“But that was in another country…”

Someone I knew in elementary school:

"The prohibitively high cost to the nation at this point though is that...the former president has normalized his behavior and his delegitimizing and dehumanizing rhetoric into our political culture"

Washington's Farewell Address:

“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community,” he said in his Farewell Address. “They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

The Presidential campaign of 1800: (four years later)

Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." Asth the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward. Even Martha Washington succumbed to the propaganda, telling a clergyman that Jefferson was "one of the most detestable of mankind."

Complete with a secret plan to end the war* invade France:

Back then, presidential candidates didn't actively campaign. In fact, Adams and Jefferson spent much of the election season at their respective homes in Massachusetts and Virginia. But the key difference between the two politicians was that Jefferson hired a hatchet man named James Callendar to do his smearing for him. Adams, on the other hand, considered himself above such tactics. To Jefferson's credit, Callendar proved incredibly effective, convincing many Americans that Adams desperately wanted to attack France. Although the claim was completely untrue, voters bought it, and Jefferson won the election.

And yet we still admire Jefferson for the Louisiana Purchase and for hiring Lewis and Clark.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure the dehumanizing rhetoric of Andrew Jackson (the Trail of Tears) and John Tyler (who admitted Texas and Oregon to the Union because they were pro-slavery states), to name just two (come to think of it, Woodrow Wilson was also a notorious racist) don’t really figure because that was another century and besides, now it’s about white people. And no, I’m not taking cheap shots:

The new reality sparked a resurgence of white supremacy and racial violence against Black people by Southern whites, who feared being replaced by what they considered to be an inferior race. 

One of the most influential expressions of this replacement anxiety was found in the 1916 book “The Passing of the Great Race,” a pseudo-scientific work by amateur anthropologist Madison Grant warning readers that a flood of inferior races – not only from Africa and Asia, but from eastern and southern Europe – was sweeping away the Anglo-Saxon civilization. 

The remedy, Grant argued, was to get rid of democracy and disempower Black people and the teeming masses of urban immigrants as well. 

By the 1920s, white Southern lawmakers had fashioned a new version of master race democracy and enacted Jim Crow laws that established racial segregation across the South and disenfranchised Black voters.

And if you’re really worried about violence, there was the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas, 1919:

On Sept. 30, the farmers met in a church outside Elaine to discuss strategy and had armed guards stationed outside. A sheriff’s deputy and other white men confronted the Black men standing guard. The ensuing fight escalated until white vigilantes roamed the farmland, ransacking houses, confiscating arms and killing Black men, women and children on the slightest pretext. 

Arkansas Gov. Charles H. Brough called the War Department for help. About 600 federal troops were sent to the area, and once there, they used machine guns to spray the the fields and woods. When the gun smoke cleared, at least 200 Black people were dead, and the only people held to account were a dozen Black men convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

The farmers were trying to organize a union, to fight the peonage system in rural Arkansas. The federal government helped out, with military troops. The president who authorized that would have been Woodrow Wilson. Funny nobody remembers him for that. Almost 50 years later the Rev. Dr. King led a movement of non-violence, a movement rooted in Christianity, that countered that deeply embedded cultural violence with non-violence, and began to turn it aside, changing hearts and minds. I was in a church choir with Mike Luttig; I like to think he retained some of those lessons.

I despise Trump, and think he would be a greater harm to America than he was in his first term. Biden is responsible for the hostage release and ceasefire. Trump wouldn’t have the ability, or interest, to do that, to negotiate with so many countries, to do the work demanded. But let’s not give Trump power he doesn’t have, or that culture of violence an intractability it shouldn’t be granted. Yes, he’s a bad influence, but he hasn’t brought anything to our political culture that wasn’t already there.

Maybe that’s the fight we should be fighting; with the political violence of our own culture and history. The roots of the Tree of Evil, rather than its branches.

*I know Mike is old enough to remember that. Pretty sure George Conway and Katie Phang aren’t.