“When did we as a country lose the ability to debate calmly and find common ground in order to solve problems? Was it one big event or a series of them?”
I saw this question on Twitter as an inquiry to the wonderful Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station, maybe the most intelligent blog site I’ve seen yet. Wright is retired from a career as a Navy warrant officer, and he seems to understand as well as anyone the problems we currently face in America.
I’ve written about this before, and some of the things he says are similar. The growth of the Religious Right, the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine, Citizens United, the fact that people stopped reading, the rise of hate radio.
All that is true, but maybe the biggest factor that’s often overlooked is the vulgarization of politics by Newt Gingrich in the early ’90s. He wrote a lengthy memo for candidates, urging words to use when describing opponents. Words like sick, weak, demented, indecisive and a host of others.
With the help of the Contract on America — yeah, I know — Republicans won control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40-plus years and elected Newt speaker of the house. With the help of Rush Limbaugh and the others on AM talk radio, the whole country was getting the message.
And there were so many issues and occurrences over the next 10-15 years that were divisive. Waco and David Koresh, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Clinton impeachment, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War and oddly enough, the election of Barack Obama.
The last was highly ironic. The U.S. deserved great credit for being the first democracy to choose as its leader a member of a minority group making up less than 15 percent of its population. Of course, even before Obama became president, racists were spreading pictures of him as a monkey or of the White House lawn planted with watermelons.
And the common ground got smaller and smaller.
In 2009, Obama’s first year in office, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and his greatest goal was to make Obama a one-term president.
Smaller and smaller.
In 2016, McConnell refused even to consider Obama’s Supreme Court nomination. And later, he called that his proudest accomplishment.
Was there any common ground left at all?
In 2020, during the vice presidential debate, incumbent Mike Pence displayed an outrageous level of gall when he threw Daniel Moynihan’s quote from the ’80s at Democrat Kamala Harris:
“You are entitled to your own opinions. You are not entitled to your own facts.”
It may not be entirely accurate to call that a lie, but it’s an implied one. Pence used the line to deny something Harris had said that was true. Calling it a lie is dishonest in itself.
Just like Trump saying anything bad about him is “fake news.”
The thing is, there’s a purpose in attacking truth as a lie.. Trump himself has admitted he uses the tactic so that when someone reports something bad about him as true, his supporters won’t believe it.
Of course, that’s the real reason there is no common ground.
We don’t occupy the same truth.