Unhelpful insults

At the time, when he made the statement, it struck me as one of the dumbest remarks a politician could make. Two years earlier, his Republican Party had lost the presidency to Barack Obama. Now, Mitch McConnell was speaking as the Senate minority leader. “Our No. 1 priority,” McConnell said, “is to make this president a one-term president.”

It was a viciously and almost heartlessly personal view of things. It was exactly the kind of red meat that McConnell’s Democratic opponents needed to make the Republican leadership look really bad. And the Democrats’ accomplices in the mainstream media were quick to join in.

All that was six years ago. The economy was still in the tank from the 2008 recession. Fear of Islamic terrorism was the topic of conversation everywhere. To reduce all the nation’s priorities to a single person, even if it was the presidency, seemed to many to be both cheap and mean. It didn’t help, when reviewing a video of the comment, to see that the senator from Kentucky was grinning as he said it. But if it was just an ugly and dark-spirited joke, a politician as experienced as McConnell should have known how damaging and demeaning that kind of frivolity might be. It served only to make his own party look petty and small—and to do that for many months to come.

But I’m not sure we’ve learned much since then. Our political process seems to consist more and more of ad hominem personal attacks. The negativism starts on the editorial pages and the cable news free-for-alls, but expands quickly to the news pages and to what we used to think of as the straight evening TV programs.

Our political process seems to consist more and more of ad hominem personal attacks.

The year 2016, with its wild presidential campaign, featured such personal abuse on both sides of the partisan divide—and often did so with record ferocity.

Nor did it help much to have an insulter-in-chief leading the way with his sharp attacks on anyone, in almost any venue, who challenged him. “Liars!” bellowed our new president-elect as he pointed to the gaggle of reporters in the balcony during a “thank-you visit” to Wisconsin. But Trump might well have also been chastising hundreds in the audience. The proliferation of social media options has produced literally millions of would-be journalists who have little moral concern for truth-telling; they’re just eager to pass on the latest rumor. The natural result, sooner instead of later, is this whole new package of something we’ve come to call “fake news.”

But the rest of us shouldn’t let ourselves off too easily—and that includes a little introspection even on my own part. It was a little more than a year ago that I referred to Mr. Trump in this space as an “arrogant blowhard”—a label I still believe was technically accurate, but one I have to admit was hardly kind. Nor was it based on face-to-face reporting or firsthand experience. In retrospect, the term was not helpful.

Christian believers, the Bible reminds us, live by a unique standard. We aren’t free, even when we’re armed with the truth, to be mean or rude in the application of that truth. The Apostle Peter puts some tough restraints on us when he says bluntly: “Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.” No specific commands about how to treat a president-elect—but the point is pretty clear.

To be sure, it all works best when the honor required in one direction is regularly exhibited in the other direction as well. But the sense of the Biblical directive is unmistakable. It’s those of us who are armed with the truth who are expected to make the first move.

Political developments in the last few weeks suggest that leaders sympathetic to our faith convictions may be in the driver’s seat, both on the national level and in many state governments as well. Chafing under that influence, some of our opponents are likely to raise the temperature and sharpen their attacks. Their vocabulary will be colorful, and their attitude might not be pretty. One measure of our growth in grace will be the tone of our response.