[For this year’s annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight some current (and in most cases longstanding) trends that really gripe my cookies. Add your non-favorites to a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year, ironically enough!]
On the
difference between debate and division, and why it matters a great deal.
The
comedian Will
Rogers once famously remarked, when asked about his political affiliation, “I
am not a member of any organized party—I am a Democrat.” That was in the 1930s,
so it’s fair to say that for at least the majority of the 20th
century—and most definitely into the first couple decades of the 21st—the
big
tent of the Democratic Party has also been a notoriously noisy one. While
some of those party members who have made the most noise have ended up rightly
unable to find a home in the party—I’m thinking of the
1948 Dixiecrats in particular here, without whose blatantly racist views
and white supremacist ideologies the party was distinctly better off—the vast
majority have remained, constituting a political community with nearly as many
internal differences and debates as external contrasts with its official
adversaries.
I’m entirely
good with that—a political party isn’t a religion, much less a cult, and should
never demand nor require rigid or unthinking allegiance to anything or anyone
(and certainly not to, I dunno, orange
conmen). Moreover, I genuinely love the big tent goal, as I think we can
and should debate a wide range of policy priorities and principles while still
pulling together toward the goal of forming a more perfect union. Whatever
their flaws
and failings—and they were more than a few—the American
Framers most definitely achieved that multi-layered purpose, debating
famously and ceaselessly (if not quite as musically as recent representations
have portrayed the process) yet eventually and consistently helping push the
new nation forward. Some of my favorite arguments have been political ones with
fellow lifelong Democrats—my
parents very much among them—and I like to think that my hometown frenemy
Thomas Jefferson would have very much approved.
But here’s
the thing: debate and division might be on the same spectrum, but they are in
very different locations. That’s particularly true when it comes to the “pulling
together” part of the formula I articulated above—if we see ourselves as
divided from someone else, we’re almost certainly not seeing them as allies in
a cause, as those with whom we want or need to pull together. It seems to me that
here in 2022, far too many of my fellow folks on the political left see
themselves as divided from many others on the left, and indeed would define
those others as opponents rather than members of a raucous big tent. I call
that phenomenon the “circular
firing squad,” our tendency to shoot at each other rather than at those
against whom we are genuinely battling in our quest to move the nation forward.
And the thing with a circular firing squad is, all of its participants end up
wounded at best, destroyed at worst, and certainly not having achieved any of
their goals. All of which makes this trend one of my least favorites on our political
landscape.
Last
non-favorite trend tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Thoughts on this non-favorite? Other non-favorites of any kind you’d share?
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