The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

  20.Glenn Kessler, “A Year of Unprecedented Deception: Trump Averaged 15 False Claims a Day in 2018,” Washington Post, December 30, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/30/year-unprecedented-deception-trump-averaged-false-claims-day/?utm_term=.7e7f004d2ab5.

  21.Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Has Made 6,420 False or Misleading Claims over 649 Days,” Washington Post, November 2, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/02/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/?utm_term=.213ad1363f8b.

  22.Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Has Made More Than 5,000 False or Misleading Claims,” Washington Post, September 13, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/09/13/president-trump-has-made-more-than-false-or-misleading-claims/?utm_term=.4094494f1411.

  23.Thomas M. Wells, “Donald Trump Hired Me as an Attorney. Please Don’t Support Him for President,” Huffington Post, July 31, 2016 (updated August 2, 2016), https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-hired-me-as-an-attorneyplease-dont_us_579e52dee4b00e7e269fb30f?section.

  24.Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” New Yorker, July 25, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all.

  25.Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 357.

  26.Woodward, Fear, 353.

  27.John Wagner, “Anthony Scaramucci: Trump Is Not ‘a Liar,’ as Previously Said. He’s an ‘Intentional Liar’ Who Uses ‘a Methodology of Mistruth,’” Washington Post, October 25, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/anthony-scaramucci-trump-is-not-a-liar-as-previously-said-hes-an-intentional-liar-who-uses-a-methodology-of-mistruth/2018/10/25/8dc3fdc4-d879-11e8-a10f-b51546b10756_story.html?utm_term=.7be978d84116.

  28.Wagner, “Anthony Scaramucci: Trump Is Not ‘a Liar,’ as Previously Said. He’s an ‘Intentional Liar’ Who Uses ‘a Methodology of Mistruth.’”

  29.Just one example of this can be found in an exhaustive New York Times report that showed Donald Trump earned his riches through dubious tax schemes and outright fraud. One of the central narratives of his presidential campaign, that he was a successful and wise businessman, was a massive lie. David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches from His Father,” New York Times, October 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html.

  30.Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” New Yorker, February 27, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds.

  31.Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 88.

  32.Norbert Schwarz, Eryn J. Newman, and William D. Leach, “Making the Truth Stick and the Myths Fade: Lessons from Cognitive Psychology,” Behavioral Science and Policy 2, no. 1 (January 2016), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295478583_Making_The_Truth_Stick_and_The_Myths_Fade_Lessons_from_Cognitive_Psychology.

  33.Brian Resnick, “How Politics Breaks Our Brains, and How We Can Put Them Back Together,” The Atlantic, September 19, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/how-politics-breaks-our-brains-and-how-we-can-put-them-back-together/453315/.

  34.Christine Herman, “Why We Argue Best with Our Mouths Shut,” Christianity Today, May 26, 2017, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/june/why-we-argue-best-with-our-mouths-shut.html.

  35.Herman, “Why We Argue Best with Our Mouths Shut.”

  36.Margaret Hartmann, “How Australia and Britain Tackled Gun Violence,” Intelligencer, October 2, 2015, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/how-australia-and-britain-tackled-gun-violence.html.

  37.“Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 Is . . . Post-truth,” Oxford Dictionaries, November 16, 2016, https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/press/news/2016/12/11/WOTY-16.

  38.“How Journalists Are Rethinking Their Role Under a Trump Presidency,” Diane Rehm, November 30, 2016, http://dianerehm.org/shows/2016-11-30/how-journalists-are-rethinking-their-role-under-a-trump-presidency.

  39.“Remarks by President Trump at the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States National Convention | Kansas City, MO,” White House, July 24, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-veterans-foreign-wars-united-states-national-convention-kansas-city-mo/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top-stories.

  40. Meet the Press, August 19, 2018, NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-august-19-2018-n901986?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top-stories.

  41.Aaron Blake, “‘Facts Develop’: The Trump Team’s New ‘Alternative Facts’-esque Ways to Explain Its Falsehoods,” Washington Post, August 6, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/08/06/facts-develop-the-trump-teams-new-alternative-facts-esque-ways-to-explain-its-falsehoods/?utm_term=.9a059a8166db.

  42.James Poniewozik Tweet (@poniewozik), June 27, 2017, at 6:34 a.m.

  43.Jonathan Lemire Tweet (@JonLemire), June 27, 2017, at 12:34 p.m.

  44.Lili Loofbourow, “Welcome to Trumplandia, Where Feelings Trump Facts,” The Week, October 20, 2016, https://theweek.com/articles/656455/welcome-trumplandia-where-feelings-trump-facts.

  45.Saad, “Military, Small Business, Police Still Stir Most Confidence.”

  46.Frank Newport, “Americans’ Confidence in Institutions Edges Up,” Gallup, June 26, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/poll/212840/americans-confidence-institutions-edges.aspx?utm_source=twitterbutton&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sharing.

  47.Ian Schwartz, “Full Video: Megyn Kelly Interviews Alex Jones,” RealClearPolitics, June 18, 2017, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/06/18/full_video_megyn_kelly_interviews_alex_jones.html.

  48.Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63), Twitter, December 13, 2016, 11:08 a.m., https://twitter.com/kasparov63/status/808750564284702720?lang=en.

  49.For more background on the story, see “About,” Issachar Fund, http://www.issacharfund.org/about/.

  50.David Roberts, “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology,” Vox, May 19, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology.

  51.Roberts, “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology.”

  52.Carroll Doherty and Jocelyn Kiley, “Key Facts About Partisanship and Political Animosity in America,” Pew Research Center, June 22, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/22/key-facts-partisanship/.

  53.Stephen L. Carter, “Torture Report, Rolling Stone and False Dilemmas,” Bloomberg, December 11, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-12-11/cia-torture-report-rolling-stone-and-false-dilemmas.

  54.Michael Barthel and Amy Mitchell, “Americans’ Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Along Partisan Lines,” Pew Research Center, May 10, 2017, http://www.journalism .org/2017/05/10/americans-attitudes-about-the-news-media-deeply-divided-along-partisan-lines/.

  55.Derek Thompson, “Report: Journalists Are Miserable, Liberal, Over-Educated, Under-Paid, Middle-Aged Men—Mostly,” The Atlantic, May 8, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/report-journalists-are-miserable-over-educated-under-paid-middle-aged-men-mostly/361891/.

  56.Margaret Sullivan, “Pro-Trump Media Sets the Agenda with Lies: Here’s How Traditional Media Can Take It Back,” Washington Post, March 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/pro-trump-media-sets-the-agenda-with-lies-heres-how-traditional-media-can-take-it-back/2017/03/11/4f30f768-050a-11e7-b9fa-ed727b644a0b_story.html?utm_term=.c468da1f9027.

  57.Maggie Haberman, “Why I Needed to Pull Back from Twitter,” New York Times, May 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/sunday-review/maggie-haberman-twitter-donald-trump.html.

  58.Jake Tapper, “LA Press Club Remarks,” TapperTumblr, June 26, 2017, http://jak
etapper.tumblr.com/post/162277370571/la-press-club-remarks.

  59.“About Us,” StopFake.org, http://www.stopfake.org/en/about-us/.

  60.Madeleine K. Albright, “We Need 21st Century Responses,” Digital Forensic Research Lab, June 29, 2017, https://medium.com/@DFRLab/we-need-21st-century-responses-6b7eed6750a4.

  61.Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 238.

  62.Vaclav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless (Armonk, N.Y.: Palach Press/M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1985), 64–65.

  63.George Orwell, 1984 (London: Signet Classics, 1977), 81.

  64.Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2009), 211–12.

  Chapter 6: In Praise of Moderation, Compromise, and Civility

  1.James Madison, “The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection: From the New York Packet, Friday, November 23, 1787,” Yale Law School Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp.

  2.Michael Signer, Becoming Madison (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015), 32.

  3.That’s also true of our propensity to divert controversies to the courts, where those who lose cases feel no sense of democratic fairness. That explains in part why abortion is such a contentious issue nearly a half century after Roe v. Wade was decided. The issue was taken out of the hands of the people and turned over to nine justices on the Supreme Court, who issued a sweeping ruling.

  4.Greg Weiner, “Nancy Pelosi’s First Order of Business Should Be to Reclaim the Power of the House,” New York Times, November 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/opinion/sunday/nancy-pelosi-congress-midterms.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage.

  5.Philip Wallach, “The Indispensable Branch,” National Affairs 38 (Winter 2018).

  6.Personal email, March 8, 2018.

  7.Aurelian Craiutu, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

  8.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1:73.

  9.Martin Diamond, “The Revolution of Sober Expectations,” delivered at Independence Square, Philadelphia, in the House of Representatives Chamber, Congress Hall, October 24, 1973.

  10.Harry Clor, On Moderation: Defending an Ancient Virtue in a Modern World (Waco, TX: Baylor Univ. Press, 2008), 5.

  11.Craiutu, Faces of Moderation, ch. 2, 34.

  12.Craiutu, Faces of Moderation, 148.

  13.Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “The Mindsets of Political Compromise,” Perspectives on Politics 8 (2010), https://president.upenn.edu/meet-president/mindsets-political-compromise.

  14.John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 5.

  15.Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, 5.

  16.Jonathan Rauch, “Rescuing Compromise,” National Affairs 17 (Fall 2013), https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/rescuing-compromise.

  17.George Washington, “From George Washington to Lafayette, 7 February 1788,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-06-02-0079.

  18.James Q. Wilson and John J. DiIulio Jr., American Government: Institutions and Policies, 10th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 27.

  19.Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” July 5, 1852, TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/.

  20.Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May–September 1787 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966), xii.

  21.Weber Shandwick, “Civility in America VII: The State of Civility,” June 13, 2017, http://www.webershandwick.com/uploads/news/files/Civility_in_America_the_State_of_Civility.pdf.

  22.Stephen L. Carter, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 24.

  23.Craiutu, Faces of Moderation, 24.

  24.Craig Shirley, “In Defense of Incivility,” LifeZette, July 30, 2015, https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/in-defense-of-incivility/.

  25.Mark Levin, “In Defense of Incivility,” PolitBrew, July 30, 2015, http://politibrew.com/politics/2890-mark-levin-in-defense-of-incivility-this-a-great-levin-segment.

  26.“William Buckley vs. Gore Vidal” (1968), YouTube, August 15, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8.

  27.Andrew Ferguson, “A Buckley Revival,” Weekly Standard, August 3, 2015, http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-buckley-revival/article/996599.

  28.William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York: Vintage, 2003), 364.

  29.Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, 365.

  30.John Buchan, Pilgrim’s Way: An Autobiography (New York: Carroll & Graff Publishers, 1968), 142.

  31.C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Modern Classic, 1955), 194.

  32.Owen Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Barfield Press, 2011), back cover.

  33.Andrew Davison, ed., Imaginative Apologetics (London: SCM Press, 2011), 15.

  34.George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Boston: Harcourt, 1952), 230.

  35.Philip N. Howard et al., “The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012–2018,” Computational Propaganda Research Project, University of Oxford, https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2018/12/IRA-Report-2018.pdf.

  36.Sara Fischer, “The Russian Social Media Disease Spread Beyond Facebook and Google,” December 18, 2018, https://www.axios.com/russia-interference-facebook-google-social-media-99938baa-5333-4666-bb10-7d796bec7830.html.

  37.Robert Pondiscio, “Suing for Civic Education,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute, August 1, 2018, https://edexcellence.net/articles/suing-for-civic-education.

  38.“How to Teach Civics in School,” The Economist, July 6, 2017, https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2017/07/06/how-to-teach-civics-in-school.

  39.“Americans’ Knowledge of the Branches of Government Is Declining,” Annenberg Public Policy Center, September 13, 2016, https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/americans-knowledge-of-the-branches-of-government-is-declining/.

  40.Max Fisher, “Americans vs. Basic Historical Knowledge,” The Atlantic, June 3, 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/americans-vs-basic-historical-knowledge/340761/.

  41.David E. Campbell, Meira Levinson, and Frederick M. Hess, eds., Making Civics Count: Citizenship Education for a New Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2012), 1.

  42.Leszek Kolakowski, “The Idolatry of Politics” (15th Jefferson Lecture), May 6, 1986, https://neh.dspacedirect.org/handle/11215/3767?show=full.

  43.Civics Renewal Network, https://www.civicsrenewalnetwork.org.

  44.“The Case for National Service: A Fellowship Research Project for the Panetta Institute for Public Policy,” Panetta Institute, http://www.panettainstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/National-Service-Report-Final-as-Published.pdf.

  45.William F. Buckley Jr., Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country (New York: Random House, 1990), xxi.

  46.Buckley, Gratitude, 160.

  47.“Better Angels Help Communities Ease Political Tensions,” CBS This Morning, March 26, 2018, available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mLDgtUuK34.

  48.“GPS Web Extra: How Americans Can Unify,” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2017/06/17/exp-gps-0618-blankenhorn-web-extra-reconciliation.cnn.

  49.Gerald F. Seib, “What Duluth Can Teach America About Declining Political Civility,” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-duluth-can-teach-america-about-declining-political-civility-1532961081.

  50.“Speak Your Peace: The Civility Project @ Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation,” Community Foundations, October 20, 2008, available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UpWPDsV-Ww.

  51.Duluth Su
perior Area Community Foundation, “Speak Your Peace: A Civility Project,” http://www.dsaspeakyourpeace.org/index.html.

  52.Seib, “What Duluth Can Teach America About Declining Political Civility.”

  53.Yuval Levin, “Going Local in a Troubled Time,” The Catalyst 11 (Summer 2018), https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/your-town/levin-going-local.html.

  54.Jamil Zaki, “Kindness Contagion,” Scientific American, July 26, 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kindness-contagion/.

  Chapter 7: The Case for Hope

  1.An expanded version of the report was published as a book: William J. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: Facts and Figures on the State of American Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 8.

  2.Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin, “Crime, Drugs, Welfare—and Other Good News,” Commentary (December 2007), https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/crime-drugs-welfare-and-other-good-news/.

  3.The program aired Friday, April 26, 2018.

  4.Karoun Demirjian and Josh Dawsey, “Congress Advances Bill to Renew NSA Surveillance Program After Trump Briefly Upstages Key Vote,” Washington Post, January 11, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-backtracks-after-appearing-to-contradict-his-administrations-support-of-fisa/2018/01/11/5d7f7088-f6d1-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html?utm_term=.fc2c5f77b939.

  5.Patrick Radden Keefe, “McMaster and Commander,” New Yorker, April 30, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/mcmaster-and-commander.

  6.Carol E. Lee, Kristen Welker, Stephanie Ruhle, and Dafna Linzer, “Tillerson’s Fury at Trump Required an Intervention from Pence,” NBC News, October 4, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/tillerson-s-fury-trump-required-intervention-pence-n806451.

  7.Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube, Kristen Welker, and Stephanie Ruhle, “Kelly Thinks He’s Saving U.S. from Disaster, Calls Trump ‘Idiot,’ Say White House Staffers,” NBC News, April 30, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/kelly-thinks-he-s-saving-u-s-disaster-calls-trump-n868961.