ve faced over and over again. It is relatively easy to support the civil rights of people you like (even if you disagree with them). It is profoundly difficult to support the civil rights of people you hate.
Or, as John Adams wrote in his 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia: “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”
Restrain those vices and we preserve our republic. Indulge them, and we risk its dissolution.
On Thursday, a federal appellate judge, Lawrence VanDyke, issued a truly remarkable dissent — a textbook example of how not to handle disagreement on profoundly important constitutional issues.
The Ninth Circuit had denied a petition to rehear, en banc, an opinion upholding the State of Washington’s Law Against Discrimination against a challenge brought by two Washington spas that banned men and preoperative transgender women “who have not yet received gender confirmation surgery affecting their genitalia.” The spas are Korean spas, where customers are typically nude in communal bathhouses.
Under the current interpretation of Washington’s law, which the Ninth Circuit sided with, women (and some girls) could be exposed to the sight of male genitalia without their consent — an act that, in different circumstances, could constitute indecent exposure or sexual harassment.
I disagree with the Ninth Circuit’s conclusion that the First Amendment does not grant the spa the right to exclude customers with penises from receiving the spa’s services. But I also know that the interaction between nondiscrimination statutes and the First Amendment is complex. There will always be competing and overlapping interests in play, and line-drawing can be difficult.
But this is how Judge VanDyke began his dissent: “This is a case about swinging dicks.”
Yes, you read that correctly. And then he doubled down. “The fact that so many on our court want to pretend that this case is about anything other than swinging dicks,” he wrote, “is the very reason the shocking language is necessary.”
No, the shocking language was wholly unnecessary. It’s worse than unnecessary. It’s further damaging our political culture. It’s a court opinion as a 4chan post — an “own the libs” statement that brings thunderous applause from the angry right but communicates nothing but scorn and contempt for the opposition.
To call for decency doesn’t deny the depth of our disagreements. It does, however, acknowledge the essential humanity of our opponents. I keep thinking about the commitment card that Martin Luther King, Jr. asked his followers to sign before they joined the 1963 Birmingham campaign.
The 10 directives included these admonitions — “Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus,” “Remember always that the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation — not victory,” “Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love,” and “Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.”
Does anyone believe Dr. King was not dedicated enough to justice? Or that he was ineffective in his quest to transform American culture and politics? His love and regard for others — even as he fought desperately for civil and economic and political rights — were indispensable to his success. They’re what makes reconciliation possible, even if we’re still far from perfect.
I disagree with James Talarico on many things. But I also agree with his desire to reject politics as a blood sport. And unless we can remember — as Dr. King did, with his life perpetually on the line — to seek both justice and mercy, then we’ll be left with neither.
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