The politicians have always been snakes and the reporters have always been liars.
What’s changed is us.
As America sits ripped down the middle by politics, as partisanship has become the idol we all worship, the fault is our own. They – the press and the pols – are what they have always been. It is we who are at fault.
The erosion of our culture and the abandonment of our values have left us without the civility to handle disagreements – healthy, normal disagreements – like adults. We have morphed from a nation of fellow citizens motivated by love of country to warring tribes fighting out of hatred for one another.
Over and over we are told that it has never been this way, that this division is new and dangerous. In many ways, that claim is not convincing. In part, because the fomenting of anxiety and fear is an industry that works around the clock, enriching the press and empowering the politicians, allowing us to be driven from crisis to crisis like sheep from pasture to pasture.
It is also suspect because any reading of political and media history shows that it has always been this way. From the days of the Continental Congress to the present – without exception – the politicians have always been backstabbing bastards. You can go from presidential administration to presidential administration, and from decade to decade, the whole length of American history, and not find a time when the politicians weren’t willing to slit one another’s throats if it would benefit them.
That’s not to criticize them, just to report a fact. Another fact is that most of those backstabbing bastards did an excellent job. In the back-and-forth pull of political philosophies and parties, the course of American progress and liberty has been strong and sure, and often downright inspired. All while the politicians have been fighting like rabid dogs.
The politicians of today are just like the politicians of yesterday.
Ditto for the press.
There has never been an era in American history when the news media wasn’t biased. The press has always been a propaganda tool of the political parties. Literally. From the days of Washington ‘til now. It has sometimes pretended to objectivity, but it has only been pretending. The history of American media is inseparable from the history of American politics.
And yet, even with that perpetual bias, the press has been useful to the Republic and its people. It has been one of the supports of our democracy and essential to the American way.
The press and the pols have always been like this.
But we haven’t.
And the reason has little to do with politics.
America has traditionally been a nation of not just liberty, but morality. We have rejected restraint by government, but we have embraced restraint by conscience. There has been a baseline cultural norm to which most of us have consciously or unconsciously clung. We were raised to treat people the way we wanted to be treated, and to see one another as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens.
There also was a generous mix of courtesy and decency, with some honor and integrity thrown in. We knew how good people acted and we wanted to act that way, and when we didn’t, we were embarrassed and ashamed.
These values were a social lubricant, they kept friction from building up between us as we went through life, including as we dealt with politics.
We weren’t perfect, but we were better.
And we’re not anymore. At least not to a degree sufficient to keep the pot from boiling.
As we have drifted from religion and rejected our culture and values, we have become increasingly selfish and tribal. We have dehumanized one another and we have let our motivations shift from light to dark, from good to evil.
And so it is that we let party affiliations become more important than family bonds, and we see those who disagree with us as being somehow inferior to us, lacking our moral or intellectual clarity. And elections stop being about loving the country and start being about hating the other party.
The wonderful dynamic of disagreement, which is part of the genius of the American Republic, metastasizes from the engine that drives us forward to the conflict that tears us down. We stop respecting our neighbors’ freedom of opinion, and ultimately we stop respecting our neighbors.
And we are left where we are, a nation divided, our institutions strained, a reconciled path forward not immediately obvious.
And it’s our fault.
We can’t blame the politicians, they’ve always been this way. And we can’t blame the press, it’s always been this way. What’s changed is us.
And it’s not for the better.
A free people must also be a good people, liberty must be partnered with morality, and we won’t be able to fix our country until we fix ourselves.