Ghosts from the Past Convict Our Current Politics
A friend of forty years recently reached out. What she said has stayed with me. “I’m so sad at what people on the left and right have become,” she told me. “So hateful, just because of political differences.” She is not a political junkie. She is a decent person watching decency drain out of our public life, and her lament deserves an answer.
Recent news stories provide plenty of reasons for her sadness. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, a Catholic, recently signed legislation legalizing the dismemberment of children in the seventh, eighth and even ninth month of pregnancy. Separately, four judges on a Pennsylvania court overturned the collective voice of millions and more than fifty years of bipartisan consensus and ordered taxpayers to fund the aborting of the children of the state’s poor. Meanwhile, President Trump, trapped in what looks like the kind of endless war he campaigned against, keeps on hunting for D.C. monuments on which to leave his mark. Add the now-routine spectacle of elected officials dropping F-bombs everywhere. It is no wonder my friend feels something essential is being lost.
As the widening gyre of our culture generates a politics of anger and contempt, I found myself drawn to lyrics from another turbulent era. Amid the violence, war, assassinations and racial tension of the 1960s and early 1970s came voices pleading for respite and reconciliation.
Those responsible for today’s darkness might want to stand down and consider these ghosts of the past. Consider, for example, Jackie DeShannon’s voice from 1969: “Think of your fellow man, lend him a helping hand, put a little love in your heart.” The same year, the Youngbloods suggested “Come on, people now, smile on your brother everybody get together try to love one another right now.”
Instead of engaging one another, politicians on both sides seem to think our problems can be managed in soundbites rather than solved with sustained work. With the border now secure, is anyone really working to fix our broken immigration system somewhere between going back to Joe Biden’s open-borders and throwing a bedsheet over the Statue of Liberty? Where is the honest accounting of a $40 trillion dollar national debt and what deficits, tariffs and foreign wars have done to inflation? Has there been any debate over the Affordable Care Act’s failure to deliver the affordability it promised? While the party in power punts, ascendant Democratic Socialists offer not resolution but revolution, doubling down on policies that produced many of these failures.
In another echo from the past, the Byrds quoted the Bible as they sang of different seasons – including a time to build up and a time to break down. We have had enough of breaking down. It is time to rebuild, to rebuild on the foundations we celebrated last month on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: a reliance on Divine Providence and a recognition of the proper ends of government, i.e., “to secure” in the words of the Declaration of Independence, the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Acting on these principles throughout history, we solved great problems, including our founding-era debt, the enslavement of millions, crushing economic depressions, and threats from the totalitarian evils of Nazism and Communism. But we did not solve these problems on our own. They were solved with the understanding of our obligations to God and our fellow man, echoing the recognition of Jesus’s summary of the law, which first recognized the obligation to love God and the second to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Indeed, it is the love of God that leads many followers of Jesus to love their fellow man, and that is the proper order. For without basing love of each other on the love of God, we run the risk, as Flannery O’Connor concluded, of a “tenderness…detached from the source of tenderness” whose “logical outcome [then] is terror.” This type of tenderness ends, as O’Connor observed and as we saw with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Xi, in the cruelty of forced-labor camps and mass execution.
So while we seek a new politics serious about solving problems and respecting each other, we must operate with an understanding of the Divine Providence that guides us and, in that spirit, live out what another anthem from days gone by offers in seeking solutions to our challenges. “So on we go; his welfare is my concern; no burden is he to bear. We’ll get there, for I know, he would not encumber me. He’s ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.”
(Congressman Keith Rothfus served 3 terms in the U.S. House. He is a Notre Dame Law School graduate living near Pittsburgh where he and his wife raised their family.)
