The Demonization of Politics

As the election farce unfolds in Florida, Americans have been indulging in some self-congratulation. They crow that they are taking the bickering in stride. They concede there are rifts, but there is no constitutional crisis, no threat to U.S. democracy. The election will be resolved, one way or the other, and Americans will close ranks behind the new president.

No doubt this is largely true, but the complacency masks a dark, disturbing undercurrent in the electoral fracas. To any objective observer, Vice President Al Gore has been a political combatant attempting to maximize his vote totals through every means available, just as Gov. George W. Bush has been a political combatant using every means at his disposal to prevent the recounts that might add to Gore’s totals. But a good many Republicans officeholders and grass-roots supporters don’t see it that way. To them, Bush is a white knight abiding by the rules, while Gore is a blackhearted villain trying to engineer, in the word of the conservative Weekly Standard, a “coup” by stealing the election.

The rhetoric coming from the two camps hasn’t been comparable. The Democrats’ has been legalistic and political; they are trying to win an election. The Republicans’ has been moral; they are trying to win the crusade they launched against President Bill Clinton and continue against Gore. Democrats are carrying out old-fashioned political attacks in pursuit of advantage. Republicans are playing a new politics of demonization. By these terms, Gore isn’t an opponent to be defeated; he’s a moral cancer to be extirpated.

In part, framing the debate this way accounts not only for the public’s growing willingness to let Bush have his victory--morality seems nobler than political gain--but also for the disparity in the intensity between Gore’s and Bush’s adherents. Though it is Gore supporters in Palm Beach County and elsewhere who should be aggrieved, having arguably seen their votes invalidated either because of a confusing ballot or a peremptory certification by the partisan Florida secretary of state, it is Bush supporters who are manning the picket lines in Florida, shouting at canvassers and flooding call-in-radio-show switchboards.

More, some Republican officeholders, like Montana Gov. Marc Racicot and Rep. J. C. Watts Jr. of Oklahoma have been ratcheting up the hostility by accusing Gore of stealing the election and then threatening to boycott the inauguration should Gore be declared the winner. Republican attack dogs have been overheating the debate with baseless charges, like Matt Drudge’s that the Democrats circulated a secret memo to disqualify overseas ballots (it was a verbatim recitation of Florida election law) or Rush Limbaugh’s that Democrats must “cheat in order to win big.” Although the general public evidently hasn’t been persuaded one way or the other, the demonizers, through sheer volume and venom, have succeeded in co-opting the debate, so that the media have begun portraying Gore as a sore loser rather than as a man who has a legitimate claim to have won the election, if only the votes are fairly and fully counted.

Attacks, of course, have long been standard operating procedure in U.S. politics. Thomas Jefferson was pilloried by his Federalist opponents for everything from his supposed atheism to his having had sexual relations with a slave. Andrew Jackson was accused of bigamy, and John Quincy Adams was said to be a procurer for the czar at the time Adams was posted as U.S. minister to Russia. Abraham Lincoln was so reviled that he had to travel to his own inauguration in the disguise of a Scotsman.

But there is a difference, however subtle, between attacks, which regard an opponent as wrongheaded or flawed, and demonization, which regards an opponent as sinful. The first is an accepted part of political gamesmanship. You denigrate your adversary in the hope that the electorate will think badly of him or her, but once the election is over, there is a basis for compromise, since the attacks have lost their immediate political value. The second is not really political at all; it is fundamentally moral, and it allows for no compromise, since the opponent is not simply misguided but morally blighted and in need of redemption. Or put another way, the first is politics, the second is jihad.

The politics of attack and the politics of demonization have coexisted, but the latter, particularly after the Civil War, was usually marginalized because Americans increasingly sought consensus, not division. The erosion of that marginalization may have begun innocently and ironically enough with the high-minded oratory of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, injected morality into mainstream U.S. political discourse when he set the country on a mission to make the world “safe for democracy.” He wasn’t a demonizer; he saw himself on the side of the angels. But by turning politics into a quasi-religious crusade, he made them safe for morality and unleashed a force that would eventually contaminate the body politic.

What opportunists discovered in Wilson’s wake was the dark side of moralism, viewing politics not as a struggle between good ideas and bad ones but between good and evil. The enablers in this process were frustration and desperation. For 12 years, Republicans festered under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s enormous popularity. So deep and mad was hostility toward Roosevelt that some opponents launched a whispering campaign attributing his paralysis not to polio but to syphilis. But it wasn’t until after his death, and after the beginning of the Cold War, that demonization became the guiding principle for a large faction of the Republican Party--and Roosevelt became, posthumously, the American satan, the man who undermined democracy at home by socializing the state and who facilitated communist domination abroad.

For a party long out of power, this was a potent combination on which to base politics, and postwar Republicans seized it eagerly. Dwight D. Eisenhower may have been the benign face of Republican moderation, but demonization was the party’s pulsing heart--from Richard M. Nixon to Joseph McCarthy to Barry Goldwater. Since demonizers were too extremist to win a national election, the party was poised between conservative pragmatists, who subscribed to the traditional view of politics as a means of advancing policy, and demonizing true believers, who essentially saw the party as a quasi-religious movement that was charged with saving the country from big government and communist perfidy.

As long as the Republicans were in power, these elements maintained a symbiotic alliance. The true believers did the dirty work of questioning Democratic patriotism, softening them for the kill. The pragmatists enabled the party to win elections for which they, in turn, rewarded the true believers with right-leaning policy. It was a neat balance, and it worked. Demonization was such an all-purpose strategy that it operated well into the 1980s, when it was adapted to fit racial and generational politics. Just as one demonized Democrats for handing China over to the Communists, one could demonize them for being soft on crime or for indulging welfare queens or encouraging immorality.

But fundamentalists, uncompromising and indefatigable, make poor partners, and they would eventually hijack the party. Just how total their conquest was could only be fully appreciated with the end of the Cold War and the election of Clinton. Without foreign enemies to demonize, they trained their fire on the new president. Long before Monica S. Lewinsky, he was demonized by mainstream Republicans as a moral contagion who had done everything from killing White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster to arranging Colombian drug deals. Impeachment was the logical culmination of his demonization. It was never about ideas or policy or politics or power. To the demonizers, it was always about sin. Clinton was the devil, Gore his spawn.

That is why there is a close affinity between the religious right and the Republican Party now. They speak the same language, which is the language of moral absolutism rather than political negotiation, and they share the same cosmology. It is also why the voices of demonization overwhelm the voices of reason on cable television and talk radio. Manichean conflict, spun of hate, makes for great TV, certainly better TV than the old consensus that honorable men could actually disagree on policy.

With these cable shows blaring their moralistic cant and with most Republican leaders acting as if a Gore victory would enthrone satan, the forces of demonization aren’t likely to be contained, no matter who wins this election. The well is already poisoned. What we really need isn’t a new president. We need a new national commitment to civility--the civility we lost when opponents became enemies and when politics became holy war.