By Jim Heffernan
I’m not sure why I did not read this book three years ago when I first bought it. Maybe I was caught up in tribalism and thought a book by an avowed conservative was unworthy. I was wrong to ignore the book and the valuable message it carries with it.
Peter Wehner is a journalist who spent 35 years of his life in Republican White Houses with Reagan and both of the Bushes. Tribalism once made me avoid anyone with the “conservative” label, but lately I’m wondering if I might be one.
Here’s a quote from the book that I think defines the proper place for politics in any country. I feel we are moving away from that place.
“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. […] Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”
He begins the book in a nostalgic vein, remembering when politics was a noble, aspirational calling. He explains how our politics mainly arose from the thinking of Aristotle, John Locke, and Abraham Lincoln.
At our highest point, our politics truly made us a “shining city on the hill” that guaranteed freedom and the pursuit of happiness to everyone. That was before the “politics of contempt” took over and exploited the anxieties of the voting population; before the popularity of “government is not the solution, it’s the problem” sentiment.
Our government’s direction is frightening, but it’s not irreversible. The cure is not easy and it will not happen unless “we, the people” do it for ourselves. It will not happen until we become, all of us, better citizens. It will mean returning to old habits of morality, moderation, compromise, and civility. We will need to find that lost set of facts that we can agree on. We need to stop manufacturing facts to suit our arguments.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I do believe it chipped away at a harmful, tribal belief I’ve held for decades, liberalism=good, conservatism=bad.
I’ll close with an excerpt from page 60.
“One kind of political culture takes the fate and equality of each human person to heart; another sees humans as expendable or of differing worth. One political culture attempts to hold its leaders to account for decisions affecting even the weakest; another regards might as right. One kind of political culture teaches an ethic of responsibility; another promotes dependency.
Every generation has to decide whether it will continue America’s noble experiment in ordered liberty or allow the foundation our ancestors built to fracture. Today we are witnessing cracks forming and spreading, due in part to a president who delights in demonization, who himself embodies an ethic of cruelty and selfishness, and whose corruptions are borderless.”
Available at Cloud and Leaf Bookstore, Manzanita and Tillamook County Library. 267 pages, (30 notes and acknowledgments), published June 4, 2019
As always, discussion welcome at codger817@gmail.com