The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

  The point Jesus was driving home is that we need to break down the walls between us. We are called to love our “neighbors,” which, according to the parable, are those who are racially, religiously, ethnically, and culturally different than we are, and to help them in their need in the most practical way, materially and physically.

  All of this has obvious lessons for the here and now. Our politics is polarized and tribalized. Many Americans view “the Other”—for some, these are refugees, Muslims, and Mexicans; for others, it’s rural southerners, gun owners, and religious fundamentalists—with suspicion and contempt. That combination of suspicion and contempt is eating away at our sense of national unity and runs counter to what Jesus taught.

  Christians can model what it means to reach across the divides that exist in their work settings, in their churches, in their social circles, and in what they say on social media. They can demonstrate tolerance and understanding toward those with different life experiences. They can be intentional about putting themselves in volunteer settings that put them in contact with people who have different political views, skin color, national origins, and class status.

  The way to create a bond between people isn’t sitting across a table from each other talking about bonding; it’s to put them in situations where they’re working shoulder-to-shoulder in pursuit of a common goal, especially a humanitarian one.

  There’s no magic wand we can wave to repair the breach. A nation’s civic and political culture is changed by what we do in our daily lives, in our homes, schools, communities, and houses of worship. And by loving our neighbors we take the most important first step. This is what Jesus calls his followers to do, and what citizenship in twenty-first-century America demands.

  REDEMPTION AND RECONCILIATION

  Five years ago, my friend Steve Hayner mentioned to me that he was going through the Gospel of Luke and was struck again with the grace and embrace Jesus extended to those whom the religious elite had every reason (they thought) to kick to the curb. People on the low rungs of life, including those with frailties and flaws, flocked to Jesus—not because he preached moral rectitude but because he was willing to love them, to listen to them, and to welcome them.

  “I’m sure that many were self-justifying and hardened in their life patterns,” Steve wrote me. But Jesus’s main mission was to convince them of God’s love and invitation. And then he went on to speak about those willing to stand in the middle of the tensions that necessarily attach to faithful living in a broken world.

  “I doubt whether God will have much to say about our political convictions in the end,” Steve said to me, “but I’m quite sure that he will have something to say about how we loved the least, the marginalized, the outcasts, the lonely, the abused—even when some think that they have it all. Political convictions that lead toward redemption and reconciliation are most likely headed in the right direction.”

  This isn’t a prescription for a particular kind of political involvement. It’s certainly not a road map on how to deal with complicated public issues. It is, however, a reflection on how Christians should engage the world, including the political world. There is great wisdom in his insights, and great richness in these words: redemption and reconciliation.

  The successful political-social movement I have in mind will require Christians to make a compelling case for social order and moral excellence, but done with a generosity of spirit, all the while offering a healing touch, especially to those who are suffering and living in the shadows of society.

  It will require Christians to be less fearful and more hopeful, less anxious and more confident that God is sovereign and his purposes don’t ultimately rest on their efforts. Christians engaged in public life should model calm trust rather than panic and vitriol born of anxiety. We are called to be faithful, not successful; to act with integrity, not to become just another special interest group whose worth is measured by its influence on the politically powerful.

  “All admirable,” some of my Christian conservative friends may say, “but just words. Don’t you know we’re under siege by the radical Left and the hostile secular culture? Don’t you realize that if we do not push back, now and hard, we may lose the very liberty to practice and embody the values you celebrate? What you say is fine for ordinary times, but these are desperate times that require desperate measures—such as Donald Trump.”

  I do hear, but I don’t agree. First, because my friends’ fears are simply not justified by facts. Second, because even if the times were desperate, responding with fear and anger and in ways that betray our own teaching will cloud our vision and sabotage our battle. Embracing Trump, whose defining characteristics include dishonesty and exploitation, does not help us. Third, because by letting fear rule, we open ourselves to far too easy manipulation by fearmongers and demagogues, who are expert at scaring up our money and votes for their own profit and power. And fourth, because being political outsiders or even a cultural minority is not something to fear in the first place. Historically, Christianity has done its best work and exerted its greatest influence not from a position of political dominance but while being faithful even from a position of political weakness. For all those reasons, fear, as a basis for Christian politics, is our enemy, not our friend. It is not our weapon; rather it controls us and eventually can consume us.

  “We need a gospel culture as opposed to a political culture,” James Forsyth told me. “Jesus challenges all our categories—political, theological, ethnic, racial, cultural.” He added, “What we need is a humble remapping of cultural engagement.”

  How will that occur? Admonitions offered in good faith may help here and there. In the end, though, it will require a transformation of individual hearts, a reordering of priorities. It will require from people of faith more modesty and less rigid, off-putting certainty. It will require seeing the virtues in our opponents and the shortcomings in our allies and ourselves. And it will require people of faith to see the world through gentler eyes. That isn’t likely to happen unless some inner transformation happens. It has occurred before. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect,” the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans.36

  History has shown that politics can be a more noble enterprise when it is twinned with faith, but only faith properly understood and properly executed. It turns out that this is a good deal easier to get wrong and a good deal harder to get right than I once thought.

  I’m not willing to give up on this linkage, this alliance, at least not yet. But to my coreligionists I would say this: we need to do it right and we need to do it a whole lot better, for the sake of American politics, for the sake of a more just social order, and for the sake of our Christian witness to an increasingly skeptical and jaded world. I may not be certain how we can accomplish what many of us aspire to, but I am confident I know how God and the world will judge whether we are doing it in a way that deserves the label “Christian.”

  Chapter 5

  Why Words Matter

  Suzzallo Library is the main, majestic library located on the campus of the University of Washington, where I attended college. From time to time on Friday and Saturday evenings, when my friends were busy with social activities, I would ensconce myself there, not to focus on homework assignments but rather to listen to speeches by John F. Kennedy.

  I did so often enough that I eventually memorized different JFK speeches—a few in whole, most of them in part: his inaugural address and the one accepting the Democratic nomination in 1960, his “Ich bin ein Berliner” remarks in West Berlin, and the “peace address” at American University, his civil rights address to the nation, and the “We choose to go to the moon” speech at Rice University, his farewell address to the Massachusetts legislature, and more.

  I did this despite the fact that I was a Republican, having cast my first vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Tha
t is less incongruous than it may seem if you take into account that Kennedy was a Democrat when Democrats were much more conservative than today. (On some issues Kennedy ran to Nixon’s right during their presidential contest, including hammering then Vice President Nixon for the “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union, which in fact did not exist.)

  But what appealed to me most was not Kennedy’s political profile. I was certainly taken in part by the elegance and grace, the charm and high culture that characterized the Kennedy presidency. “The Kennedys lit up the White House with writers, artists, and intellectuals,” according to the historian Alan Brinkley, “the famous cellist Pablo Casals, the poet Robert Frost, the French intellectual André Malraux.”1

  But I was primarily caught up in the power and beauty of Kennedy’s words, which captured my imagination and further persuaded me that politics can be a high calling.2 In those years the thing I wanted to be most of all was an advisor to the president who, in one way or another, used words in the service of the nation.

  Two decades later, I was deputy director of presidential speechwriting for George W. Bush during and after September 11, 2001, a moment when presidential words were particularly important—in expressing collective grief and sorrow, in channeling the public’s fear and rage, in creating national unity and tamping down bigotry against Muslims, in explaining to the American people an enemy almost all of them were unfamiliar with (al Qaeda), and in summoning the nation to war.

  The words of a president always matter, but in this case they really mattered. All of a sudden the days of the little-noticed Lincoln Day dinner speech, remarks at a steelworkers picnic, or the National Future Farmers of America speech seemed trivial. When the president addressed a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks, it galvanized the nation. National Hockey League games were halted so players and fans could watch the speech on a video screen. One colleague said it was “a nearly universal American experience.” There was a sense that President Bush’s words were not just for the moment but for history.3

  THE POWER OF WORDS

  Democracy requires that we honor the culture of words. Modern democracies arose as a correction to absolute monarchies and the long human history of “might makes right.” The very idea of democracy is based on the hope that fellow citizens can reason together and find a system for adjudicating differences and solving problems—all of which assumes there is a shared commitment to the integrity of our public words. When words are weaponized and used merely to paint all political opponents as inherently evil, stupid, and weak, then democracy’s foundations are put in peril.

  Words have extraordinary power. Think for a moment how moved you are by the lyrics of your favorite song, by your favorite books and poems, by a letter from a loved one. Words are the means by which we convey our deep emotions and longings, knowledge and understanding, hopes and fears. We use them to teach, to warn, to inspire, to defend truth, to seek justice.

  “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see!” This is how the novelist Joseph Conrad defined his mission as a writer. “That—and no more: and it is everything! If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”4

  The use of words by novelists and politicians is not identical, but the very best politicians use words in some of the same ways novelists like Conrad did—to make us hear, to make us feel, to make us see.

  My belief, which is undoubtedly influenced by my history as a speechwriter, is that we need to understand much better than we do the role of words in the mission of politics. We need to know why using words as weapons against others and against truth is a travesty. We need to recognize why our political culture allowed for the rise to power of Donald Trump, a mendacious propagandist. And we need to offer ideas on what our institutions and we as individuals can do about it.

  Words have long been a treasured part of American political history. It’s telling that when Americans call to mind their greatest presidents, they often think of them not so much for their policies as for their words.

  We think of Thomas Jefferson less as the person who pulled off one of history’s most consequential land deals, the Louisiana Purchase, from which fifteen states, in part or in toto, were eventually created. Instead we recognize him primarily as the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and authored the phrase “All men are created equal.”

  We think of Abraham Lincoln less for the Homestead Act, which opened government-owned land to small family farmers, than for his second inaugural—“With malice toward none, with charity for all”—and the Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

  We think of Franklin Roosevelt less for the Lend-Lease Act, which helped Great Britain and our other allies survive the Nazi offensive, than for saying, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and declaring that December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, was “a date which will live in infamy.”

  John Kennedy is remembered less for his handling of the Cuban missile crisis than for a single line in his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” And many fewer people know the specifics of Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts and 1986 tax reform, which were huge legislative achievements, than know his line “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

  Rhetoric, then, has an important place in the hearts of men and women, as well as in America’s political and social history. Words can articulate and set out national goals, express national resolve, promote healing and understanding, educate the public and explain complicated issues, galvanize a nation behind great causes, and rally a nation in times of war. It was said of Churchill, during the dark days and darker nights when England was under Nazi attack, that he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”5

  The same was true of Thomas Paine, the English-born Enlightenment figure who was a pivotal political theorist and polemicist on behalf of the American Revolution. Paine argued against the British monarchy and for American independence; to that end he produced the most widely read and influential pamphlet of the American Revolution, Common Sense. Paine gave public voice to many private beliefs and galvanized populist and elite opinion in America. He gave words to the case for American independence without which it really might not have happened. And he did so by reaching higher, by connecting events to principles and ideals. John Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”6

  Words can also stir within the hearts of people anger at unrighteousness. Frederick Douglass achieved this during his extraordinary July 5, 1852, speech, which included a searing indictment of America. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass asked. “I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. . . . There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

  A very different approach to indicting a nation’s wrongdoing and shaping its moral sensibilities can be found in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most affecting and influential novels in American history. Upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln reportedly said to her, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” One Southerner said the 1852 novel “had given birth to a horror against slavery in the Northern mind which all the politicians could never have created.”7

  David S. Reynolds’s book Mightier Than the Sword analyzes the enormous impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and shows how it broadened and deepened the public’s revulsion at s
lavery. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was known for his acidic rhetoric and denunciations of those whom he considered to be insufficiently antislavery. The Constitution, Garrison said, was “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”8 Harriet’s brother Henry believed Garrison was well intentioned but lacking in “conciliation, good-natured benevolence, even a certain popular mirthfulness.” According to Henry, “Anti-slavery under [Garrison] was all teeth and claw. . . . It fought. It gained not one step by kindness. . . . It bombarded everything it met, and stormed every place which it won.”9

  Harriet Beecher Stowe took things in a different direction. According to Reynolds:

  The novel’s relatively benign treatment of Southerners was deliberate. Because Stowe wanted the South to change its mind about slavery, she avoided the kind of wholesale demonization of slaveholders she feared might alienate all Southerners. She actually had two Southern characters, Emily Shelby and St. Clare, speak against slavery. By doing so, she felt she could challenge the South’s peculiar institution from within by having some slave owners say that slavery was evil.10

  Reynolds adds, “In fact, her efforts to be compassionate made her seem far more dangerous than virulent abolitionists like Garrison, whose rancorous tone and calls for disunion made him easily dismissable in the South and unpopular even in the North.”11

  Stowe herself wrote to a friend a year and a half after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, saying,

  The effects of the book so far have been, I think, these: 1st. to soften and moderate the bitterness of feeling in extreme abolitionists. 2nd. to convert to abolitionist views many whom the same bitterness had repelled. 3rd. to inspire the free colored people with self-respect, hope, and confidence. 4th. to inspire universally through the country a kindlier feeling toward the negro race.12