By PETER BERGER
By Peter Berger
In the last years of his life, Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, suffered a marked mental deterioration, likely attributable to a brain tumor. Lord Randolph continued nonetheless to attend Parliament, where he’d rise and attempt to speak as he once had. The result was increasingly incoherent ramblings, and his friends would leave the chamber rather than witness his painful decline and humiliation. One described Lord Randolph’s ordeal as “dying by inches in public.”
I can’t help grieving for my country the same way.
I grew up believing in the United States that won World War II, the land of Eisenhower prosperity, where portraits of Washington and Lincoln graced our classroom walls. As time passed, I gradually learned the difference between the perfect myth and the imperfect reality. I watched Bull Connors’ police dogs and Dr. King’s March on Washington, I waited to learn my Vietnam draft number, and I remember the day Gerald Ford moved into the White House. Through all that, I never lost confidence in my country’s progress, however halting, toward our founders’ more perfect union.
Now I grieve and want to look away.
Our president is a liar, and nearly half of us don’t care.
He undermines November’s election, and with it our republic, because he might not win.
He embraces the Hitlers of our generation. He breaks our word, betrays our allies, and shreds our treaties.
He threatens American protesters with “vicious dogs and ominous weapons.”
He promises with relish to be “really vicious” himself, and his supporters gleefully cheer.
He lives in a world where “downplay” means “up-play,” where up literally means down, and nearly half of us willingly inhabit his Orwellian unreality.
Two hundred thousand Americans are dead, and many lost their lives because he prized his re-election and self-interest above their right to draw another breath.
It is what it is.
I shouldn’t be surprised that a people blind to narcissism in the mirror would choose not to see its malignancy in their president.
A Supreme Court justice died last week. My concern here isn’t the merit of her judicial opinions, but what our leaders’ response to her death says about them, and what our response to them says about us.
In 2016 Justice Scalia died, and consistent with the Constitution, President Obama nominated a successor. Consistent with the Constitution, the Senate should have exercised its power to advise and consent, given the president’s nominee a hearing, and either approved or disapproved his choice. Instead Senate leader McConnell refused to consider the nomination or any nomination the president might submit. He asserted in that election year that “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
The election was then nine months away.
Now Justice Ginsburg has died, and the same Senate leader McConnell has declared his intention in this election year to hear, consider, and approve whatever nominee President Trump submits.
The day of his declaration the election was six weeks away. Americans in several states were already voting.
It’s no longer surprising when American politicians practice hypocrisy. Senator McConnell justifies his on the grounds that the 2018 Congressional election proved the American people support President Trump’s agenda. His reasoning is hard to follow, as in that ballot Republicans lost control of the House, Democrats won sixty percent of the votes, and in McConnell’s Senate only eleven Republicans won election, compared to twenty-four Democrats.
His feeble excuse and his collaborators’ bleating assent testify to the ease with which too many American leaders today trade their honor for power.
In response irate Democrats propose remedying Republicans’ incivility and disregard for precedent by disregarding precedent and abandoning civility themselves.
There’s nothing novel or necessarily wrong when a president nominates judges who share his political philosophy. John Adams, our second president, appointed a cast of Federalist “midnight judges” as he left the president’s House.
But the Supreme Court is supposed to be more than an undersized legislature with partisan members appointed for life. The administration of justice requires wise, fair-minded men and women engaged in rigorous, reasoned debate. Someone trusted with the title Justice is rightly valued less for his opinions than for his capacity to weigh others’ opinions, less for her doctrine than for her judgment.
Sadly, none of that seems to matter in these days of our decline. Honor gives way to advantage, and principled virtue to expediency. Shamelessness struts in our corridors of power. George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address that he hoped we’d one day become “a great nation” that would “give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”
We were.
We did.
Now our ideals have evaporated into thinnest pretense.
Shall government for the people perish for want of the people’s resolve?
Winston Churchill, Randolph’s son, led his nation through their darkest, finest hour. As they staggered under Nazi bombers, he voiced his confident hope that even if the Battle of Britain were lost, “the New World, with all its power and might,” would “step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
We would.
We did.
But no longer. Now we lie and ramble incoherently.
Inch by inch our friends look away and turn away.
And I grieve.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for thirty years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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