With Malice toward None

While this essay will be posted the night of the election and emailed to subscribers the morning after, I’m writing it several days before. Public Discourse isn’t a news outlet, and we seek writers and essays that take time and reflection, so we’re not quick to report on the events of the day. I do not know the results, and it may be that we might not for several days, say if the election depends on mail-in ballots yet to be counted in Pennsylvania. I don’t know if the Electoral College tally is undetermined, virtually tied, or a blowout. I don’t know if there are claims of fraud. I don’t know if there has been violence, as some have predicted and others threatened.

The final days and weeks of the campaign have been rancorous. Unseemly jokes about garbage, a sitting president apparently responding in kind, slurs about fascism and Nazis, mockery of the intelligence and character of candidates, and a seemingly endless litany of abuse. It has been tiresome; it has been ugly.

Politics is a hard business, of course, and always has been: it’s not as if the early days of the republic saw cheerful and respectful exchanges of views. The contest between Jefferson and Adams was notoriously vicious, for example. Dirty tricks and insults did not appear for the first time only in recent campaigns.

That’s certainly the case, but we can mourn the current tone and mood without succumbing to nostalgia for some idyllic past. There is much to mourn. Too many of our political elites appear to have contempt for entire swaths of the populace. The political class does not seem to produce especially serious people. The campaigns seemed content-free, as if this or that stunt or verbal mistake mattered—when it did not matter at all—even as we appeared unwilling or unable to soberly deliberate about the debt, the housing crisis, our depleted and unprepared military, the opioid crisis, failing schools, and more. A serious and self-respecting people require more than we received during the campaign. Although far too many citizens themselves seem unserious as they give way to histrionics about “the most important election in history” or the “threats to democracy” supposedly posed by both parties.

My expectations of our political class are rather low. To borrow from while altering Wordsworth: “Lincoln! thou shouldst be living at this hour: America hath need of thee.” We would do well to discover statesmen in our halls of power, but I do not myself see many of them.

Well, put not your trust in princes, says the Psalmist, and it’s good counsel. I wish that this morning we heard our leaders evoke the spirit of Lincoln from his Second Inaugural Address, although I don’t anticipate that wish coming true: 

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work; . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Whatever the outcome; whether today you are waiting, watching, weeping, or rejoicing, there is no reason each of us cannot, in our way and place, in keeping with our station and responsibilities, be as Lincoln. If our media and political elites are unwilling, there is no reason why you and I cannot be patient, gracious, decent, calm, charitable, and act in ways keeping with the responsibility of self-governance for the commonweal.

If today we are tempted to gloat or despair, curse or mock, it would be far better for ourselves and our children to quietly pray or study, rake the leaves, invite a neighbor to dinner, play a game, or work in the garage: all the things that a self-reliant, free, and sober people do.

Image by Taya and licensed via Adobe Stock.