gracchusdixit

It has become a cliché to bemoan the polarization of our political life.  Stories abound of tense family dinners, angry exchanges between spouses at opposing ends of the political spectrum, and liberals who refuse to be in the same room with conservatives, or vice versa.  Whatever stock you place in such tales, one thing is certain:  the polarization of our political discourse is not even remotely bipartisan.

For all their flaws, liberals have a long history of tolerating opposing opinions, no matter how vehemently they may disagree with those who hold them.  It was the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire—a quintessential liberal, if ever there was one—who is purported to have proclaimed:  “I wholly disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”  

Whether Voltaire actually uttered those words is neither here nor there.  What matters is that anyone who claims to be a liberal is obliged to defend the right of others to believe what they will and must, to an equal degree, be willing to listen to what they have to say.  The foundational qualities of liberalism, which are reason and tolerance, require that all sides of an argument must be given a fair hearing.

Unfortunately, those on the political right do not share these qualities.  Indeed, they disdain them, preferring to defame opposing arguments with vehemence and venom.  That is because, to conservatives, liberals are not only mistaken but morally wrong, and, worse than wrong, evil.  

There is no liberal or Democratic equivalent of this sort of zealotry.  

There is no liberal equivalent in our history of McCarthyism.  There is no Democratic equivalent of the 20-year-long plot by right-wing ideologues to hound and humiliate Bill and Hillary Clinton.  There is no equivalent on the left of the falsehoods cooked up by conservative conspiracy-mongers to impugn the birth and citizenship of Barack Obama.  No matter what Donald Trump and his surrogates may say about “presidential harassment,” the extreme polarization of our public and political life is in no meaningful sense bipartisan.  It is decidedly one-sided, and it emanates from the right.

The roots of the right-wing extremism that is tearing our country apart go back a long way, to the very founding of our nation, and those roots are deeply connected to religion.  According to our national myth, the Puritans, who made their famously hazardous journey across the Atlantic on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, came to these shores seeking religious freedom, striving to worship God in their own way,  untrammeled by an oppressive king and an established church.

The truth is more complicated.

Only a third of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower were Protestant dissenters, who fled England for religious reasons.  The rest were at best religiously indifferent:  laborers, servants, and farm-hands, destined for voluntary or indentured service, not in what became Puritan Massachusetts, but in decidedly non-dissenting Virginia.  

More to the point, the 30 or so actual Puritans on the leaky and lumbering Mayflower were not solely interested in freeing themselves from religious persecution; they wanted the freedom to impose their own theology on everyone else.  They fled England to escape a civil society that refused to let them have their way.  The Puritans, in fact, were bigots and religious zealots, and the zealotry they bequeathed to us has poisoned our politics from the day they set foot on Cape Cod.

Indeed, the word “Puritan” says it all.  Central to their beliefs was the millenarian fantasy that the end of the world was just around the corner, and, when the Day of Judgement arrived, only the morally “pure” would survive.  Thus, their world was starkly divided between between good and evil, between the pure and the impure, between those destined for salvation and those doomed to damnation, i.e., the rest of us.

This kind of thinking did not stop with the Puritans, not is it limited to their evangelical heirs and descendants.  The  intellectual founder of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley, was a die-hard Roman Catholic, who abominated the secularism of the academy, bewailed the ecumenism of Pope John XXIII, and cast the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union as an existential moral struggle.  To Buckley, being a communist or even a socialist was not only treasonous but sinful.

When Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” adopting the language of eschatological theology to describe a geopolitical rivalry, he was treading in Buckley’s footsteps.  When George W. Bush cooked up the phrase, “axis of evil,” to demonize Russia, North Korea, and Iran, he was doing the same.  

That right-wing ideologues have fastened on Iran as their particular bête noire is deeply ironic, because Iran’s religious leaders are no less fanatical.  All the while our present-day Puritans decry the Iranians as “evil,” Iran’s Puritans call us “the great Satan”.  

The problem is that such nonsensical talk does little to clarify or resolve the actual issues that divide our two countries, which are diplomatic, political, and economic, rather than moral, let alone theological.   

There is yet another aspect of right-wing fanaticism in the United States that derives directly from the toxic religiosity of the Puritans—the idea of perpetual victimhood.  For decades, Republicans have reveled in the notion that they are a beleaguered minority, even when they have controlled all three branches of government.   Fundamentalists wail against attacks on their religious freedom, even as they enjoy unrivaled privileges and protections.  Conservatives in general would have us believe that they are the helpless and innocent victims of an insidious and overpowering liberal plot, fomented by left-wing academics and journalists, even as they and their immensely rich backers expand their control over the levers of power. 

This self-serving trope mirrors the story that lies at the heart of Christianity itself—a story that exalts persecution, torture, and death over life, reason, and compromise; a myth that equates victimhood with virtue; a dangerous delusion that casts every political argument as a winner-take-all struggle between “good and evil,” between victims and their oppressors, rather than a simple disagreement between equal citizens, who have different views about the future.

If we ever hope to restore reason and compromise to our public discourse, then we must be prepared to cast aside such fairy tales and to reject the forces of unreason.  Chief among those forces is the unrelenting religiosity of those on the political right.