What Does Lowering the Political Temperature Look Like?

A couple recent essays offer a diagnosis of the problem, and some helpful first steps.

The more we learn about the shooter in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the more it appears all the partisan finger-pointing we’ve heard since the moment it went down has been misplaced. There’s not much information thus far suggesting that the young man who pulled the trigger had been politically radicalized. What has been unearthed is a history of being bullied, and indications that he felt lost and isolated — characteristics we’ve come to associate more closely with school shooters.

Regardless, I think we’re in desperate need of a serious, long overdue discussion on the topic of our increasingly nasty political discourse. It’s escalated beyond reason over the last 15 years or so, without any sign of relent, and it’s undeniably led to other incidents of violence. I suspect however that the window of opportunity for that conversation, in the wake of the Trump shooting, is quickly closing (as it always does at such times after a few days of relative sobriety). Before it’s shut entirely, maybe we can at least acknowledge the fairly recent history that led us to this point, along with why it’s so difficult to go back to viewing our political rivals as wrong rather than evil.

National Review’s Noah Rothman wrote an excellent piece on the matter that includes concessions people on both sides should make if they are serious about pursuing a good-faith understanding of the other side’s perspective:

“Americans on the political right have spent the better part of a decade being lectured to about their side’s penchant for political violence while, in their justified perception, the violence was being disproportionately meted out against them by their adversaries,” he writes. “They have every reason to resent that dynamic.”

Rothman offers as examples the 2016 assault on Trump supporters in Costa Mesa, California, and assaults on police outside Trump events in New Mexico and Chicago. He points to the shockingly scant media coverage of the congressional baseball-practice shooting in 2017, carried out by a deranged Bernie Sanders fan who targeted Republicans. He talks about the 2020 summer riots, and how many in the media made excuses for the political violence because they deemed the cause to be just.

Regarding the other side, Rothman writes, “While partisans on the Left seem utterly incapable of seeing the violence directed at the American Right as an outgrowth of their failure to observe prudence and propriety, the Right is just as capable of talking themselves out of seeing their own incitements. They absolve [Donald Trump] of his responsibility for violence. He promises to ‘pay for the legal fees’ incurred by his supporters who ‘knock the crap’ out of attendees, and they look the other way when his fans go and do just that. They don’t reckon with the instigations that culminated in a mercifully unsuccessful mail-bombing campaign targeting Trump critics in the press. They have argued themselves into exonerating the former president for his role in the provocations that produced the attack on the Capitol.”

“Neither side in this drama can countenance their roles in this escalating series of horrors,” Rothman adds. “Few even remember which aggravation or insult inaugurated our slide into the abyss, of which the latest episode of violence and terror is only a reprisal for the last. Events like Saturday’s beget a few half-hearted hours of reflection on the reckless state of modern political rhetoric, but whatever resolve those moments produce dissolves into an ocean of recriminations from partisans who decry the false moral equivalence in observing that both sides of the American political spectrum are increasingly acclimated to violence.”

Of course the problem isn’t entirely organic. Media partisans and provocateurs throw gasoline on the flames at every opportunity, feeding their audiences a steady diet of outrage that keeps the addicts coming back for more. It’s a tried-and-true revenue model that many livelihoods depend on. The same is true for many elected leaders whose party-primary victories hinge on their celebrity status and how angry they can appear at the other side on television and online.

How do we get past the cycle, or at least even out the steering wheel a bit? Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute presented an essay of his own that offers what I believe is very sound advice:

If you want to fix the political rhetoric and violence, focus on policing your own side rather than lecturing the other side.

Both parties have enough examples of irresponsible rhetoric and even violence to surrender all moral authority to lecture the other side. And debating which side is worse is a pointless waste of time that solves nothing.

Neither party has the credibility or the influence to lecture the other. But we do have the ability, the power, and the authority to better police our allies. Stop rewarding, retweeting, and re-electing our side's worst demagogues. Deprive the demagogues of the attention and votes that give them money and power, and that encourages copycats. Don't let their toxicity filter down to us. Maintain your values and views, but amplify those who express and support them constructively. Take off your partisan warpaint and seek common ground instead. You might even find that your side turns off fewer independents and becomes more popular.

Your allies will listen to your opinion much more than the other side will. And don't lecture another house until you clean up your own.

Bernie Goldberg and I take a fair amount of heat from some of our readers for our willingness to point out bad, reckless conduct from the Right (in addition to the Left). The charge is that by doing so, we are offering “aid and comfort” to the other side. Some even suggest it makes us “liberals”, or at minimum sufferers of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Such accusations crumble easily under objective scrutiny, but they’re still worth addressing. The two of us have long argued that our country’s escalating political vitriol has become increasingly dangerous. Pretending it’s not a problem on both sides, or that “their” behavior justifies “ours”, does nothing to address the issue. In fact, those who subscribe to such sentiment are only worsening the problem.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in being part of the problem. Legitimate criticism of our elected leaders is good and even necessary. Rabid vitriol and vilification isn’t. Right and wrong is far more important to me than Right and Left, and I think if more people saw things that way (or at least prioritized principles over partisanship), our country would be in far better shape.