Pundits have tried to find a term other than polarized to describe the political environment. I call it vigilante politics. From the time Obama was nominated, through four years of Trump, right wingers have concocted virulent attacks on anything deemed progressive. They’ve tried to verbally lynch the targets of their disdain by inciting fears of rampant socialism, black ascendency, immigrants of every kind, and threats to gun ownership. That’s fifteen years of vigilante politics culminating in an attempt to overthrow democracy through violent insurrection.
Picking up the torch, some left wingers are using the same tactic to attack anyone and anything connected to Trump in any way. He may have headed the most scandal ridden administration in history, but verbal lynching, inspired by allegations because they are lurid and widespread, is precisely what progressives have fought against for generations.
There is no excuse for vigilante politics, no matter how self righteous the mob declares itself to be. It violates the rule of law, erodes our democracy, undermines our highest ideals, and demeans us in the eyes of a world that thought it could trust America. The antidote lies in the voices we use to publicize our opinions: take serious allegations seriously, investigate and let the facts tell what they can, make them public, withhold judgement that can’t be made with verifiable confidence.
“Almighty God, you proclaim your truth in every age by many voices: Direct, in our time, we pray, those who speak where many listen and write what many read; that they may do their part in making the heart of this people wise, its mind sound, and it will righteous…” (BCP, 827)
I often wonder about how Jesus dealt with Vigilante s and Self-righteous of His time? I look to the Gospels for this and preach it when I find it.
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H+
Because I write on politics, and have my own biases, I wonder how often I might be guilty.
Steven, the lies have certainly poisoned our democracy and spread fear and nurtured hate in our society. I hope your antidote will be employed widely by people of goodwill.
My Whitman students would be mystified at the notion that the heart could be wise, first, because “wise” is a word they both never use and find immediately suspicious, and second, because “heart” is quickly becoming just like “wise”: they rarely use it since they substitute some version of “empathy” that somehow they take to be less sentimental than whatever it could mean to have one’s own heart become “wise.”
And all that is directly tied to a deep suspicion of “truth,” for they see claims to “the truth’ as an imposition by the powerful on the powerless. That there could be truths of the heart quite literally never occurs to them, the very phrase sounding like sentimental nonsense.
It is the above context in which vigilante politics, say in the form of “cancel culture,” thrives among the college-age young.