In previous election cycles, much attention was devoted to the increasing partisanship of American politics. It was generally viewed as a bad thing — in fact, when President Obama was running for the first time in 2008, he positioned himself as the one who would be able to transcend partisan gridlock and cooperate with the opposition to get things done. That obviously didn’t happen. Now, we are in the closing stages of a political season marked by the most rabid partisanship in living memory.
In the current presidential cycle, rather than focus on their proposals to improve America, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have employed rhetoric that paints the election of their rival as the end of American politics as we know it. And in both camps, supporters have bought into these portrayals. As evidenced by the unprecedented negativity ratings of both candidates, the primary motivation of most supporters of Clinton and Trump is more about denying the office of president to the other party’s candidate than getting their own candidate into office.
While some prominent Republicans have said they will not support Trump, I’ve also encountered many staunch conservatives who attempt to minimize or apologize for his objectionable words and actions. Having decided to vote for their party’s candidate, they then try to bring him into line with their values.
We are letting our politics inform our morality, not letting our morality inform our politics. I don’t want to play into the same kind of end-times rhetoric now being used by Clinton and Trump, but this trend spells trouble for America. The loss of a moral sense independent of your political stance has led to the kind of extreme partisanship that has emerged in our parties in recent years. If people view their party as 100 percent right on everything and the opposing party as 100 percent wrong on everything, then they may feel quite justified in calling the other party evil. In this paradigm, any sort of compromise with that evil is participation in it. This mindset, however, is inherently incompatible with our system of government, which was built on compromise and checks and balances, and leads to unproductive and harmful gridlock.
For instance, the Senate’s role in approving the president’s appointments to high offices has been hijacked by an obstructionist Republican bloc. They have not only refused to hold a hearing on Obama’s Supreme Court justice pick, but prominent Republican John McCain vowed last month to reject any of Clinton’s nominees if she were to win the election. When both sides are so committed to their ideological goals that they view compromise as an evil, not only are the American people hurt, but also the credibility of our nation’s institutions of government.
Extreme polarization such as we see now is decaying its foundations and the public’s trust in the rule of law. When one party dismisses the investigation of the Benghazi incident, an attack which cost the lives of four Americans, as politically motivated and members of the other have all but admitted that the said investigation was meant to take down Clinton, we are pretty far gone. Conspicuously absent from both of these positions is the idea of impartial justice being served. We are in danger of devolving into the miscarriage of justice that occurs in many authoritarian governments around the world. In countries where this is the case, like Putin’s Russia, the judiciary is reduced to a wing of the majority party, used to quash opposition and reinforce party policy.
During the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, Republicans joined Democrats to open impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, a Republican president who then resigned. Why did they do it? Was it merely damage control, taking a short-term loss to save the future of the party? I don’t think so. More than pragmatism, those statesmen were motivated by a commitment to seeing justice served, whether it helped or hurt their own interests.
I cannot honestly say the Nixon impeachment could be replicated in today’s political climate. The subsuming of morality into politics that defines our partisan culture has set us on a dangerous path. We will continue along it toward disaster unless we can reclaim the notion of an objective morality that binds us all equally and knows no political bounds.
Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox warned during the investigation, “Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people [to decide].” Our choice today is almost as stark.
Will we have a government of laws or of parties?