Ideological Purity Has No Place In Politics

Last week, the world of politics was treated to what many referred to a “clown show” as ideological purists who identify with the inappropriately named Freedom Caucus threatened to hold their breath until they turned blue in the face if they didn’t get everything they wanted. What a bunch of reactive two-year-olds!

Today, progressives are wringing their hands and saying they have been stabbed in the back by Joe Biden because of his decision to continue building a wall along the southern border of the United States and send refuges from Venezuela back to where they came from. Progressives have a right to be annoyed — horrified, even. But they might do well to put all these developments in the world of politics into context.

Politics & Naomi Klein

I am reading Naomi Klein’s latest book, entitled Doppelganger. Those of you who are familiar with Klein’s work know she is a meticulous researcher and brilliant writer. On the surface, the book is about how she is often confused by the online community with Naomi Wolf, a former darling of the feminist movement who has now become a pillar of the radical right wing underground being put together by Steve Bannon to propel the Maniac of Mar-A-Lago back into the Offal Office.

But Klein goes much deeper than the confusion between herself and the woman she calls Other Naomi. Part of her exposition delves into the way the internet is encouraging people to create alternative versions of themselves — virtual doppelgangers — in order to position themselves as “influencers” in the online community or to prepare a sanitized version of themselves for future college admissions officers and job interviews with prospective employers.

In her examination of Bannon, she describes how he is parsing the online world, looking for ways to peel off potential Democratic voters to get them to vote Republican. In case you think Bannon is playing a fool’s game, Klein makes it clear that his tactics succeeded in peeling away enough blue collar workers from Hillary Clinton in 2016 to tip the election in favor of her opponent.

That’s not the only reason she lost, of course, but in a close election, flipping a small number of voters can have a significant impact. What surprised Klein most in her research was how affable Bannon can be when he is trying to court potential opponents like Wolf.

David Leonhardt On Politics And “Winning”

That leads directly to a newsletter I get daily in my inbox from the New York Times. Today’s column by David Leonhardt looks back on American history to gain insights into how America’s leaders handled themselves in fractious times. The answers may surprise you.

Over time, national heroes like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Franklin D. Roosevelt acquired an image that is a lot tidier than their real life behavior, he writes. They are made into popular saints and treated as leaders who changed the country by transcending politics.

But the truth is quite different, he claims. “A defining feature of the country’s most effective leaders has been their embrace of messy politics, including a willingness to listen to, and work with, people whose views they do not share. Transformational leaders tend to be both radical and practical.”

Politics & Steve Inskeep

Image credit: Houston Public Media

That was true of the founders and the suffragists, of Roosevelt and King. In a new book about Lincoln, Steve Inskeep, the NPR host, argues that this approach was a defining feature of Lincoln’s victory over slavery and his rescue of the nation. The book’s first sentence is, “Abraham Lincoln was a politician.”

He refused to isolate an abolitionist in Congress whom others considered extreme. He also worked with a leader of the anti-immigration Know Nothing party. The title of Inskeep’s book is “Differ We Must,” a reference to a line in a respectful letter that Lincoln wrote to a friend who refused to oppose slavery.

“If you’re going to defeat someone you think is doing something terrible, and also keep a democracy, you have to build a majority,” Inskeep said in an interview with Anand Giridharadas on Substack, “And that might mean that you have to deal with people that you disagree with on some things, or many things, or even most things, but you find enough common cause that you can work with them on something.”

That’s Un-American

The counter-argument is plain enough — the other side in a political debate is so wrong that it doesn’t merit engagement. The other side is un-American, according to this view, or denies the humanity of others. It simply must be defeated. The unanswered question, Leonhardt points out, is how it will be defeated.

In a democracy, he writes, victory requires winning enough votes to take power, which in turn requires persuasion. That doesn’t mean winning over most of your opponents. It does often mean winning over some of them. And it’s difficult to persuade others if you stop listening to them. “Had he failed to engage with people who differed, he would have not become the Lincoln we know,” Inskeep writes.

An abiding lesson of political change is that it’s usually accomplished by people who aren’t too pure to treat their opponents with respect. The new biography of Martin Luther King by Jonathan Eig, contains evidence of the same point.

Turning to the chaos in the House of Representatives this week, Leonhardt writes that Congressional Democrats have done the difficult, often unsatisfying, work of compromising with each other and the Senate over the past 15 years. Along the way, they passed laws to expand health insurance, fund clean energy, build roads and semiconductor factories, and more. House Republicans have a less impressive list of accomplishments, he says. When they have been in power, they spent more time deposing their own leaders for being impure.

The Takeaway

Where is all this going? I have no special prognostication skills, but as all these confluences and crosscurrents collided in my inbox today, I couldn’t help but think that people in the Biden administration have read Klein’s book and are well aware of what Bannon and other MAGA operatives are trying to do.

Is it possible that resuming construction of the wall and sending migrants back where they came from is part of a strategy to peel some people away from the red team — a preemptive strike, so to speak, designed to weaken the opposition? Maybe the old codger is crazy like a fox?

Who knows, but Leonhardt is absolutely right. The current Freedom Caucus members have no interest in compromise and so, based on the past history of politics in America, they are setting themselves up to be the biggest losers when the next election rolls around.

Which reminds me of an expression a former colleague of mine was very fond of. “Pigs get fat but hogs get slaughtered,” he liked to say. Mohandas Gandhi had an expression he was fond of as well. “Civilization is the encouragement of differences,” he said. Food for thought for those who think everyone in the country should think like them — or be killed for their impure beliefs.