Is This Really Who We Are?

 

American politics has never been a parlor game. In 1828, partisans of John Quincy Adams branded Rachel Jackson an adulteress; she died weeks before her husband’s inauguration. In 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks caned Senator Charles Sumner nearly senseless on the Senate floor. Our politics has always had a dark side, one that caters to everything except what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

But something has changed. What was once the shameful exception has become the expected rule, and the tone is set at the very top.

The grammar of contempt

Last November, when Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey pressed the President about the Epstein files, he pointed at her and said, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” The White House blamed the reporter. Within days he called the New York Times‘ Katie Rogers “ugly, both inside and out,” and asked CBS’s Nancy Cordes, “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?”

Just this Thursday, Reuters correspondent Jacob Bogage asked whether canceling his weekend trip to Kansas had anything to do with being worn out from travel, a fair question to put to an eighty-year-old man in the last week of a punishing campaign. The President turned on the man’s body: “Look at this guy—he’s way out of shape... You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell.” The White House’s rapid response account then celebrated the “takedown,” tagged the reporter by name, and posted screenshots from a video of him and his wife on a road trip. A question about the President’s stamina was answered by ridiculing a journalist’s weight, and the official machinery of the presidency piled on.

The pattern is measurable. A Washington Post analysis this spring found that about 93 percent of the President’s second-term speeches contain at least one vulgar term, compared with about 40 percent early in his first term. On Easter Sunday he posted an expletive-laden threat to Iran. This is now the lingua franca of the presidency: the shaming of reporters’ bodies, the grammar of vulgarity, the leer of sexual innuendo. And when the head of state speaks this way, the floodgates open.

The floodgates

This morning’s New York Times catalogs the closing week of the midterms:

• In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall said, without a scintilla of evidence, that his opponent “probably is grooming” children.

• In Texas, Vice President JD Vance insinuated that Senate nominee James Talarico is gay, saying he would never want to see “that guy’s web browser history.”

• In Michigan, the President called Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim, a “vicious, violent jihadist.”

• In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ran an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, a mother she has not spoken to since she was twelve, after her stepfather was charged with raping her. Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican and a Catholic, called it “deeply, deeply troubling.” The President and Vice President defended it.

Former Senator Jeff Flake, no man of the left, said simply: “this seems to be a new level.”

Honesty requires me to say the other side has not kept its hands clean. Governor Newsom’s office has posted insinuations that conservatives were gay and gleefully echoed “Quiet, piggy” back at the President. Imitating vulgarity is not resisting it; it is surrendering to it. But one sin does not excuse another, and this season the viciousness has a clear center of gravity.

What we have lost

In October 2008, a woman at a rally told John McCain she could not trust Barack Obama because “he’s an Arab.” McCain took back the microphone: “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man.” His own supporters booed. He said it anyway. In 1954, Joseph Welch asked Senator McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” The question worked because there was still a shared sense of decency to which it could appeal.

Is there one now? Is this really who we are?

The tongue and the heart

Yes, desperation can bring out the worst in us. But character is precisely what remains when we are desperate. Integrity is not a fair-weather virtue.

Our Lord was blunt: “For from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks” (Mt 12:34). St. Paul: “No foul language should come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for needed edification, that it may impart grace to those who hear” (Eph 4:29).

“Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury” (CCC 2477). To say a man “probably” grooms children, without evidence, is calumny. To mock a person’s body because he asked an unwelcome question is contempt for the imago Dei. Cardinal Bernardin’s seamless garment was never only about the unborn, the condemned, and the migrant; it covers the reporter, the opponent, and the stranger whose faith we do not share.

Pope Leo XIV, four days after his election, told the world’s journalists: “Let us disarm words, and we will help disarm the world.” Two weeks ago Archbishop Paul Coakley wrote: “We must reject rhetoric that appeals to fear, resentment, or division.” And Bishop Daniel Flores reminded his brother bishops that our demeanor “should be one that exemplifies before it preaches.” That word applies with particular force to any bishop who would lay hands on a President in prayer and say nothing about how that President speaks of his neighbors.

The legacy we bequeath

Children learn grammar by imitation. They are learning ours. Every teacher who corrects a child for calling a classmate “piggy,” or mocking a heavier child’s weight, must now explain why the President of the United States may do so with impunity, and why so many grown-ups cheer. What we tolerate, we teach.

On Tuesday, each of us will vote according to conscience; neither party fully reflects the Catholic ethic, and I will not tell you how to mark your ballot. But whatever you decide, refuse to speak this way yourself. Refuse to share it, to laugh at it, to excuse it because it comes from “our side.” Reward the candidate, of whichever party, who has the courage John McCain had in 2008. And teach your children, by your own example, that the measure of a person is not how cleverly he can wound, but how faithfully she can tell the truth in love.

Lincoln’s better angels have not left us. But they will not speak for us. That task, as always, is ours.

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As many of you know, some of my essays have grown into a book, The Right Pope at the Right Time, from ACTA Publications, which is now in its second printing. It was chosen by U.S. Catholic magazine as its October Book of the Month. You can order it at https://actapublications.com/the-right-pope-at-the-right-time/ or wherever you buy books. You can also call the publisher, Greg Pierce, at 800-397-2282 if you have questions or are interested in multiple copy discounts. If it speaks to you, a short review on Amazon helps more than you might think.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.