The Death of Politics Read online

  Dedication

  To my parents, who nurtured my love for politics and my love for America

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: A Noble Calling

  Chapter 2: How We Ended Up in This Mess

  Chapter 3: What Politics Is

  Chapter 4: Politics and Faith

  Chapter 5: Why Words Matter

  Chapter 6: In Praise of Moderation, Compromise, and Civility

  Chapter 7: The Case for Hope

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  A Noble Calling

  This is a book that pushes back against what people have come to think about politics. The word itself conjures in our minds an image that is nasty, brutish, and depressing. My aim, however, is to leave you far more hopeful about politics than you are, because you have far more power than you think.

  Even I need to be reminded of this, as someone who has spent my whole career in politics, where I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly; where things work and things fail; and where I’ve encountered men and women of integrity, as well as scoundrels. I’ve worked as a college intern in the Washington State legislature, as a senior advisor in the White House, and in the previous three Republican administrations. Today, in my current capacity as a New York Times contributing opinion writer, contributing writer for The Atlantic, and frequent commentator on political talk shows, my focus has been on the general calamity caused by President Trump.

  In such a context it’s not always easy to get beyond fear and worry, deep disappointment, and a sense of genuine outrage at what is being done to the profession I value and the nation I love. This book, then, has been beneficial for me; I hope it will be for you as well. We have lost sight of who we are as a people and as a nation. We need to relearn what American politics ought to be about, and we need to realize that as citizens we have the power and ability to repair the fraying we have witnessed.

  Here’s the problem: when Americans think about politics today, their first thought is that it is inherently dirty and undignified; that most politicians are corrupt and unprincipled, either knaves or fools; that those involved in politics only care about their self-interest and not at all about the interest of the country; that it takes no special skills to be a politician—in fact the less experience, the better; that the problems we face as a nation are simple, the solutions obvious, so either stupidity or malice must explain why the solutions haven’t been implemented yet.

  Many people today have given up on politics, believing it to be irredeemable, and their frustrations are understandable.

  We are indeed at a low ebb in the history of modern American politics—a period when politics is both trivial and dehumanizing, when large challenges are being either ignored or made worse, and when politics is an arena for invective. Virtually across the board, in both parties, the political leadership ranges from mediocre to dismal. Republicans and Democrats have contempt for each other. They can’t work together to solve our common problems. And the most important and powerful political office in the world is occupied by a man who is intellectually, temperamentally, and morally unfit to be mayor of a small city, let alone president of the United States.

  “It’s just messed up now” is how one woman put it to the Washington Post. “It’s not even a political system. It’s a reality show.” Another said American democracy has become “a rock-throwing contest.”1

  But that is not the whole story. To hold a uniformly negative view of politics is selective and misleading—and in important ways it is simply wrong. It mistakenly assumes that our current predicament is a permanent condition. But just as a television series shouldn’t be judged by a single bad episode, just as a professional basketball player shouldn’t be judged by a single bad series, politics shouldn’t be judged by its worst moments. Certainly American politics has seen moments of squalor, but our politics has also seen moments of grandeur. Most of the time it’s something in between. Here is the risk of allowing ourselves to be cynical: When we imagine that this nadir is the norm, we let ourselves and our leaders off the hook. We imply that there is no point in demanding better or in working to do better.

  In fact, it is precisely at a low point like this one that we should remind ourselves of the potential of politics, both to better understand what has gone wrong and to think more concretely about how to turn our politics around. We simply cannot afford to settle for the reigning arguments that politics is beyond repair and our corrupt leaders and institutions are to blame. The core argument of this book is altogether different. It will argue that by remembering and restoring America’s noble and necessary political tradition—covering the roles of morality, religion, rhetoric, debate, and citizenship—we can heal what has been fractured and get back to the task of making America a more perfect union.

  Much of the blame for our ugly and unfortunate state of affairs can be laid at the feet of politicians and the political class, of which I have been very much a part. Not everyone is culpable, of course, but as a general matter our elites have been detached from the problems and creeping hopelessness that have overwhelmed many Americans, especially those without college degrees and those who are living in rural areas.

  Rather than shaping events, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have often seemed at the mercy of them. The last several years have been characterized by unusual pessimism, a deep sense of unease and apprehension. We’ve witnessed a collapse of trust in government, particularly the federal government; and that loss of trust is in important ways justified.

  But “we the people” are complicit in this state of affairs, too. In a self-governing nation, we generally get the government we deserve. The people who serve in public office haven’t been installed by some hostile alien force. It’s ordinary Americans—in congressional districts, in states, and in the nation as a whole—who elect House members, senators, governors, and presidents.

  Your reaction to politicians as a class may be “To hell with them”—but “To hell with them” really means “To hell with us.” It’s just too easy for all of us—myself included—to point the finger at others and never at ourselves, to assume that the troubles plaguing American politics have everything to do with other people and nothing to do with me. We quickly and mercilessly condemn what we consider to be a very unattractive garden (politics) without giving a moment’s thought to the role of those tasked with planting the garden’s flowers (voters).

  The rancor and division in our politics reflect the rancor and division in our nation. It’s too facile to say we have a healthy country but a broken political system; in fact, our broken political system reflects the brokenness of our country.

  But here is the most important point you should take away from this book: what’s broken can be mended. We are not in the grip of forces we can’t control. We can reverse what has gone wrong; we can build on what has gone right.

  The wrong way to think about politics today is as if we’re collectively afflicted by a terminal disease, an illness with no cure. The better way to think about politics is that we’re out of shape, the result of doing a lot of things wrong over the years. Shedding pounds and rebuilding muscle is difficult, but it can be done and we know how to do it. It’s a matter of summoning the requisite will, energy, and commitment.

  So the task before us isn’t easy, but it’s hardly beyond us. If we demand more of our politicians by demanding more of ourselves, our politics will get better—and so will our country. But that requires us, person by person, to assume the mantle of citizenship.<
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  ESCAPING THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND

  I have spent my entire adult life involved in politics in one way or another. I served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and, for seven years, in the George W. Bush White House, where I was deputy director of speechwriting before becoming the director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives, a kind of in-house White House think tank. I have been involved in two presidential campaigns, in 2004 (George W. Bush’s reelection) and 2012 (Mitt Romney’s), and have worked in several leading public policy and research institutions.

  All told, then, I have more than three and a half decades in political and public life—in and out of government, formulating and implementing policy, writing speeches for those holding high public office and writing columns and essays about them. I have been a commentator on events and at the center of events, including during the terrorist attacks against America on September 11, 2001. I have seen how politics works up close, including in the West Wing and the Oval Office, and at more of a distance, as a writer and essayist.

  But my perspective was also shaped by my early years. Politics was, along with sports, one of my early passions. Among my fondest memories is as a young boy driving with my parents to our cabin in the Cascade Mountains in Washington State in the 1970s and talking about current events—at that time, the end of the Vietnam War and the 1973 Mideast war, Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy and Richard Nixon’s opening to China, the Watergate hearings and the Nixon pardon, and the Carter-Ford election among them. I became an avid reader of books, magazines, and the newspaper. My parents and I would watch the evening news together and discuss what we saw. And some of my most vivid recollections from junior high and high school are of debating my social studies teachers about political and world events.

  I never ran for office, not even for student government, and I never had much of a desire to do so. Part of it, I’m sure, was a fear of failure and not wanting to be the focus of attention. I was also afraid of public speaking, something that took me years to overcome. But what most drew me to politics were the ideas and personalities, the human drama, the ability to shape events and outcomes, the sense that there was something important and meaningful at stake. Both my parents immigrated to America from Germany, so I understood from an early age the cataclysm that can follow when we get politics wrong.

  I pursued a life in politics in part out of a sense of its high possibilities, then, and most other people in politics chose that path for similar reasons. This is one important reason for my sense that our politics is not only salvageable but a potential source of renewal and recovery for the country. The political arena is actually full of people who love their country and want to serve it. They are also, of course, ambitious, driven, and eager to advance. Right now, the incentives that too often confront them in politics put their ideals in tension with their personal ambitions. But it need not be that way, and part of what a revival of our politics would involve is a better alignment of the incentives our politicians face with the potential of politics to elevate our national life. That, too, is why only a change of attitude among the broader public could bring about such a revival. Citizens who demand more will yield politicians who offer more. I know this can work because I have seen it work.

  All in all, it has been a fascinating journey. I’m hardly naive about politics—about the capacity of power to dull the conscience of good people, about the degraded state of our discourse, about how political loyalty and partisanship can cause people who should know better to act in maddeningly hypocritical ways. Politics is a fallen profession composed of fallen people. But of course that is true of the medical and legal professions, of real estate agencies and the academy, of churches and auto repair shops, of hedge fund managers and waiters, janitors and store clerks, radio talk show hosts and mathematicians, actors and athletes. My inner Christian, as well as my inner realist, starts out by acknowledging the fallenness of all humanity.

  Today too many people seem determined to see politics in part rather than in whole. They focus on the downside while ignoring the upside, in a way that’s unbalanced, unrealistic, and therefore untrue. I understand the temper of our times, and I know it’s fashionable to be cynical. But I intend to help readers see that those who are cynical about politics are the ones who are actually naive.

  I would be delighted if you took away from this book a sense that politics is not only a necessary activity but a noble calling—an imperfect but essential way to advance justice and human flourishing. This may seem unimaginable during our angry and distrustful time, when so much of politics seems both trivial and malicious. But it happens to be true.

  In his classic seventeenth-century allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan describes the protagonist, Christian, who has heedlessly fallen into the Slough of Despond, where he “wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; and . . . began to sink in the mire.” But along comes a figure, Help, who “gave [Christian] his hand, and he drew him out; and set him upon some ground, and bade him go on his way.”

  We’ve been wallowing for too long in a political Slough of Despond, bedaubed with the dirt, sunk in the mire. This book is a modest attempt to help draw us out, to once again set us on firm ground, and to get us back on our way.

  Chapter 2

  How We Ended Up in This Mess

  On January 14, 2016—half a year after Donald Trump descended an escalator at Trump Tower to announce his run for the presidency and several months before he wrapped up the Republican presidential nomination—I wrote a column in the New York Times in which I declared I would not vote for him under any circumstances.

  I was perhaps the first prominent Republican to have taken this position, and I did so despite having voted Republican in every presidential election since I first became eligible to vote in 1980, despite having worked in three Republican administrations, and despite having worked for Republican presidential campaigns.

  “Party loyalty has limits,” I wrote.

  In this case, the limits were rooted in my belief that Mr. Trump was intellectually, psychologically, and temperamentally unfit to be president. I argued that Trump is precisely the kind of person our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of demagogic leader our founders feared.

  I also warned that Trump posed a profound threat to the Republican Party and conservatism, in ways that Hillary Clinton never could. Mrs. Clinton could inflict a defeat on the Republican Party, but she could not redefine it. Mr. Trump, if he were to win, could redefine it from a conservative party to an angry, bigoted, populist one.

  My stance was dramatically out of step with that of many of my friends and acquaintances, most of whom are Republicans. I had countless conversations with Trump supporters—some enthusiastic, others more qualified—who expressed their unhappiness with my views. How could I not cast a vote for the GOP nominee in a race against Hillary Clinton, of all people?

  In the course of those discussions—almost all of them reasonably civil, if sometimes fairly intense—several themes emerged. One of the most frequent ones was the idea that the country was on the brink of collapse and that we needed someone to shake the system to its foundation. A person I have known for many years wrote me during the Republican primaries. What he said is typical of what I heard:

  I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn us around. I have no hope that one of the establishment guys would do that. That, I believe, is what opens people up to Trump. He’s all the bad things you say, but what has the Republican establishment given me in the past 16 years? First and foremost: BHO [a derogatory acronym for Barack Obama by his critics, meant to highlight his middle name, Hussein].

  What’s notable in this exchange is that the person who sent it to me didn’t deny Trump’s drawbacks, but they hardly seemed to matter. For many Trump supporters, things couldn’t possibly get worse, so electing Trump was worth a roll of the dice. The
supposition was that he’s really no worse than many other politicians, and in some respects he’s better than they are.

  Desperate times require desperate actions, and these are desperate times. Or so the story goes. But is the story actually true?

  THE POLITICS OF CONTEMPT

  This book began to take shape, for me, from the realization that any nation that elects Donald Trump to be its president has a dangerously low view of politics.

  This statement isn’t simply a supposition; it points to a serious problem. Donald Trump is the culmination of a long-term destructive trend: the public’s utter contempt for politics. By contempt I don’t mean merely extreme frustration or anger over what is happening politically. Such reactions have been apparent in America since our first contested election in 1800. Something new is afoot in our political lives. By contempt, I am describing how many Americans have crossed over a threshold from frustration to despair, from unhappiness to rage, from deep skepticism to corrosive cynicism. Many Americans have lost hope that we can solve our problems using the traditional means of politics. This is a very dangerous development; it opens us up to all sorts of anticonstitutional mischief.

  What is the result of this contempt? At a time when it’s imperative for Americans to recover a sense of the high purposes of politics, they elected as president a man who seems determined to denigrate it. Trump in this sense is a symptom at least as much as a cause of the virus now threatening our common life in America. There is a very real sense that Trump’s presidency could mark the death of the best of the American tradition of politics. If this happens, it would be a catastrophic loss.

  One of the duties we have as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations, is to look searchingly and honestly at the nature of this virus—what caused it, what sustains it, and what needs to be done to combat it and ameliorate its effects. And that is what I want to undertake here. To start, and it is only a start, let’s examine Trump’s rise and what it says about the state of American politics.