The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as “Communists” or “Fascists” by their opponents.
— U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, June 1, 1950
We are approaching the end of yet another contentious and ugly election season in the United States. It has been said a lot, but it’s true: we need to lower the temperature of our political rhetoric in this country. At the federal level, of course, but at the local level too.
You hear people from both parties express this same idea, yet such statements are often, if not always, made with an accusatory finger pointed at “the other side.” It is presented as both lamentation and justification: I’m not the problem. They’re the problem. And if my behavior sometimes resembles theirs, what choice have they left me?
Public opinion data makes the dynamic clear. Americans broadly agree that political rhetoric has gone too far. More than 90% of both Republicans and Democrats said the opposite party had gone too far in using inflammatory rhetoric to criticize their opponents, according to a poll by Gallup, but only about one-third said the same about their own party.
That Americans do not believe the blame is equally shared is exactly the problem. The “my side is justified; the other side is out of line,” is an easy position to settle into. It offers the comfort of being right without the burden of looking inward. But it is also a way of absolving “our side” of responsibility when, in fact, changing the dark nature of our politics requires accepting our own responsibility in the matter.
But the malaise of competing excuses is ultimately a symptom of the deeply cynical place politics has come to occupy both in public and private life. We increasingly treat one another’s political beliefs as a complete measure of moral character rather than one aspect of whole human being. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats described people in the other party as more immoral than other Americans—up from 47% and 35% in 2016. The same survey shows that majorities in both parties also view members of the other party as more dishonest, lazy, and unintelligent. Political disagreement has become a judgment about whether we are good or bad people.
A politics that teaches us to regard our fellow citizens as enemies threatens our ability to govern ourselves. Self-government depends on our ability to lose an argument, or an election, without concluding that the people on the other side are illegitimate.
The danger extents beyond of government’s ability to function, as evidenced in the recent rise in political violence. It is not hard to justify cruelty, or even violence, if one views their political opponents as a mortal threat to their way of life or to democracy itself. Many atrocities across human history were perpetrated by people who believed their actions were justified, having succumbed to the idea that their opponents were so evil and depraved that ordinary moral and ethical limits should no longer apply.
There are, however, examples throughout history of people resisting this impulse. In 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, gave a speech on the Senate floor titled “Declaration of Conscience.” Her speech was a short but scathing condemnation of McCarthyism and the grip it had on her own party. The Senate had become what she called “a forum of hate and character assassination.”
Smith pointed to the hypocrisy of how senators could attack ordinary Americans’ character on the Senate floor, yet such attacks, if leveled at fellow senators, would violate the rules of decorum of the Senate and be stopped on the grounds of being out of order.
“It is strange that we can verbally attack anyone else without restraint and with full protection, and yet we hold ourselves above the same type of criticism here on the Senate floor,” she said.
Her speech wasn’t, however, one-sided. It included no shortage of criticisms of the Truman administration: “America is rapidly losing its position as leader of the world simply because the Democratic Administration has pitifully failed to provide effective leadership.”
Despite her displeasure with the Democratic administration, though, she refused to accept the idea that those perceived failures justified political smears and character assassination. “The nation sorely needs a Republican victory,” she said. “But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
Smith displayed the kind of moral courage our politics desperately needs right now: the willingness to apply our principles even when it is hard and when doing so may inconvenience our own side. She was a devoted Republican, and fierce critic of President Truman, but she insisted that some means of winning were unacceptable.
Applying that standard does not require pretending every argument is equally sound or every action equally defensible. Smith’s premise was that it is not only possible but imperative to recognize dishonesty, condemn cruelty, and hold people accountable without treating their basic humanity as something to be forfeited.
Disagreement is a good and healthy feature of democracy; it is how we test and improve ideas. But it is unreasonable to expect our government to function, to improve the lives of ordinary people, if we cannot learn to disagree better. The vitriol that defines American politics today is not just unproductive; it is dangerous.
Elected leaders deserve much of the blame for their willingness to stoop to the lowest common denominator. But lowering the temperature is not solely, or even principally, the responsibility of politicians. They respond to what voters reward and what they excuse. When we condemn contempt in our opponents but let it slide with those we agree with, we give them little reason to behave differently.
Changing the nature of our politics cannot be solved with legislation. It requires principles and standards we must be willing to apply to ourselves and our allies. We each, as neighbors and citizens, have a role to play. In today’s political environment, finding common ground or accepting compromise requires a certain measure of courage when the people on our own side regard it as a betrayal. So does pushing back against contempt when it comes from someone whose politics we share, or resisting it in ourselves even when we believe the other side deserves it.
Unlike what so many politicians and political ads want you to believe, the greatest threat to this country right now is not the other party. It is the contempt we feel for each other, and our addiction to defining one another’s lives through the lens of politics alone.
We have more opportunities to change that than we sometimes acknowledge: in what we choose to share, how we respond to others, and whether we allow ourselves, in the heat of the moment, to indulge our darker impulses. No one individual’s choices will fix our politics. But it is a start, and each helps to establish what we, as a nation, are willing to accept.
We cannot insist that everyone else lower the temperature while making exceptions for some and not others. Our politics needs a conscience, and that begins with refusing to take the bait.
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