Last week someone called me a Nazi.
Really, he only called me a “Nazi sympathizer.” But at that level of calumny, how significant is the distinction?
I am neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathizer, and I’m not sure the person who called me one could tell a real Nazi from a Cumberland Presbyterian.
After half a century in which I have purposely abjured political discourse, I found myself squarely in the path of a carelessly tossed mudball. It happened when I challenged a Facebook friend’s casual labeling of certain local officials, by name, as Nazis. They were Nazis, it seemed, because they performed their official duties in a way my Facebook friend did not like.
It’s easy enough to imagine that people who regularly talk politics in public may be Nazified, vilified, and mudslung as a matter of course.
Perhaps they get used to all this besmirchery.
I, however, cannot.
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Vitriol was routine in our community around 1970. A mob of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionaries dominated the UW-Madison campus. On any street corner, you could hear fellow students and not-so-students praising Marx’s theory on alienation of the workers or critiquing the more recent writings of Herbert Marcuse.
They were intellectuals, you see. Nonetheless, they had stingers.
Clinging to ordinary, plain-vanilla political thoughts left over from the 1950s and early -60s, I was drummed out of revolutionary society. When I sought a clarification of intent in an impromptu soviet convened ostensibly to oppose a particular strategem of the Vietnam War, the organizers snickered at me and swiftly moved on to the next speaker.
A small cell of leftist students whom I knew, busy plotting to unionize the employer who had created their part-time jobs, lowered their voices theatrically, loudly noting that “Spy Sommers” was in the room. As if I gave a damn how they amused themselves.
You may not know this, Dear Reader, but Your New Favorite Writer is one of Those Timid People. There are quite a few of us. When attacked, we choose flight, not fight. Over the years, I’ve added layers of bluff and bravado for self-protection, as many of us do, but deep inside the 79-year-old author dwells a shy little boy.
That’s why I withdrew from politics. It frightened me. Besides the avoidance of bruising battles in boring polemical trenches where nothing I prized could be won . . . I have also kept from being wounded.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” Mom said. That sounds comforting, but it doesn’t happen to be true. Words hold power. Words can be wings, bearing you up to a soaring perspective. But words can be weapons. Words can hurt.
For that reason, our parents and teachers, besides giving worthless advice about sticks and stones, also taught kindness and forbearance. Take care, they said, with other people’s feelings. We did not always heed this advice, but we did accept its relevance. I, and possibly you as well, Gentle Reader, grew up in a world where tact and gentleness had a place.
But that world changed very swiftly about 1968.
I returned to college in 1969, after a few years in the uniform of the United States, to find the rules I knew had changed beyond recognition, or were simply dispensed with.
It was now okay to flay your opponents with hateful and slanderous words. This was really nothing more than bullying and intimidation. But as with all topics in those days, it received an intellectual gloss. It was called “the politics of confrontation.”
The politics of confrontation meant this: If someone disagrees with you, even by a trifle—in fact, especially if the disagreement is trivial—then go all scorched-earth on them. Never mind “Come, let us reason together.” Just flame them.
If they stand in your way, use anything up to and including nitrate explosives.
I kid you not.
In 1970, after the Kent State massacre on May 4 and the Sterling Hall bombing on August 24, the prospect of bloodshed to overthrow the old order lost a bit of its allure. Our society slipped into a torpid malaise in which old leftists still rumbled and grumbled, but routine commerce and something resembling normality returned to American life.
Yet we never got truly “back to normal.” We never got over the habit of subsituting invective for political discourse. It remains with us to this day. That is one reason politics is so toxic.
This problem is widely acknowledged. Hardly a week goes by without someone’s launching a new, wearily-heralded effort to “restore civility” to our national conversation.
Such attempts are bound to fail, because civility is not the issue. Civility, in the political context, was a permanent victim of 1968.
The only thing that will save us now is human decency.
Many of our fellow-citizens cannot imagine a person-to-person connection being more important than a partisan platform. There are millions, maybe tens of millions, in whose minds politics is the only occupant.
The vacuity of these people’s social and intellectual lives gets filled with formless, reflexive anger, which spills over into vicious utterance. They can’t tell you why you are a Nazi. It’s enough to state that you are one. Or a racist, or whatever. Just offhand, by definition or decree.
It absolves them of any compunction, relieves them of any responsibility for the well-being of others. There is no need to treat anyone with what we used to call kindness or decency.
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Dear Reader, it is clear you are not one of those I am talking about.
Yet I hear a whisper from the back of the hall: “In the face of pure evil, niceties can become irrelevant.”
The thing is, I don’t think we often come in contact with pure evil.
I think, rather, we have grown willing to transgress all boundaries of decency in our outraged harassment of those we disagree with, whom we define as evil to salve our consciences.
That’s what I’m torqued about: The abandonment of those curbs and boundaries—that kindness and forbearance—that once kept our politics in a manageable state.
So sue me.
Oh, by the way, I re-checked my facts just five minutes before posting this and can definitely affirm: (1) I continue to think my ordinary, plain-vanilla political thoughts left over from the 1950s and early -60s—and (2) I’m still not a Nazi.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
