Why are politics so vicious?

In the past few days I've had heard these questions voiced several times: "Why are politics are so vicious and nasty? When did politics become so ugly? Has it always been this way?" My initial reaction is to think, "Well, sure, politics have always been ugly!" But while human nature is consistently flawed and the temptations inherent to the world of power and politics are numerous, the past few decades have witnessed a real and notable turn for the worse, I think, especially when you compare (as well as one can) the very best of political discourse with the very worst. There is, to put it another way, a lot of politics (and a lot of nasty politics), and not much in the way of statesmanship. 

All of which to preface this excerpt from a New York Times op-ed, "The Ugliness Started With Bork", by Joe Nocera, which proposes a very specific event that took place 24 years ago yesterday: the Senate's vote to reject Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Nocera writes:

The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. For years afterward, conservatives seethed at the “systematic demonization” of Bork, recalls Clint Bolick, a longtime conservative legal activist. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution coined the angry verb “to bork,” which meant to destroy a nominee by whatever means necessary. When Republicans borked the Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright less than two years later, there wasn’t a trace of remorse, not after what the Democrats had done to Bork. The anger between Democrats and Republicans, the unwillingness to work together, the profound mistrust — the line from Bork to today’s ugly politics is a straight one.

It is, to be sure, completely understandable that the Democrats wanted to keep Bork off the court. Lewis Powell, the great moderate, was stepping down, which would be leaving the court evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. There was tremendous fear that if Bork were confirmed, he would swing the court to the conservatives and important liberal victories would be overturned — starting with Roe v. Wade.

But liberals couldn’t just come out and say that. “If this were carried out as an internal Senate debate,” Ann Lewis, the Democratic activist, would later acknowledge, “we would have deep and thoughtful discussions about the Constitution, and then we would lose.” So, instead, the Democrats sought to portray Bork as “a right-wing loony,” to use a phrase in a memo written by the Advocacy Institute, a liberal lobby group.

The character assassination began the day Bork was nominated, when Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing “Robert Bork’s America” as a place “in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” and so on. It continued until the day the nomination was voted down; one ad, for instance, claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give “women workers the choice between sterilization and their job.”

Bork, in his fascinating book, The Tempting of America:  The Political Seduction of the Law (1990), wrote the following about the reaction that he and Howard Baker (Reagan's chief of staff) had to Sen. Kennedy's speech:

We were incredulous.  Not one line of that tirade was true.  It had simply never occurred to me that anybody would misrepresent my career and views as Kennedy did.  Nor did it occur to me that anybody would believe such charges.  The conventional wisdom in Washington then and for some time afterward was that Kennedy had made a serious tactical blunder.  His statement was so outrageous that everyone said it helped rather than hurt me.  I should have known better.  This was a calculated personal assault by a shrewd politician, as assault more violent than any against a judicial nominee in our country’s history.  As it turned out, Kennedy set the themes and the tone for entire campaign.

Thankfully, Kennedy eventually apologized to Bork and later in life even publicly renounced his nearly diabolical support for abortion over the last thirty years of his life. Oh, wait—that never happened.

Nevermind. And yet the man, upon dying, was eulogized (even by himself!) as both a great statesman and a wonderful Catholic. I believe that to call Edward Kennedy "cynical" is almost an insult to cynicism; to say, as some do, that his life was about being Catholic is surely an overt exercise in cynicism.

Back to Bork: he writes of visiting the office of Sen. Robert Packwood (a man, like Kennedy, who treated women like pretty possessions to be awed and then pawed):

[He] told me he had no problems with any of the rest of my record but if there was the slightest chance I might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, he would vote again my confirmation. He made it abundantly clear that that was the only issue.

Others, including Harry Reid, said the same thing. The god named "Abortion" demanded complete obedience, and those men prostrated themselved before the bloody altar. In a certain sense, Roe v. Wade tore the mask from the monster, and attempts since to cover that vicious visage have further revealed the desperation and duplicity of Abortion's minions. (See the chapter, "Why the Campaign Was Mounted", in The Tempting of America, for a good analysis of the ideological roots of the attacks on Bork.)

Bork, for those who might not know, converted to Catholicism in 2003.

Long story made short, it's frustrating, even maddening, to consider that a major reason political discourse today is so banal, insulting, vicious, petty, vindictive, manipulative, and filled with half truths and fully formed lies is because a Catholic senator who had sold himself for a pot of "right to privacy" pottage was willing to attack, defame, and slander one of the finest legal scholars of the past fifty years. And now? It is ordinary and common. We almost don't know better. Alas, we continue—to borrow from the title of another one of Bork's books—to slouch toward Gomorrah. 

Comments

[Gail F]

The ugliness started with the Revolution. Anyone who thinks politics is vicious today needs to take a remedial course in American history. It's been vicious since day one! Some of what people used to say and do would make your hair curl.

[Sawyer]

As with so many other things and in so many other ways, it is the Left that has dragged our society into the cesspool. The Left stands for and produces evil.

[Howard]

No, it didn't start with the Revolution; it started in the Garden of Eden.

What happened during the Revolution was tame compared to what had been going on in the British Isles, for example under Cromwell.

I will agree with Gail, though, that even by American standards, "vicious politics" today does not mean a repeat of Burr vs. Hamilton.

[Robert Miller]

This really is a very good reflection on the debasement of US politics, culture and religion that has ensued from the 1960s cultural/sexual revolution.

Bork's martyrdom, though, I think rises to an even higher level of importance when we consider his critical role in what George Will once, long ago in 1973, dubbed "the crisis of the regime" at the time of President Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre".

Bork had the courage to fire a "Special Prosecutor" who was attempting to unseat the President of the United States in connivance with a rogue Congress. The President's real "crime":
He had put together an electoral coalition that was able to check Congress, wind down the Cold War and create the conditions of economic prosperity for more than a generation.

Bork was loyal to the greatest US President of the 20th century -- the political genius without whom Reagan and the two Bushes never could have happened -- and that was why the rabble would stop at nothing to kill him.

They had treated his master the same way.

[TomD]

Why are politics so vicious? I suppose it is because so much in the human endeavor is at stake. Those who control government, control the central authority of society, whether that central authority is less extensive, as our founders envisioned, or, most especially, when that central authority has greatly expanded powers, as it does today. Power does corrupt, absolute power does corrupt absolutely.