Muzzled (8 page)

But I would argue that this period of American history, with its politically correct silences—its widely felt fear of saying the wrong thing—is at strong odds with a tradition of great debate that has historically defined national politics. The history of the United States has been consistently highlighted by a series of essential political debates. From the founding of the country through the Civil War, the Great Depression, two world wars, several cultural revolutions, and the war on terror, robust political discourse in this country has fundamentally shaped and reshaped our lives.

Perhaps the most singular characteristic of the United States’ brand of political discourse is its free-flowing, full-throated, even raucous nature. It is far from a polite exchange of ideas. Read through American history and the narrative is defined by debate that is loud, often harsh, straightforward, and frequently personal. The critical debates of the past have been spurred on by politicians who put their arguments, even the effectiveness of their speaking styles, without speechwriters or consultants, up for public judgment. Political careers grew from the power of winning debate. With the leading
political lights in the game shining their insights and their words on these debates, other public figures, academics, and business and civic leaders found themselves drawn to the national conversation. Further urgency came from newspapers fanning the flames to increase sales.

Despite the changing nature of the media, the basic recipe for the best of American political debate has not changed all that much since the nation’s founding. What has changed is our fear of political correctness. It has replaced the best that we have to offer—robust, honest debate—with hushed tones. Those silences are punctuated by a scatter shot of politically fragmented sound bites, usually from extreme and angry voices. The result is that the media makes more news out of fewer crumbs of competing points of view because the genuine substance of modern political debate is so meager, so hard to find. After the massacres at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and Tucson, and daily reports on drive-by shootings, how can there not be a major debate over access to automatic weapons? The answer is that it is too risky—it is too politically incorrect—given the power of the NRA and gun lobby and the extreme fear on the Right that the Left’s ultimate goal is to ban all guns. The result, in combination with the rise of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, is a media feeding frenzy whenever any major political figure touches on the issue, because the media has so little to chew on. News programs are often reduced to speculation, provocative statements, and opinion masquerading as news because that’s all they have to work with. There are exceptions, like Representative Carolyn McCarthy of New York (whose husband was killed and son wounded in the Long Island Rail Road shooting of 1993), who
has introduced legislation aimed at reducing the ammunition capacity of gun clips. But it’s sad that people like her, who are willing to forcefully advance a position, are the exception and not the rule.

Instead, the modern political dialectic has largely been reduced to winks and whispers. The Federalist Papers and the Lincoln/Douglas debates have been replaced by slogans and talking points and negative ads and, even worse, by warring Facebook posts and YouTube “gotcha” moments. Major politicians, guarded by cautious, highly paid advisers, avoid the risk of honest debate and, even more, the risk of agreeing when an ideological opponent makes a good point.

It is no surprise that this current paradigm for political discourse results in extreme partisanship. There is a lot of money invested in keeping the ideological divide wide and deep.

Direct-mail fund-raising aimed at people with single-issue concerns such as abortion or gun control came of age during the 1980s and 1990s, and it has continued to make a lot of people rich to this day. Newsletters, blogs, radio programs, conventions, and paid speeches shower big money on true believers and on the people holding political power. As Representative Gabrielle Giffords said before she was shot in the head by a crazed gunman, there is a lot of financial and political reward for being extreme and almost none for a politician willing to compromise. All the attention and money goes to elected officials who engage, she said, in “outlandish and mean behavior.… You get no reward for being the normal, reasonable person.” With the money going away from people willing to defy political correctness and talk to one another, listen to one another, there are now huge financial obstacles
to anyone attempting to bring opposing camps together for rational discussions on key issues.

There may be a silent majority of moderates in America, but they are moving from silent to muzzled in a hurry for lack of money. It is the rare voice that is given a radio program or wins election to office who voices moderate views in America. If the 1990s witnessed the beginning of a schism in the electorate, then the 2000s saw it grow into full maturity. As we look at this game, the question is how anyone’s voice can be heard above these well-funded megaphones available to anyone who conforms to the new rules of political engagement and discourse, where partisanship is rewarded while rationality and moderation are penalized and ignored.

In the last decade, I would argue that the national political conversation has been paralyzed by factions of political correctness. There has been little real movement on resolving critical national issues or even defining those issues. The best-known players in this nonconversation are a new class of political figures. Impish, venting archpartisans have created a subculture of celebrity provocateurs who make outlandish statements to grab attention, entertain, and mock but rarely advance the nation’s critical debates. As we’ll see in subsequent chapters of this book, from national security to entitlements to immigration to social issues, the strategy time and again is to heighten the conflict and widen the divides in this country. Today’s most revealing political discussions tend to happen in a vacuum; people talk only to “the base” and preach to an already like-minded audience. That is why it became major news when, as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama talked—behind closed doors—of economically frustrated, small-town
Americans who are holding fast to their guns and God. There are reasons why this is a bold comment and one worthy of discussion. Why didn’t we have an honest and thorough debate about it? Well, because it’s a fine thing for a Democrat to say in San Francisco behind closed doors, but it’s too risky outside of those confines for fear of a talk-radio pummeling or a blue-collar revolt. So rather than be bold, our politicians shrink from challenging themselves or the electorate.

As a result, we have rival camps that resort to spying on each other. That is why groups like Media Matters track and report with alarm what right-wing talk radio hosts are saying to their right-wing audiences. We’ve forgotten how to say what we think in front of a broader, more diverse audience, to hold an honest dialogue and debate key issues in a frank and solution-focused manner. While previous political debates in U.S. history were hardly models of civil and well-mannered discussion, more often than not they produced real results—they solved problems for better or worse.

Compare that to the last session of the U.S. Senate, historically America’s greatest debating society, an arena reserved for leading political minds from every state who, ideally, personify the qualities implicit in the honorary title of “statesman.” The 111th Congress saw the most filibusters in American history. Once a rarely used exception to Senate rules, the threat of the filibuster has become the way to stop any debate from taking place. There is little if any value to twenty-first-century debate because parliamentary maneuvering—the filibuster—has become the primary tool for closing debate and blocking legislation. Members of Congress are elected to identify, debate, and resolve problems, aren’t they? To serve their constituents
within the framework established by the Constitution? The filibuster was created to allow a principled politician to act on conscience and stand tall in opposition to a runaway majority. Today’s cavalier use of the congressional filibuster is the exact opposite. It requires a total lack of conscience, a celebration of impeding the Senate’s, and thus Congress’s, ability to function.

How can government work for the people when “compromise” is now a pejorative? When no politician is willing to have his or her name associated with any hint of compromise with the other side, for fear of being labeled weak or a traitor to his or her party? For another example, look at the ridiculous and counterproductive Senate practice of placing unnecessary holds on political appointees.

Our entire system of government is based on compromise—giving something to get something. In the current political theater, the politicians who adopt the most rigid ideological stances are the ones who garner the most fervent, devoted followings and occasional eye-popping headlines. It’s a path to power, whether it’s Cornyn, DeMint, or Inhofe on the Right or Sanders, Leahy, or Levin on the Left. The politicians who consistently compromise and work with the other party are punished. They do not get on TV as often and their fund-raising dries up quickly. They are dismissed as traitors to the cause—RINOs and DINOs (Republicans and Democrats in name only)—by partisan commentators. They may be challenged or even defeated in a primary election. The media, financial, and political incentives are stacked in favor of intransigence and against compromise.

The same dysfunction crippling the Senate holds sway in
the House of Representatives. On nearly every major piece of legislation offered in the first two years of the Obama administration, the House voted strictly along party lines, with Republicans in unanimous opposition to the president and the Democratic majority, even when the legislation was originally proposed by Republicans. It was within their rights as the minority party to do this. However, just because you have the right to do something does not mean it is the right thing to do. It leads to paralysis in the government. When I talk with Republican leaders about their strategy of obstructing not only their political opponent but also real debate, they say their primary job is to defeat the rival party and regain power—not to govern or fix the problems of the country. They dismiss the value of debate as a vestige of a past era. They are proud to be the party of no … and even “hell no!”

Some rank-and-file Republicans contend that every legislative proposal by President Obama was so misguided that their principles dictated nothing less than complete and total opposition. But if that is the case, why not make your points in a fierce, full-throttle debate? Why not try to win support from honest members of the opposition party through the rigor of arguing your ideas? What happened to winning support from the American people? Unfortunately, part of the problem in the House is that gerrymandering has limited the spectra of constituencies for many individual members. Increasingly, they are rewarded for picking their own choir and preaching to it.

But this dishonest game of political correctness is not played by Republicans alone. Both parties, Democrats and Republicans, use ideological litmus tests. Each has its own
politically correct speech within its respective political base. During the Bush years, neoconservatives attempted to expel and marginalize people who questioned the wisdom of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, like Congressman Ron Paul. On the Democratic side, politicians rarely speak out against abortion rights, since Governor Bob Casey was prevented from delivering a pro-life speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. At both ends of the political spectrum, compromise and moderation have become politically incorrect.

The Constitution that created the Congress was itself the child of debate. Ron Chernow, author of definitive biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, wrote in a
Wall Street Journal
essay about the Founding Fathers that the “rough-and-tumble tactics” of debate among the nation’s first politicians was to be expected and “for sheer verbal savagery, the founding era may have surpassed anything seen today.” In Chernow’s view, the Founding Fathers led the revolution against Britain by daring to speak out, and after “sharpening their verbal skills hurling polemics against the British Crown, the founding generation then directed those energies against each other during the tumultuous first decade of the federal government.” And in their speeches and public writings, the nation’s first leaders proved to be more than willing to engage in a war of words, be it on paper or in public.

Those leaders not only spoke up and stood by their positions but demonstrated the capacity to listen, to be persuaded, and to take action for the common good. For example, after harsh criticism of the Constitution emerged, Alexander Hamilton decided to put together a series of essays to make the case for ratifying the nation’s founding document. Those eighty-five
essays swayed convention delegates in New York to back the new Constitution. Thomas Jefferson described those essays, the Federalist Papers, as the “best commentary of government which ever was written.” The Supreme Court has cited the essays in its opinions 317 times across the years—from 1790 to 2005—in citations by both liberal and conservative members of the Court.

Strong, clear lines of debate were critical when the country verged on coming apart over slavery. In Senate campaign debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858, the men took turns speaking for hours on whether slavery should be allowed to spread into the nation’s new territories to the west, which would have lasting consequences for the institution’s place and influence in the nation as a whole. Although Lincoln eventually lost the election to Douglas, the press coverage was intense and word of it spread nationally. It engaged the major developments of the day, from the Compromise of 1850 to the Supreme Court’s
Dred Scott
ruling in 1857. Lincoln refined his arguments against slavery to write a book that furthered the debate and became the starting point of his presidential candidacy. The historical power of these debates is obvious in hindsight. Yet it is important to remember that Lincoln, despite losing his Senate race to Douglas, did not censor or renounce his arguments against slavery to win more votes. He did seek common ground—he was not calling for abolition of all slavery. But he never backed off his side of the debate for fear of alienating voters in his party. In twenty-first-century terms, he didn’t trim his position to conform to national polling data. Here was a major national voice letting everyone see him struggling, grappling with admitting failure,
at times, but demonstrating sincerity and love of country as he addressed the hot-button issue of his generation.