By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald
On June 14, a very angry man who hates Donald Trump shot four
Republicans at
their baseball practice at a field near Washington, D.C.,
severely injuring one
of them.
Something like that was bound to happen sooner or later.
In a Facebook post in March, James Hodgkinson had declared:
“Trump Has
Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
Facebook groups
to which he belonged included one called Terminate the
Republican Party and
another called the Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans.
Much worse was to come. The recent riot in Charlottesville, Va.
pitted white
supremacists and neo-Nazis against their left-wing opponents,
leading to the
murder of one person. As well, two state troopers died.
The mayhem shocked Americans, but maybe it shouldn’t have. The
entire
culture is growing coarser, and entertainers, in particular,
seem to have lost
any sense of moderation.
At the Women’s March on Washington, held the day after Trump’s
inauguration,
Madonna said she had fantasized about blowing up the White
House. Kathy Griffin
more recently displayed a likeness of Trump’s bloody severed
head.
Comedians have been just as vulgar. Stephen Colbert used a
crude term to
describe Trump as Putin’s sexual boy toy, while Bill Maher
suggested that Trump
and his daughter Ivanka have engaged in incest. In New York’s
Central Park, a
production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar portrayed the Roman
general as a
Trump-like character and, as we know, he was stabbed to death.
Some reports have claimed that in the first 12 days of Trump’s
presidency,
12,000 tweets called for his assassination. Violence is now
considered by some
on the left, especially at elite colleges and universities, to
be an acceptable
response to political differences. On the right, provocateurs in
turn cause
riots on campuses.
Even former presidential hopeful and populist commentator and
author Patrick
Buchanan, himself no slouch when it comes to vitriol, has
remarked that things
have gone too far.
Democracies require compromise. To engage with others, you have
to believe
that if you lose a contest or a debate, the winner will treat
you equitably;
that if the other side wins, it will act within the law and not
send its
opponents off to jail.
Elected majorities should act with restraint and reciprocity,
and
politicians should campaign without disparaging their opponents’
patriotism or
loyalty. You have to assume that institutions will be fair and
that leaders
will act in the country’s best interest.
This is where things are going wrong. Political scientists
Steven Webster
and Alan Abramowitz of Emory University in Atlanta have observed
that one of
the most important trends in American politics over the past
several decades
has been the rise of negative partisanship in the electorate,
that is,
preferences driven primarily by intense dislike of the other
side.
Americans are now so geographically segregated by class and
culture that
most communities are either overwhelmingly Republican or
Democratic. In 2016,
eight out of 10 U.S. counties gave either Trump or Hillary
Clinton a landslide
victory.
In these increasingly homogenous communities, nobody need
bother about
compromise and the trust it requires. Majorities can do what
they want without
dealing with their opposite numbers who live in the next state
over or even
just a few miles down the road. But on the national level, this
becomes
gridlock and polarization.
When parties agree on virtually nothing, the result becomes
scorched-earth
politics. So now, political grievances have escalated into
violence.
No comments:
Post a Comment