DETROIT – Not long ago, I went to see a puppy at a breeder’s home in a quaint little mid-Michigan town called Vermontville. They were nice people who had a huge Let’s Go Brandon flag on their lawn.
Down the street, someone had an illuminated sign on their well-kept front lawn that didn’t bother with code words. It had three words, the first of which began with F. The last two were JOE BIDEN.
That same day, I talked to a woman in her sixties who wakes up every morning, squints at her phone, and tells her spouse something like, “disappointed again. Trump didn’t die during the night.”
How did this country end up this way?
I’ve been covering politics and America as a journalist for almost half a century, and have written books about history, and I can tell you that it wasn’t always like this.
The late Douglas Neckers, a renowned organic chemist with whom I worked on newspaper science columns, once told me he grew up in a fervently Republican family in a small town in New York. As a child during World War II, he loathed “the Japanese, the Germans, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, not always in that order.”
Then, one day he came home from school to find his mother crying. “President Roosevelt is dead,” she said. Baffled, he asked why she was so upset. Didn’t they all hate Roosevelt?
She said through her tears, “yes, but he was our President,” she said. He never forgot that.
More recently, a newly elected President Jimmy Carter turned at his inauguration to outgoing President Gerald Ford, who he had defeated after a close and bitter campaign. “I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land,” he said.
Two years ago, the most recently defeated President refused to even show up for President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Some would argue that this is mostly about one vulgar politician who has broken all records for lying and outrageous personal attacks. But in fact, it started years before him.
Millions of Americans don’t even want much to do with other Americans who are in “the other camp.” I’ve met bewildered people who’ve told me they’ve never even met anyone who voted for Donald Trump. They have, of course, but it is significant that they didn’t think so. How did things come to this?
That’s something we all need to think about. Granted, we’ve had nasty and even violent politics in earlier eras. A congressman from South Carolina attacked U.S. Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the floor of the Senate in 1856, nearly killing him.
Aaron Burr, when he was vice-president of the United States in 1804, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, though that was perhaps more personal than political. There was also that little thing called the Civil War. But somehow, what’s happening now feels worse.
Worse to those of us alive today, anyway, and I think I have some insights as to why. Those leading the nation are still overwhelmingly baby boomers and Generation Xers, people born between 1946 and 1980.
Nearly all boomers had parents shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, shared national experiences in which the nation had common goals, especially during the war. This was followed by the Cold War, in which there was a feeling of common nuclear peril. Everyone in school during the 1950s remembers “duck and cover” drills, in which we practiced getting under our desks in case an atomic bomb suddenly went off in the vicinity.
Nutty, yes. But it was a weird bonding experience, just the same. The saying was “politics stopped at the water’s edge.” The feeling of imminent shared nuclear peril, and the memory of the recent world war, also resulted, I believe, in a respect for our nation’s leaders, especially the President, hard to imagine today.
On top of that, it was a far different media world. Americans in the 1950s and 60s got most of their news from radio and television, and their broadcasts were strongly regulated by something called the Fairness Doctrine. Broadcasters had to air news in some fashion or, at least, air matter deemed to be in the public interest.
Most significantly, contrasting viewpoints had to be aired. Fox news would have had to air liberal rebuttals, for example, and a liberal host like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow would have to had present conservative criticism of anything she said.
There was also no social media; anything aired had to be approved by editors, or, if aired live, spoken by journalists trained to be cautious, fair and balanced.
There was also — at least in public — far more civility. Nobody would have called a President “Crooked Joe,” no matter what they thought of him. Not to mention the other names we’ve heard..
The world is vastly different now. The Fairness Doctrine died in 1987, and some would say fairness died with it.
That may not be completely true. But before we sign off on becoming two permanently hostile cultures, I suggest we remember the probably mythical tale the late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to tell about a young congressman who gave an impassioned speech calling the other party “the enemy.”
Afterwards, Tip took him aside. “Son, they aren’t the enemy. They’re the opposition,” he said.
Whether that ever happened isn’t important. (It was usually told as a joke in which Tip then added, “the enemy is the Senate.)
What matters is that we all stop thinking of other Americans as enemies. If we don’t, our country may well be doomed.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
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