FOR OR AGAINST—DOES IT MATTER?

By Edwin Cooney

“I voted against Obama in 2008 and will vote against him again in 2012.”  This emphatic statement sent me recently sums up the passion of millions of American voters.  The question I’m putting to you this week is: does this passion matter?  The answer to that question depends on what effect our political passions have on today’s trends in America’s capacity for liberty and tolerance.

At the close of his public service, George Washington warned us against the establishment of political parties which he insisted would distract the "public councils" (perhaps he meant Congress) and enfeeble the "public administration" (the presidency, the function of which he carefully nurtured).  President Washington further asserted that parties would agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindling the animosities of one against the other thus opening the door to foreign influence and corruption and subjecting us to the policies and will of other nations.

It seems to me that Washington’s wisdom and foresight is borne out today by those who depend on prefabricated or canned Liberal and Conservative doctrines rather than on a dispassionate examination of history and current circumstances for the basis of their political decisions.

In the mid-1960s, when I was forming my first set of political “principles,” my Conservatism was constructed on my obsession to rid the land of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Hubert Horatio Humphrey.  Hubert, as I saw it, not only talked too much, too loudly and too squeakily, but was also permanently associated with the socialist if not communist “anti-American” labor movement.  Lyndon Baines Johnson, I convinced myself, was not only a hopelessly Liberal and power hungry politician but (I insisted) was the likely murderer of John F. Kennedy.  After all, I asked myself back then, wasn’t LBJ all-powerful in Texas? Wasn’t he likely very resentful and jealous of JFK about everything from his wealth to his office? Hadn’t the crime occurred in LBJ’s Texas fiefdom? Hadn’t LBJ directly benefited from JFK’s murder?  All of these circumstantial attitudes and situations convicted President Johnson in my mind if nowhere else.

Political hatred is far from new in politics.  Certainly the deeds of John Wilkes Booth (Abraham Lincoln), Charles J. Guiteau (James A. Garfield), Leon F. Czolgosz (William McKinley) and Lee Harvey Oswald (John F. Kennedy) attest to that.  However, in recent years, there has been a very special and virulent form of morality-driven vitriol that has been growing within us.

This modern form of political vitriol probably began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as its target. Conservatives considered him the “root of all evil” and more.  That vitriol was surely strengthened by FDR’s willingness to not only note but even take glory in it.  In his famous acceptance speech in Philadelphia for the Democratic Party nomination for his second term, FDR labeled old guard Conservatives “economic royalists.”  In an address at Madison Square Garden on Saturday, October 31^st, 1936, he asserted "we know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred."

Whether FDR returned that hatred in full measure is unlikely because, after all, he was of the same social standing as most of his bitterest enemies.  Nevertheless, whether good naturedly or not, FDR certainly gave the institutionalization of political hatred a cheerful boost!

Since the Watergate era, the mid-1970s, ideological hatred has been made more potent by the intensification (or if you prefer, the "Nixonization") of personal hatred toward all political opponents, but especially against presidential candidates.  This intensity has grown geometrically, it seems, rather than mathematically.  This vitriol is far from healthy to our “body politic.”

If you’re a Carter critic, a Reagan ripper, a Bush basher, a Clinton castigator or an anti-Obama obsessionist, you are guilty of a serious political crime. 

The truth is that Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Joe Biden and, yes, Barack Obama are people of deserved respectability and of substantial achievement.  Poisoning the wellspring of liberty which is our trust in the person the majority of voters send to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may be as American as cherry pie, but it is more destructive than Benedict Arnold, the Rosenbergs and John Lindh could have ever hoped to be.

To be for something or someone is healthy because it’s affirmative.  To be against something or someone ought to merely be the unavoidable side of choice.  Today, however, too many of us glory in what we’re against.  The moral degradation of the political opposition as a legitimate political alternative is both mean and reckless because it asserts that differences of opinion are unpatriotic and immoral.  As I see it, that’s one of the sheer paths to tyranny!

Freedom isn’t about your way or my way, freedom is about the considered possible application of many ways!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY