The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

  These nine rules for civility had such resonance that the Duluth public schools developed a curriculum that implemented them. Years after the initiative was started, people testified that there was a markedly positive change in the political climate, and the community followed that lead.

  The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib reports that Duluth’s mayor, Emily Larson, credits the civility project for helping the city work through an emotional two-year debate over a new ordinance requiring employers to offer paid sick leave, which was adopted in May 2018.

  Mayor Larson told Seib, “To me, civility is about truly listening.” By actually listening, she says, people discover they have some common ground, which “lays the groundwork for the next conversation.” According to Seib, “Duluth’s experience is worth a look, if only because it shows that such a slide [toward mob violence] is neither inevitable nor unstoppable.”52 This kind of effort can be replicated in pretty much every community in America.

  Both Better Angels and Speak Your Peace are examples of what public intellectuals like David Brooks and Yuval Levin refer to as constructive localism, which they believe offers the best way out of our current predicament.

  The basic argument they make is that our national politics is deformed, the federal government is paralyzed and distrusted, and state and local governments are where much of the action is, where greater mutual trust resides, and where most of the solutions are to be found.

  At the local level it’s far easier to experiment and try innovative approaches (like charter schools) that are tailored to the needs of local communities. It’s also in local communities that you deal with others person-to-person. As a result, politics is less distant, less impersonal, and therefore more humanizing. Nor is it filtered through hyperpartisan media outlets that have a ratings interest in keeping Americans in a constant state of agitation and rage. Local politics and civic engagement draw people out of their partisan silos. And if you believe, as I do, that one of the major problems facing America today is isolation and alienation, the loss of human connection and loving attachments, then the answer by definition has to be local. There’s a human touch found at the local level that is impossible to replicate at the national level.

  “A more interpersonal and local politics is . . . likely to be more civil more of the time,” according to Levin, “lowering the temperature of our public life and enabling more accommodation than could be possible on the vast and impersonal scale of national political debates.”53

  This isn’t to argue that national politics isn’t important or that there are not some problems that only the national government can combat. But it is to argue that repairing our broken national politics begins with each of us being more involved in local politics and community service, an option that is available to almost all of us. It’s a bottom-up approach that over time can change the political landscape of a nation.

  You may feel largely powerless to change politics in Washington, DC, but you’re not powerless to change politics where you live—in McLean, Virginia, or Pueblo, Colorado; in Richland, Washington, or Glendale, Arizona; in Bridgeport, Connecticut, or Huntsville, Alabama; or in any of the three thousand counties and twenty thousand cities across America.

  You’re certainly not powerless to connect with and serve the people in your neighborhood—to become exposed to their worlds, to find out more about their lives, to listen to their perspectives, to learn from their experiences, and to lend a helping and healing hand.

  And you’re certainly not powerless to model civility, temperance, humility, tolerance, honesty, compassion, decency, and grace in your home life and at work, in your relationships with your spouse and children, at the board meeting and the dinner table. The family in particular is the incubator of civic manners and civic virtues. The kind of people we are—our values, beliefs, and moral sensibilities; what we learn to love and what we learn to loathe—are largely shaped by our families, friends, classmates, and colleagues. We bring those things to politics; that’s the stage on which they often play themselves out.

  Many years ago a friend told me that if you find yourself overwhelmed by the mess in your room, the best thing to do is to pick up the pile of clothes at your feet. You can’t clean up everything at once, but if you clean up the things right in front of you, one at a time, over time the room will become organized and orderly.

  The great challenge for a book like this is that its greatest reach may be with people who least need to hear its message. The political entrepreneurs and social provocateurs who win profit and promotion by demeaning politics and coarsening discourse are not going to be swayed by a book like this.

  But modern psychology and ancient wisdom both show that the effect of example can be profound. One such example was set by a prophet from Nazareth many years ago, and there have been many since.

  Jamil Zaki, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, uses tools from psychology and neuroscience to examine empathy, altruism, and social influence. His findings show that witnessing kindness inspires kindness, causing it to spread like a virus. “The battle between dark and light conformity likely depends on which cultural norms people witness most often,” he writes.

  Someone who is surrounded by grandstanding and antagonism will tend towards hostile and exclusionary attitudes herself. Someone who instead learns that her peers prize empathy will put more work to empathize herself, even with people who are different from her. By emphasizing empathy-positive norms, we may be able to leverage the power of social influence to combat apathy and conflict in new ways. And right now, when it comes to mending ideological divides and cultivating kindness, we need every strategy we can find.54

  If each of us inspires or moves one or two or three other people to give politics—real politics, not just political theater—a second chance, to think twice before sending that inflammatory tweet, or to listen and question instead of jumping to disagree, then there will be millions among us. We don’t need to transform everyone’s behavior or temperament (something no conservative would ever want to attempt, by the way). Reach the movable middle, and the country and the culture will move with it.

  The task of citizenship in America today is not simply to curse the political darkness but to light candles. This can be done one person at a time, in your neighborhood and city, at a homeless shelter and a school board meeting, at neighborhood gatherings and city councils, and in countless other settings. And it can be done starting tomorrow.

  What are we waiting for?

  Chapter 7

  The Case for Hope

  In 1993 I helped prepare a report, “The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators.” Issued by William J. Bennett, it quantified and analyzed social trends over a thirty-year period from 1960 to 1990.

  Over the course of those three decades, the United States had indeed experienced substantial social regression. There had been a more than 500 percent increase in violent crime; a more than 400 percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than seventy points in SAT scores.

  The report’s conclusion was inescapable: “The forces of social decomposition are challenging—and in some instances overtaking—the forces of social composition.”1

  For my part, I believed that if those trends weren’t reversed, they could lead to the decline and maybe even the fall of the republic—and frankly I wasn’t all that hopeful that America would turn things around, at least in the short run and absent something like a new religious Great Awakening.

  I embraced what at the time was a central conservative tenet: our social problems were linked to a broader cultural collapse, and unless and until we repaired things at the deepest cultural level, we could not really hope to reverse these downward social trends. Culture is upstream from politics, it was (and still is) said; if the culture has decayed, politics can’t hope to repair the damage. The report cite
d the words of Samuel Johnson: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”

  But something happened along the road to Gomorrah and the collapse of our culture. Most things started to get better, and many things got much better.

  A Commentary magazine essay I coauthored in 2007 documented significant progress in the areas of crime and violent crime, drug use, welfare dependency, the rate and total number of abortions, teen sexual activity and births, smoking and binge drinking, and education scores.2 Surprisingly, the storm clouds, rather than bursting, began to part.

  Were we wrong to be so worried about the state of the nation? I don’t think so; the negative statistics corresponded to very real instances of human misery and struggle. But many of us underestimated the ability of good governance and the will of the American people to reverse these trends. The improvements were the result of long-overdue changes in both government policy and public attitudes, with each sustaining and feeding the other. One could only come away impressed by the enduring power of policy, properly understood, to influence culture and make things better, often faster than we imagine. There is a reason Americans have traditionally looked to government to solve many of our biggest problems.

  THE DESPAIR TEMPTATION

  “Isn’t he making politics fun again?”

  So said Sebastian Gorka about his former boss, President Trump, during a stint as guest host for Salem Radio’s Dennis Prager.3

  Mr. Gorka, the former Breitbart editor who worked in the Trump White House for several months as a deputy assistant to the president, was celebrating that Donald Trump was making politics an entertainment show, having moved us away from what he and others considered the staid, tedious, dull politics of previous eras. Discussions about the need to reform entitlement programs and the merits and demerits of a premium support system for Medicare were out; now in were tweets like those attacking Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “WITCH HUNT” and “SPYGATE”; “fake news” networks like CNN and MSNBC, which the president deemed “enemies of the American people”; journalists like “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd” of NBC and “Crooked H [Hillary Clinton] flunkie” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times; and NFL players kneeling for the national anthem.

  The rise of Donald Trump corresponds with the rise, especially on the right, of the politics of performance and theatrics, of drama and melodrama, of reality television and the World Wrestling Federation. Political personalities who not that long ago acted as if they were members of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith—which in the past called for excommunication for any Republican who deviated one iota from what they considered conservative orthodoxy—became utterly bored with policy discussions. For them, Mr. Trump was great for business. Pass the popcorn.

  A man utterly indifferent to the craft of governing, Mr. Trump has shown time and time again that he doesn’t have even an elementary understanding of his own administration’s policies.

  One example: in January 2018, the Republican-controlled House was about to vote on legislation to reauthorize the government’s authority to conduct foreign surveillance on US soil. The intelligence community considers the program—known as Section 702, named for its place within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act that established it in 2008—to be its key national security surveillance tool, and the Trump administration had been supportive of it. But the morning of the vote, President Trump saw a segment on Fox & Friends disparaging the program and sent out a critical tweet, causing chaos and confusion among Republicans in Congress.

  “The president was seemingly misinformed about the nature of the vote and the substance of the bill,” according to the Washington Post.4

  Republican support for the program began to crater. Panicked White House aides reached out to Speaker Paul Ryan, who had to walk Mr. Trump through its details. Ninety minutes later, a second tweet was sent out in the president’s name walking back the first tweet, this time pushing for the act to be renewed.

  According to the Post, when President Trump issued his second tweet, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy handed his phone to the bill’s sponsor, Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, who in turn read the tweet aloud to the GOP conference, “calming lawmakers’ nerves.” (I was told by a high-ranking member of Congress that the second tweet was sent in the president’s name but that he was unaware of it. The tweet was actually sent by President Trump’s then chief of staff John Kelly.)

  The law eventually passed, but what should have been a routine vote was thrown into disarray because the president was clueless about vital legislation supported by his own administration. And this was hardly the first time the president demonstrated such willful ignorance. Friends of former national security advisor H. R. McMaster report that after providing many briefings to President Trump, McMaster concluded that “the guy wasn’t absorbing a f ****** thing.”5 According to multiple sources, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson referred to Mr. Trump as a “moron.”6 And John Kelly has referred to the president as an “idiot” on multiple occasions, according to several people who claim to have witnessed the comments. (NBC News reported that Kelly portrayed himself to Trump administration aides as “the lone bulwark against catastrophe, curbing the erratic urges of a president who has a questionable grasp on policy issues and the functions of government.”)7

  After a series of meetings and phone calls with high-ranking officials, a Republican who deals regularly with the Trump administration confided in me about his frustration. “The dysfunction in this White House just knows no bounds,” he said. At some point that level of dysfunction catches up to the president—and to the country.

  That Donald Trump would oversee a dysfunctional White House should have come as news to exactly nobody. But it’s not enough to lament that we ended up with a president who is indifferent to governing and unknowledgeable on policy; we need to take a step back and understand why such a thing happened.

  Much of the explanation is the near-total collapse of trust in the governing class and political establishment.

  The most common explanation for this is that the unstated promise to the public was that this elite, if given power, would govern with proficiency, expertise, and skill. The nation would run like a well-oiled machine operated by those who were only too eager to advertise their superior intelligence and ability. But instead, over the last half century we have experienced wars and military interventions gone awry, financial crises, social divisions, and political scandals. They accumulated, one after another, like weights on a scale.

  The most significant events were the Vietnam War—not just the failure of the war effort but the lies that accompanied it—and Watergate, a political scandal that brought down an American president. Those were crushing blows from which the federal government has never fully recovered. But there have been many other failings since.8 From the perspective of the public, these failures melded together into a sweeping, searing indictment of government. Things had gone badly off track, and those in charge were responsible.

  National polls have tracked this decline in confidence. Polling evidence shows that trust in the federal government nose-dived from 1965 to 1980. Since then, those numbers have fluctuated, but trust in government is now dramatically below what it was in the middle of the twentieth century. By the 2016 election, we were in the midst of the longest period of low trust in government since the question was first asked in the late 1950s, with no more than about 30 percent having expressed trust in the government in Washington at any point over the last decade.9

  By 2016 we reached an inflection point: only about two in ten Americans trusted the national government, while eight in ten expressed feelings of either frustration or anger with it. Many Americans, furious with the mounting failures and deeply unhappy with the “establishment” candidate (Hillary Clinton), decided it was time to overturn the apple cart. Trust had been breached for long enough. They were mad as hell and weren’t going to take
it anymore.

  The error they made was allowing their disenchantment to overwhelm their good judgment and embrace a fraud. Tens of millions of Americans thought the right response, after giving the middle finger to the establishment, was to first nominate and then elect as president a rank amateur, a businessman who had declared multiple bankruptcies, a person who proudly advertised his ignorance and promised that he could quickly and easily solve the problems facing the country.

  This was a failure of citizenship. Instead of demanding more from their elected leaders and more realism from themselves, a lot of Americans went in the opposite direction. They decided the proper response to failure was to promote to the presidency a man who was manifestly unequipped—intellectually, temperamentally, psychologically, and from his life experience—to govern. We now face the task of correcting that mistake, which requires us to rethink things; to reenvision politics and remind ourselves of its deep and true purpose, which is to solve public problems.

  THE POPULIST TEMPTATION

  As we’ve seen, trust in government, at least at the federal level, is near all-time lows. And that’s not only because of high-profile failures; it’s also because much of what government does on a daily basis is inefficient, clumsy, uncoordinated, and wasteful.

  In his book Why Government Fails So Often, former Yale professor Peter Schuck, a sober, thoughtful scholar on the practice of government—he refers to himself as a “militant moderate”—argues that “the federal government does in fact perform poorly in a vast range of domestic programs.”10 He believes the gap between the goals of government and the amount we spend on it is enormous; that government almost never achieves what it promises; and that the problems are “large, recurrent, and systemic.”11 According to Schuck, “Less than 1 percent of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence of cost-effectiveness.”12