RD began the week with a poignant and saddening description of how hate seems actually to have become a dominant emotional trope in latter-day electoral campaigning. While there is much cause for concern in what Laderman’s essay captured so well about this especially bruising campaign season (and today’s electoral aftermath), perhaps we can take some comfort in the historical realization that it has pretty much always been this way.
In that classic of American letters, The Education of Henry Adams, we read the following description of politics and the general atmosphere of electoral campaigning in the immediate aftermath of the US Civil War. It comes in Chapter 17, a chapter entitled simply “President Grant (1869).” It makes for strong and sobering reading, one day after the 2010 midterm elections:
Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent reason.
Trade out the name George W. Bush for Andrew Johnson, and the point translates very well today. Our own Senate seems caught up in the mingle-mangle of its own egotism, and a case of the “hysterics of nervous bucking,” and there is no evidence to suggest that this fever will pass post-Election Day. And the House promises to be, if anything, even worse.
Henry Adams continues:
Great leaders like Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, became witty on their account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter.
Great leaders like Pelosi and Reid, Boehner and McConnell—even comic outsiders like Palin and O’Donnell—cannot be burlesqued either; in the absence of barbed presidential wit, it takes figures like Jon Stewart to burlesque them now. In Stewart we meet a comedian who well understands the gravity and the tragic seriousness of the situation. To turn the United States Senate into a burlesque of faction is more than buffoonery; it is also an invitation to real, rather than rhetorical, violence.
This was the passionate core of Laderman’s essay. And this, as I have urged before, is why it is so important to emphasize that the “Tea Party” is poorly named; its historical antecedents are in the Whiskey and Shays rebellions, not the Boston Tea Party.
These people come “locked and loaded”; the Boston Tea Partiers did not.
Here is Henry Adams again:
They [the most vitriolic senators] did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and even McKinley and John Hay were to feel.
In other words, such senatorial burlesque gets people killed. We crossed an important line in this election cycle, when a publicly televised election advertisement invited us to watch a West Virginian candidate for the US Senate (Governor Joe Manchin) load his high-powered rifle and put a bullet in the president’s “Cap and Trade” bill. He will now take up Senator Robert Byrd’s Senate seat. And he is a Democrat.
Regrettably we have a very long list of names from which to trade out for Adams’ list of victims of overheated rhetoric and political assassination: John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy…
As I look out over the wasteland of current political speech, and the difficult terrain lying before this Republic in the next two years, it is Adams’ final line to which I keep returning. It offers a conclusion that brings me some chastened hope today:
The most troublesome task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.
This is the lesson I hope our current president can bring himself to learn after this midterm election. Not more coddling of old and new right-running Republican legislators. There has been enough of that already, and he has reaped a bitter harvest. He has emboldened some of the most vociferous candidates who really got their hate on this season.
The president ran on the promise of dramatic change; he is a leader of uncommon ability and gravitas. Time to lead, then. It would take a president uniquely gifted with such skills to shame the legislative branch—every party, every representative, every last one of them—into behaving more decently, and more honestly, and less dangerously, in public.
