I promise not to take sides in this essay, alright?
One of the worst side issues that's come out of the 2016 campaign - that is, it came to a head this past year, although it's been building for a decade or more - is the loss of civility and mutual respect that once permeated political discourse.
It was not always so, as Lin-Manuel Miranda writes.
Miranda went to great lengths to draw from historical evidence for his landmark musical Hamilton, basing the story and many of its details on Ron Chernow's award-winning biography of the man. The political debates he creates in the musical, while not word-for-word accurate (he was writing hip-hop lyrics, for Heaven's sake!), captured the general flavor of the discourse - and sometimes it was indeed as vehement as Alexander Hamilton's call to his own president John Adams (ahem), "Sit down, you fat m*****-f*****!" So, we had come a long way since then. In my childhood, it was the territory of gentlemen. (Alright, not entirely. But more so than before.)
But the reason President Obama was elected (in part) was his promise to work with both sides of Congress, something that had fallen away during the previous eight years. It turned out that the Republicans had no interest in working with him (and their retort would be, "because the Democrats had no interest in working with our President"), and the stalemate got worse.
I heard an interview last year with President Bill Clinton, who served from 1993 to 2001. While he was victim of a particularly partisan witchhunt in retrospect (given the possible crimes since then), he argued that when he was in office, there was probably a center 20% or so that was the group that you could negotiate with in each situation - and now, that centrist group that refused to be blindly party-loyal was down to 5% or less. It made every issue into partisan politics, when it didn't have to be. President Carter says similar things in his most recent autobiography.
But even that isn't so much the issue. Now, it's the vehemence in the rhetoric that's jumped the shark. No longer are we debating the issues any more - now it seems to be the literal humanity of our opponents that we call into question. And the primary cause of this change is social media, where everyone can have their fifteen seconds of fame now, in posts or re-tweets. Wade into a comments section at your peril. That's where the people not intelligent enough to put together coherent positions on their own comment on everyone else's position, usually in misspelled and grammatically if not linguistically obscene fashion.
And that tenor of conversation has leaked into the original discourse now - even the political leadership speaks in terms previously reserved for hellfire preachers warning of the eternal destination of sinners.One of Mr. Trump's great and sad discoveries in his first week of office (and for the life of me I cannot understand why he should be surprised by this, but apparently he is) is that vitriol comes with the office. His predecessors warned him about it - I know, because they did so very publicly. Half the populace will hate you no matter what you do. (If you're doing your job correctly; if not, it'll be MORE than half.) I can't imagine who would WANT the job as it stands now.
And that brings me back to my greatest fear. The people we would WANT to seek political office - not just the POTUS, but any office of consequence in this nation - are not going to want to have anything to do with politics, because even dipping your toes into that mess leaves a foul stench on you that is hard to erase.
What Christian could in good conscience enter a political battle with an opponent willing to sling mud, unconcerned whether the mud has any basis in truth or even reality? I wouldn't - would you? And you don't have to be Christian to see that - anyone with any sense of privacy or decency would run from the field like Usain Bolt when the gun goes off. If you have the talent to make a living in other fields, knowing that the desire to actually help people no longer demands a career in political office but can be manifested a hundred different ways today, knowing that politics today is a career of bureaucratic stalemates and mudslinging, and knowing that (except for doing so corruptly) you cannot make as much money IN public service as you can outside of it?
Why would you even consider running for office?
It's very much like the sport of boxing today. Once, boxing was the sport of kings - the most honored man on the planet was the Heavyweight Champion of the World. But with the corruption that overwhelmed boxing, with the evidence of permanent physical damage that came to light (RIP, Muhammed Ali), and with the then-dwindling popularity of the sport, there was an abrupt shift in the men who sought a career in the Noble Art - mostly ghetto Hispanics, for whom this was the only way out of poverty. (By the way, I predict this is what you'll see in American football in twenty years without a drastic change in that sport as well.)
Who will pursue a career in politics henceforth? Only those who are ill-equipped for a life elsewhere...only the BS artists who realize they are quite capable of mudslinging and can do so without ethical qualms. That is the future we have to look forward to.
Or maybe we're already there.
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