As is my wont, I was this morning perusing op ed pages of various publications and came across a piece by Michael Smerconish from earlier this week in which he describes what he experienced once he had decided to endorse Obama, with the criticism beginning even before his endorsement was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The piece, entitled Head Strong: Floodgates of criticism spread wide, explains itself with the following subtitle: Republican backed Obama, and the party went wild. It is worth taking the time to read, because it offers an insight to part of what is wrong in the mindset of many in the current Republican party, and should serve as a salient warning to those on the Democratic side who are somewhat too quick to seek to suppress speech with which they disagree, at least within the bounds of Democratic circles.
Below the fold I will explore not only words from Smerconish, but also an insight by an eminent thinker of an earlier generation. Please join me.
The idea of suppression as Smerconish experienced it is non-governmental. The insight from that earlier thinker is about the government and our society, and about dissent and unpopular affiliations in a time of conflict. I think the topics are related.
First, from Smerconish, let me offer the conclusion of his piece. After hving gone through the negative and even hateful expressions he experienced once he announced he was going to support Obama, he does acknowledge that not all of the myriads of responses he received were so negative:
Not all the correspondence I received was hatriolic. There were a few like-minded Republicans who think John McCain has ceded too much ground to the periphery of our party to get elected.
These are the folks I'm hoping are ready to begin a battle for the future of the Republican Party. I want to advance a suburban manifesto as a means of expanding the tent of the GOP. It calls for remaining tough on Islamic fundamentalists while staying out of people's personal lives and rejecting the electoral strategy of using social issues to stoke the base.
There are many of us who were appalled by efforts to have the federal government determine Terri Schiavo's end-of-life plan, who want to find room in our party for pro-life and choice views and believe that what two guys do in their bedroom is their own business. We're tired of the "liberal" or "conservative" labeling game, and find "reasonable" a better descriptor.
Which is why I won't be bullied by the nasty, doctrinaire types who've had a stranglehold on the GOP for far too long. My work is just beginning.
Smerconish remains a Republican, and makes it clear he not only intends to remain a Republican, but that he is committed to reclaiming his party from the extremists whose actions are responsible for the losses suffered in 2006 and that will be encountered in 6 days. Note especially the expression he uses for those extremists, the periphery of our pary, and his recognition that in moving to the extreme of a party one does not win national elections.
We can and should have vigorous discussions of those subjects on which we do not agree. It is healthy for our party, and if we can demonstrate our ability within the party to disagree without becoming disagreeable and resulting to the ad hominen towards one another we will demonstrate to those not of our party that we are more to be trusted with the levers of power that will affect their lives. That is part of the appeal of a Barack Obama, going back to his days heading the Harvard Law Review where those far more conservative than is he found him willing to listen and to hear what they had to say, and to engage in productive conversation. It was on view in his conversation with "Joe the plumber" who is not a plumber. It has been seen in his willingness to work across partisan boundaries. And it is something which should be more common in our polity, so that if he does nothing more than demonstrating to a wider audience how to disagree without being disagreeable he will have vastly improved our civic discourse.
Let me turn to the words of the earlier eminent thinker about which I wrote above the fold. Frank Murphy was a major figure in American politics. As Governor of Michigan he refused to use the National Guard to break the GM strikes in Flint, but worked behind the scenes to bring a peaceable solution to the conflict, thereby greatly advancing the idea of Labor rights at a time when they remained in some doubt. Having previously served as Governor-General and High Commissioner in the Philippines, appointed by FDR, he rejoined the administration as Attorney General and then later was a Roosevelt appointment to SCOTUS. While in the Justice Department he was a strong advocate for civil rights and civil liberty, and I recently came across some interesting words he spoke in 1939. Let me explain how.
I am taking a free course at George Washington Law School being taught by Mark Tushnet of Harvard Law School. One of the books we read, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown by Kevin J.McMahon, has extensive material on Murphy, including on page 148 a quotation from a speech the then Attorney General gave on October 13, 1939, entitled "The Test of Patriotism" and it is that quote I now offer.
The true citizens of America wll remember that loyalty to or tradition of civil liberty is as much a part of patriotism, as defense of our shores and a hatred for treason. He will never forget that civil liberty under the American system is a legal right in time of war as well as time of peace - that, whatever the time, it is liberty for all, irrespective of the accident of birth. The true American will remember that whether it be peace-time or war-time, there could be nothing more unpatriotic in this land of many people and many creeds than the persecution of minorities and the fomenting of hatred and strife on the basis of race and religion. He will realize that if, in the atmosphere of war, we allow civil liberty to slip away from us, it may not be long before our recent great gains in social and economic justice will also have vanished. For a nation that is callused in its attitude toward civil rights is not likel to be sensitive toward the many grave problems that affect the dignity and security of its citiens. We must not let this crisis destroy what we have so dearly won.
It is not just that we are right now more in a time of war than was the America of 1939, although already the Second World War was in its second official month. I find Murphy's words quite appropriate for our time because of his concern for the loss of the gains achieved during the New Deal in social and economic justice. The costs of war and of other crisis, such as the trillion plus we have already committed to our current economic bailout, also jeopardize what is left of the gains in social and economic justice from the Great Society.
And yet, too often people will not only tolerate suppression of unpopular speech and hatred directed towards those of minority faiths, race, and political opinion, they will actively promote it. Clausewitz once described war as the carrying on of politics by other means. Unfortunately too many in our political system have perverted that to make practice of politics as the application of the total destruction of war by other means. If we justify destroying a nation in order to conquer it, then why not destroy the polity in order to "govern" it?
I am a fierce partisan on behalf of causes and candidates warranting my support. I am also a flawed human being who lack total knowledge and has his blind spots. I seek to avoid the arrogance of the one assured that his way is so totally correct that he is justified in trying to totally suppress any expression to the contrary and to crush anyone offering such deviation in thought, word or action from that to which I am committed. I fear that in the fierce context of our political contests too often all of us - and I include myself - become so narrowly focused that we forget our own possible fallibility. And in the process we run the risk expressed so cogently by the American officer in a previous conflict a few decades back, that in order to save the village we had to destroy it.
I do not presume that this diary offers any great insight. I wrote it because I encountered the words of Smerconish which I thought useful, and given the strange workings of my mind recalled the words recently read of Murphy. I thought both sets of words worth sharing, and this diary serves little purpose beyond providing an occasion for doing that.
I am interested in your reactions - to Smerconish, to Murphy, even to my musings. Should you choose to offer them, I will read them, and when possible, engage in further discussion.
In the meantime, I offer this aspiration: that as we seem about to approach meaningful control of our national government that we not repeat the arrogance of the current administration, that no matter how great the crisis we encounter we not seek to use that as an occasion to destroy rather than reach out to our political adversaries nor use it as an excuse to seek to suppress contrary speech and expression. And most of all, that we remember that for all their failures our opponents are still are fellow human beings, and that we not fall so far as to retrace their mistaken steps by engaging in ad hominen attacks.
I strive, even as I fail, to try to live by the words of George Fox, to walk gladly across the earth answering that of God in each man I encounter. Consider that not so much a religious mandate as it is basic courtesy and human kindness. And for all my fierce dedication to causes and champions, I do not want ever to lose sight of our common basic humanity.
Peace.