Mahatma Gandhi set a standard of restraint that we would do well to keep in mind.
When we pathologize our opponents, we ask not why they act as they do, but what evil force animates them.
For the last decade or so, conservative commentators throughout the Anglosphere have complained: “The left thinks we’re evil, and we think they’re stupid.”
It’s a useful shorthand for the culture wars, perhaps, if a little depressing. Even before the pandemic, everyone could see that politics had polarized dramatically in the wake of Brexit and the Trump victory. It’s not entirely clear that the stridency of our policy debates — on gender, ethnicity, economic inequality, immigration, free speech, the environment, etc. — is as warranted as some of its practitioners claim or whether it serves, as others have suggested, as a proxy for deeper convulsions in Western civilization. We have, after all, been debating most of these issues for decades. Even the street activists have noticed that 2020 looks a lot like 1968.
Even the street activists have noticed that 2020 looks a lot like 1968.
Critics from all points on the political spectrum have blamed the usual suspects for this acrimony, and also some new ones: opportunistic social media, partisan broadcast media, pervasive pandemic and lockdown anxieties, recession stresses, a sense that the 2020 U.S. election is epochal. Intellectuals endeavouring to occupy the middle ground — the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, for example — often find themselves isolated and beleaguered. Historians are loathe ever to concede that the centre cannot hold but, on a bad day, this is certainly how things look to many people in 2020.
What to do?
An important first step in disarming the visceral, destructive brinkmanship of our current political debates is to reacquaint ourselves with the humanity of our adversaries. Admittedly, this is no small feat. It’s no less challenging today than it was when Mahatma Gandhi confronted the British Empire, or when Western leaders sought to ratchet down tensions with the Soviets. But it’s a good place to start.
We have our work cut out for us, nowhere more than in the epicentre of the culture wars, Washington, D.C., where Donald Trump remains the bête noire of both the progressive left and the Never Trump GOP. The president of the United States does not need defending, and nothing I am saying here should be construed as a defence of the man or his methods. But there is no denying the extent to which even some of Trump’s most distinguished intellectual critics have sought to pathologize him. When we pathologize our opponents, we ask not why they believe what they do or why they act as they do, but what evil force animates them. It is a strategy of dehumanization.
Two among many recent examples of this trend come from the venerable progressive standard-bearer Noam Chomsky and the veteran conservative commentator David Frum — men whose politics have little in common but whose decades-long experience and insight give them outsized influence in our public conversations. In an April 2020 interview, Chomsky explicitly compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, whom he identified as “maybe the worst criminal in human history” for having perpetrated the Nazi Holocaust. “That’s pretty evil,” Chomsky stated. “But what does Trump want to do? He wants to destroy the prospect for organized human life.” In his new book, Trumpocalypse, David Frum goes even further. “Trump loves nobody and has no sense of tomorrow,” he rails. “Like an animal, he lives only in the present.”
U.S President Donald Trump: Washington is the epicentre of the culture wars.
Strong medicine, indeed. The context for Chomsky’s and Frum’s polemics is important. Both are deeply frustrated with Trump’s policies. And both are big thinkers who evince an impressive mastery of political minutiae. Like many of the president’s critics, they are impassioned, and they are genuinely alarmed. And like much anti-Trump hyperbole, their recourse to the ad hominem appears as a rhetorical climax to their scathing policy critiques. In an earlier era, we might have said they got carried away.
But not even the most profound antipathy, whether its object is Trump or any other public figure, stands as an excuse for dehumanization — particularly among liberal intellectual elites imbued with an abiding sense of ethical obligation. Of whom can it truly be said, They love nobody?
The broader lesson follows. It behooves our Western commentariat to avoid the habit of pathologizing others — of ascribing to them dark, unfathomable motives that can be understood only as manifestations of abject malevolence. This includes the many op-ed writers who have recently suggested that one ought to cut oneself off from friends and family who are too stupid or stubborn to see that they are holding the wrong opinions. Such behaviour is cultish as well as pathologizing and, writ large, it is no model for the reformation of contemporary politics and intellectual life.
Robert Wright is professor of history at Trent University Durham.
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Wright: Fixing polarized discourse starts with recognizing everyone's humanity - The Province
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