WONDER LAND
Xtreme Politics
You're not a voter, just a spectator.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, October 24, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
If there is one remark that a tourist through the political life of the United States hears constantly--from political professionals to amateur enthusiasts--it is that our politics has never seemed more polarized. How did that happen? Perhaps a culture that could devise Xtreme Sports deserves an Xtreme Politics in which "issues" such as abortion, gay marriage and judicial nominations become not just politics, but death-struggles. It wasn't meant to be this way.
Many Europeans abandoned their birthplace centuries ago to risk life in America precisely because they had tired of the culture wars back home--of living in places where religious and social disagreements got settled by people overcome with a compulsion to smash and erase their opponents.
The men who made the American Constitution understood that nothing in the pristine vapors of their nation was so special or unique as to ensure that Jack would never despise the opinions of Tom--and more than anything would like to shut Tom up, for starters. It is clear in the Federalist Papers that the Founders, above all, tried to reduce the destruction often done to civil life by political factions. I don't know that James Madison is spinning in his grave over the factionalism washing through U.S. politics, but surely he is heaving heavy sighs.
This week President Bush said he would sign into law an act banning partial-birth abortion, which the Senate enacted the day before by a vote of 64-34, enough to override a filibuster. The American Civil Liberties Union said it would go to court, on behalf of the National Abortion Federation, to thwart the new law. The ACLU noted it has convinced courts to overturn such bans voted by legislatures in Alaska, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey and Rhode Island. These bans are favored by a wide range of religious groups--Catholics, evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews. An alarmed Tom Harkin blew his bugle to call the troops onto the battlefield opened 30 years ago by Roe v. Wade: "I say to the women of America: This is step one."
It was a good week for Xtreme Politics. We had as well the case of Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, who while in uniform and inside a church, said that the U.S. in the Middle East is fighting a "spiritual enemy" by the name of "Satan." It seems to me that Gen. Boykin's "Satan" is synonymous with "evil," the word the president himself most often uses to describe terrorism. Indeed, many of the same people who were made uncomfortable when George W. Bush described an "axis of evil" are now demanding that Gen. Boykin be fired from his job at the Pentagon because his remarks are insulting to Islam and "racist."
Only in an era of Xtreme Politics would the default option be that Gen. Boykin must be obliterated from public life. Gen. Boykin is a highly decorated soldier, meaning that he repeatedly has put his life in harm's way for his country--in the 1980 attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran, hunting for drug lord Pablo Escobar, and amid the bloody battle of Mogadishu in 1993.
In a political world less overdosed on emotional steroids, people would cut Gen. Boykin some slack, allowing the Pentagon to suggest that he go easy on the fire and brimstone in public. Life then goes on. Islam survives. But no, the story, like a helium-filled balloon at a child's birthday, has floated for days through the news, even aboard Air Force One over Australia, where an intimidated George Bush finally gave the press mob what it wanted: a thumbs-down rebuke of Jerry Boykin.
Last week in this column, I reported that a recent analysis, largely using data collected by the University of Michigan's Center for Political Studies, suggested that the membership of the Democratic Party was increasingly secular, while the GOP is attracting evangelical Christians. The e-mail I received is no doubt similar to what Gen. Boykin has been getting. "A piece of rubbish." "I'm afraid of the 'religious right' because I don't want my daughter's body to become the property of the state the next time she becomes pregnant."
In some ways, America may now be closer to the England of the Stuarts, rife with religious and political animosity, than to the intentions at Philadelphia in 1789. If not, it is sliding toward reflexive strife.
I agree with the argument that this war of the cultures dates to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. The history of the cultural tensions that came afterward is familiar to everyone, even people merely upset at "what's gone wrong with the country."
Beneath this history lies another argument, with which I agree, that the country's judges the past 30 years have made much law touching people's deepest beliefs about the ordering of public and private life, which previously was the first responsibility of elected legislatures. So internalized has the courts' legislative primacy become that seminars are now held to argue whether liberal or conservative judges are the more activist.
This may be the moment to put the courts and the culture at the center of a presidential campaign. Mr. Bush, now unable to get judges confirmed for reasons of cultural superstition, should make the case for returning the culture to legislative politics, and then make his Democratic opponent reply.
I think many people who don't get paid for waging politics are becoming quite frustrated with dysfunctional legislatures that are now polarized--as in Congress or in California--essentially along the cultural faultlines created by 30 years of allowing judges to pre-empt the broader community's ability to discover, or re-examine, its social beliefs. These legislators have become little more than clerks to judges and the complainants in their courts--the law as not much more than a brief. When this happens, citizens lose their status as voters or electors and become mere courtroom spectators. How can this be good?
Continuing to use the courts in this way--the ACLU boasting it will get a court to overthrow a law passed by Congress or any legislature--and then demanding that large portions of American society simply shut up and swallow it is a recipe for a kind of war much more serious than the mere chattering crossfire of talk shows. |
