Joe Scarborough: “I wonder, Mark Halperin, whether Americans are starting to tire of this. If they’re not starting to understand that a lot of time it’s carnival barkers trying to get big ratings. I sense a bit of a fatigue out there.”
Mark Halperin: “The problem is we can only think about this except through pubic opinion polls, through the media. There’s no other forum for us to think about it than this. And we few exceptions – this program being one of them – all the media you can consume that has velocity is on the left and on the right. Media like the NY Times, The Washington Post, even the the New Republic or National Review is increasingly caught in the crosswinds of what I call the “freak show” of all of it.
“Let’s say this was at the top of Barack Obama’s agenda and that he thought the only thing he could do to succeed was to remove this poison from the body politic. It’s very hard to know what he can do.”
According to the National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Jim Leach: “Citizenship is hard. It takes a commitment to listen, watch, read, and think in ways that allow the imagination to put one person in the shoes of another.”
While he’d be too polite to agree with me, by his own measure Jim Leach is the quintessential citizen.
We had the distinct pleasure to spend a day last week learning a thing or two about citizenship from this man who’s had a lot of practice at it, 30 years in Congress and all. Taking a page from Paul Revere – although with a gentlemanly preference toward intentionally less fanfare in the ride, possibly more of a William Dawes (who I admittedly would know nothing about were it not for Lea Marshall and Malcolm Gladwell.… bless them both…) – Leach is setting out to visit every single one of these United States to tell us a thing or two about the high bar that citizenship demands.
While he will be characteristically gentle in the telling, it just could be that a test of citizenship is coming, a test of citizenship is coming.
Leach served at a time when tense work week Congressional fights were followed by weekend signs of friendship across the aisle and probably a bipartisan backyard bar-b-que or two and then, in turn as a democracy demands, another round of philosophical fighting. He served when relationships among legislators were what Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded Americans is Tearing Us Apart, refers to as “cross-cutting.” These public servants could be on one “side” here and another “side” there as they went about the business of building a country (which they understood to be their job)… leaving noticeably less room for the evil “they” that seems to have so effectively eclipsed the common “we” just about everywhere these days.
Except we isn’t common at all when it’s part of “We the People,” it is something we should treat with reverence and care. According to Leach, “[c]ertain frameworks of thought define rival ideas. Other frameworks describe enemies.”
It isn’t just anybody who can commit to our historical tradition of complex cross-cutting relationships to serve a greater end. It isn’t just any country that builds itself on such a challenging principle.
There are those who are bonded to our founders because our founders were angry, chafing at authoritarian British rule for freedom.
They were.
But the big audacious and nearly-insane-had-it-not-been-so-wildly-successful essence of our founders was so much more than angry. These were men of profound ideas who believed that, despite all of human history before them, “we, the (plain old average) people” could be the boss.
They were willing to sit uncomfortably at the crossroads of ideas, where the comfort of convictions stood regularly challenged and the luxury of entirely dismissing rival ideas probably edged you a wee bit closer to being hung by the king. They had to sit at a knife’s edge, weighing one idea against another in constant struggle for excellence and results. These men had to bring their “A” game to their revolution, and indeed they did. And by challenging ideas as they stayed connected to each other, they made something magnificent.
They made America the City on the Hill in the world no matter what anyone says (thank you very much).
And it is public servants like Jim Leach who carry on their tradition. Please listen to his speech. What is 20 minutes when a country you love may depend on it?
The bad news is that “We the People” cannot be the boss if we’re unwilling to do the hard work of citizenship. The good news is that we come by it naturally.
One night last week, I was inspired, however, by a small group of people who are trying to restore civility in public conversation — and therefore help us make better progress in solving our problems. Our big three, the economy, health care, war, are all stymied now by vast differences of opinion and approach — and high levels of mistrust — of each other’s ideas on how to move forward.
The Village Square, an informal civic group that’s now two years old here in Tallahassee, had invited to town former Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach, who is now chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Leach isn’t exactly a rock star on a world tour, but he is setting out to visit all 50 states on his mission of reinventing civility as a path to solving some of the above gargantuan problems.
It was just a few days before the earthquake in Haiti when The Nature Conservancy’s Andy McLeod, introducing Leach, spoke of avenues to progress. “Its saving grace is in a society that seeks to cultivate moral sensibility,” he said.
In its government institutions and among its citizens, progress can hardly occur without moral sensibility; that is, respect for each other.
This is notably lacking today with rancor that’s become business-as-usual and widely accepted. Spouting off is habit-forming — if even the loudest spouters realize it’s not very helpful.
Leach is mercifully self-effacing, noting that “few subjects are duller than public manners.” Yet his proposition is a simple challenge that any one of us can apply to ourselves (and our blogs): We can use words, he said, “to bring out our better angels” or we can use them dishonestly to confuse and undermine each other.
When it comes to the rivalry of ideas, Leach said, our choice is to “stir anger, polarize and compel violence” with what we say.
Or, conversely, we can use “healing language” such as Lincoln used in his second inaugural address, inspiring the nation to bind up its Civil War wounds “with malice toward none.”
“Little is more important for the world’s leading democracy in this change-intensive century,” Leach argued, “than establishing an ethos of thoughtfulness and decency of expression in the public square.” –Jim Leach, Visiting The Village Square this Tuesday. Details HERE.
On nearly all matters of policy and politics I disagree with the birthers, the deathers, the tea baggers, most GOP office holders, a significant number of Southern Democrats, and more than a few members of my own academic department. While I judge them to be stunningly wrong-thinking, I am hesitant about labeling my adversaries “crazy.”
Red-faced screaming at town halls, audacious lies about President Obama’s citizenship, and incomprehensible obstruction tactics by legislators might be symptomatic of mental instability, and they are clearly indicative of deep human suffering, but the “crazy” label does more to obscure our understanding of our differences than to illuminate them. . .
We learn more and can more effectively influence social change when we consider the situation of our conservative opponents. Their “craziness” might seem more reasonable when we consider the tactics of fear-mongering and race-baiting that have long characterized American politics. A decade of unaccountable government might explain some of the paranoia. Shouting matches that pass as nightly news are implicated in the lack of civility with which they engage. It may not be our opponents who are insane, but instead the zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to politics, which is truly crazy.
Mary Ann Lindley mentioned us this morning in her “Local Conversation” front page article in the Tallahassee Democrat. I can’t find it online yet, so here’s a clip: (Update: Here’s the link.)
Probably the toughest challenge for people once elected to office, apart from not taking too personally all that kissing up, is to bear up under the zealotry and frankly crude and outrageous public dialogue. If you can call it dialogue.
Electronic communications have unleashed the demons in a lot of otherwise (I sincerely hope) well-behaved people… The fact that public officials hear more often from extremists than from moderates no doubt contributes to their finding such comfort in party ideology. Just repeat the party line; repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s much less of a strain than examining the jumble of nuances of public policies and risk exposing yourself as an independent thinker, rather than a loyal ideologue. (Voters are, sad to say, merciless on officials who change their minds – which is absurd on the part of voters if the official has merely learned a thing or two.)
2010 would be a good time to begin working our way out of the current practice of twisting and shouting on every topic. We do that via every means of communication and in every venue – except for that most civil of them all, over your shopping cart at the grocery story.
The Village Square and Florida Humanities Council are noble bearers of this calming effort, trying again on Jan. 12 to convey the message that you can sometimes make progress by just talking to one another about the things you have in common and then working on your points of disagreement.
This approach is call civilization. It’s what separates us from the braying beasts of the field, some of which look pretty nonthreatening compared to the bellowing at town hall meetings that marked the year ‘09.
Former Iowa Republican congressman Jim Leach will be speaking at the Village Square’s Challenger Center event on the 12th, kicking off his 50-state “Civility Tour.” It’s meant to emphasize the dangers of perpetuating what Leach calls this “era of clashing civilizations” – on the back streets of cities as well as the back halls of Washington and Tallahassee.
Give me a yell if you find an online link so that you can read this whole excellent article.
This event (1/12, two weeks from today), part of former Congressman Jim Leach’s (R-IA) 50-state Civility Tour, is offered at no charge and is open to the public. Find details and R.S.V.P. HERE.
I just had a wonderful opportunity to talk with University of Virginia’s Ted Crackel about The Civility Project at U.Va., which will release a revised list of rules, in the spirit of Washington’s original. It is particularly wonderful that students are putting together the list. You can actually submit ideas for rules on their website: The Civility Project: George Washington Meets the 21st Century.
This isn’t any ole vanilla re-do of Washington’s rules, however. It’s got gravitas:
The Civility Project will be undertaken with organizational guidance from The Papers of George Washington, a Founding Fathers project based at the University’s Alderman Library, and with the inspiration of Judith Martin, who writes the nationally syndicated Miss Manners column in the Washington Post.
Martin and Theodore J. Crackel, editor-in-chief of the Papers of George Washington, met in 2005 when both were being honored at a White House ceremony. So when the Washington Papers staff recently discussed the idea of basing a project on our first president’s famed “Rules of Civility,” Crackel knew right away whom he wanted to enlist.
“I am absolutely delighted to have Judith Martin working with us on this effort,” Crackel said, noting that the columnist will play an active advisory role. “We in the project and the students involved couldn’t have a better adviser.”
We probably won’t sleep nights waiting to hear the results…
Mike Huckabee on President Obama (You can watch this HERE, click on Chapter 8 to get right to this excerpt):
I just find it deplorable that some people on my end of the aisle want to find everything wrong and nothing right about the man as a man… I hated it when people did that to George Bush. They couldn’t even laugh at the man’s jokes they found something wrong with everything and if we do that to Barack Obama, then shame on us, shame on us. No wonder our country is so divided when that happens. –Mike Huckabee
