Dissensus, the Spirit of Our Age
Donald Trump could arise only in an atmosphere that is itself soaked in political derision.
By Joseph Epstein
Photo: Getty Images/Blend Images RM
We are living in a time of great dissensus, when political arguments are not merely rife but emotionally and verbally, if not actually, violent. People who are certain of the urgency of climate change often treat doubters as if they were hopelessly stupid flat-worlders. People who oppose abortion tend to consider those who feel otherwise as little less than murderers. Run down the list of the leading issues—and an issue, recall, is a subject still in the flux of controversy—and one discovers similarly tempestuous reactions, pro and con, everywhere.
Not that I am without my own political views. The English historian A.J.P. Taylor once claimed to have “extreme views, weakly held.” My own position is moderate views, extremely held. Whenever the subject of politics comes up in one or another of my social circles, I always jump in to offer a label warning: “I have never lost a political argument,” I say, adding, “which would be more impressive if I didn’t have to admit that neither have I ever won one.” As Jonathan Swift averred, one cannot hope to reason people out of those things they haven’t been reasoned into, which often enough includes politics.
Politics is a subject that barbers, salesmen and people in search of love do best to steer clear of. It can also be hell on friendships. I once gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute in which I made the point that one shouldn’t expect a perfect congruence of one’s own political opinions in friends.
I quoted from V.S. Naipaul’s novel “Guerrillas” his description of a woman who had a great many opinions, but these, taken together, didn’t add up to a point of view. One should instead, I argued, look for something larger than mere congenial opinions in friends; one should search out an interesting point of view, an amused take on the world combined with a certain seriousness.
At dinner after my talk, Irving Kristol, a man of great civility who had strong opinions firmly held, said that he agreed completely with me about a point of view being more important than matching opinions in one’s friends. “Except,” he said, “for Israel-Palestine.”
Quite right, alas. Some opinions even in good friends are unacceptable. I shouldn’t want a racist for a friend, or an anti-Semite, or a misogynist. On the other hand, neither would I want a friend with a perfectly aligned set of politically correct opinions. Nor could he or she bear me.
Yet opinion just now is riding high in the saddle, and fire-breathing political opinions most of all.
The effect of such endemic—better perhaps to say epidemic—opinionation is on view in the current presidential campaign. A figure as deliberately divisive as Donald Trump could arise only in an atmosphere that is itself soaked in political derision. At a time of international crisis and domestic turmoil, where cool heads are called for, Mr. Trump brings a hot head and a loose lip and a level of coarseness hitherto unseen in a presidential campaign. That so many people appear to be not merely amused but enthralled by his crude views is no cause for celebration.
I wonder what my long-gone father would make of Donald Trump. One of my father’s favorite apothegms was that “you can’t argue with success.” I suspect that Mr. Trump would cause him to rethink this. My father held strong views but was also a reasonable man—though, as he would admit, not always.
Like many Jews, my father was an ardent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. So much so that in the 1930s he wouldn’t allow the then-isolationist Chicago Tribune in the house. My father’s dislike of the paper was so fierce that once, when he had a flat tire in a snowstorm and the driver of a Tribune delivery truck pulled over to help, my father told him to bugger off. “That,” he used to say when telling the story, “shows you how stupid politics can make you.”
In 1952, during the first Eisenhower-Stevenson election campaign, I asked my father for whom he was going to vote, fairly certain of the answer ( Adlai Stevenson). He surprised me by saying that before making a decision he was waiting to see which way the columnist Walter Lippmann was going. Lippmann, though he would have much preferred to lunch with Stevenson, went for Eisenhower. He did so because he thought the great war hero had a better chance than Stevenson of closing down Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt.
Is there anyone today waiting to see what a newspaper columnist thinks before deciding how to vote?
Is there a political columnist in America not already lined up, his or her leanings unknown and unpredictable? Is there anyone in the country, period, not intransigently locked into his or her opinions? What would it take for any of us to make a Lippmann-like move, rising above personal preference and partisanship, to cast a vote for the good of the country instead of against people we loathe?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. After all, we have only our national civility to lose.
Mr. Epstein’s books include “Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
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