I think that James Wallner has the causality reversed in his op-ed at the Washington Examiner:
American democracy is resilient. It is so because individual Americans are able to engage in deeply divisive debates within the institutions created by the Constitution. It will be resilient so long as we refrain from delegitimizing those with whom we disagree.
To that end, Cohen would do well to spend less time talking about the fact that he dislikes Trump and more time talking about the areas where he and Trump disagree. That kind of debate, no doubt still contentious, is the very essence of politics; allowing it to take place is vital to identifying those areas where Americans must compromise with one another in pursuit of justice and the general good.
It is disdain for debate that has culminated with Trump; Trump didn’t cause it. The castigation of political opponents as racists, sexists, and/or tools or the rich, all tactics for ending debate, were hallmarks of our political process long before Trump ran for the Republican nomination for president.
“It is disdain for debate that has culminated with Trump”
Absolutely. If you make any kind of argument that people on the right don’t like they just say you are being politically correct or elitist, and that ends the debate.
Steve
Agreed, debate over.
What never ceases to amaze me is how partisans see this problem as entirely one-sided – it is always the members of the other party that are to blame.
Democrats have been calling Republican presidents and presidential candidates Nazis and racists, unfairly in my opinion, for at least 70 years. Truman called Dewey a Nazi (technically he said he was a Nazi sympathizer) and pro-Communist. Barry Goldwater was called a Nazi, absurd on its face. So were Reagan and Mitt Romney. I don’t know when Republicans started saying that Democrats were PC and elitist but I’m pretty sure it was more recent than that. IMO it was a false equivalence.
I’m not as old as you, but I remember Republicans regularly calling Democrats, at a minimum, soft on communism if not outright communists. There’s still some of that around.
It’s easier when you caucus with a democratic socialist.
Andy is correct that Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists and communists, well before Sanders was in office. (Grew up in a John Bircher family, so well aware of this stuff.) Pretty sure McCarthy came before Sanders. Will go check. Note how Palin said we weren’t real Americans. I think you need to stop feeling sorry for the whiny conservatives who are trying to corner the market on martyrdom and self pity. It used to be the whiny liberals that would drive me crazy but now conservatives are making it an art form.
Steve
Some Democrats are PC and elitist. It’s a legit criticism. Being comfortable with racial tokenism in a fancy setting while not caring about poverty or class one whit is a hallmark of mainstream Democrats. That it might ‘shut down the debate’ is something a Hillary Clinton would say because she has no answers or arguments.
Same goes with Republicans. It’s not that Republicans are racists. It’s that they don’t have arguments for why Ronald Reagan wasn’t playing on racism for talking about strapping young bucks buying steaks. They don’t have arguments for anything regarding race or gender, actually. The debate is ‘shut down’ because Republicans never wanted or were prepared to talk about racism, sexism, or the influence of wealth and capitalism.
You could be fair to both mainstream Democrats and Republicans and say that they never wanted Trump to happen. That they thought that somehow it would all work out. There could still be denial and elitism and everything would stay in its place. And yet Obama, who was a centrist who happened to be black, blew that hope out of the water.
I think I’m in complete agreement with that comment, MM.
MM,
This issue I have, from both sides, is that my arguments are often wrongly labeled and ignored. Or people won’t engage with you unless you pass some litmus test. And lets not even get started with the various forms of ad hominem.
The result is that most online forums are simply not worth my time and energy to comment or otherwise engage.
Everyone wants to change the subject, to make the argument they want to make rather than making the argument they need to make.
Online, obviously, is a terrible place to go in search of decent behavior. But thinking of politics as a series of bloodless issues affecting nobody is a strange thing to believe. It’s something only elites believe. Like why can’t we just a civil debate about going to war?
I’m friends with a couple where the wife was diagnosed with a rare lymphoma a couple of weeks after Trump was elected. She’s in remission, but she will have to take low-level chemo the rest of her life. Oddly enough, the health care debates in 2017 were not issues for them; they were life or death debates when it came down to existing preconditions and the GOP’s view on this matter. Both are way too wise to go online, but they did not just want to have a debate about health care. They’re very civil people, but if they heard some conservative complain about name-calling it’s not going to be a problem with them.
I find it kind of odd to try to blame one side or the other for starting the name calling. If you keep going back, you can aways find one political group calling the others names. I am surprised that a well read person would believe that you could assign this to one party.
Steve
Not every post is about everything. This post is about present disdain for debate. I agree that both sides engage in name-calling and have done so since the beginning of the Republic. There was lots of name-calling in the presidential contest between Adams and Jefferson. However, that didn’t have the effect of shutting down debate because it was part of the debate not an alternative to debate. Of today’s Democratic and Republican name-calling is either more likely to be used to shut down debate?
BTW, steve, I think that some of the differences in our reactions may be attributed to the differences in our experiences with my living in Illinois and your living in Pennsylvania.
On a near-daily basis I’m subjected to every problem being attributed to Republican moral turpitude which is arrant nonsense. That Illinois’s problems can be laid firmly at the doors of Democrats is beyond question. The only real question is whether our problems are due to ideology, stupidity, or corruption. Probably some of all three. If every single Republican were magically transported off the face of the earth, it wouldn’t solve Illinois’s problems.
My decision on how to cope with this is not to become a Republican but to demand better Democrats.
“My decision on how to cope with this is not to become a Republican but to demand better Democrats.”
Who are these better Democrats of which you speak?