Shouting Instead of Thinking

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency/Hugh Sidey "A great disruptive fact was the baneful influence of elections almost continuously in progress, of campaigns never over, and of political uproar endlessly arousing emotions . . . It raised to ever higher pitch the passion-rousing oratory of rivals. They egged one another on to make more and more exaggerated statements."

Historian Roy Franklin Nichols was not describing our time. He was writing about America's chaotic years before the Civil War; this excerpt is from his classic work The Disruption of American Democracy, published in 1948. For some students of today's politics, there are alarming echoes. The issues are different, but a paralyzing partisanship is stronger today than at any other time in the past 30 years, fanned daily by the President and the six announced Democratic contenders, whose followers pick up on the rancorous debate and drag it into Congress's deliberations.

We are running headlong into muscle-bound military machines and mountainous deficits, but neither the White House nor the Democratic congressional leadership is willing to yield ground to cut spending and raise taxes enough to prevent more economic chaos. The sentiment grows in Washington for yet another presidential commission to resolve the deadlock: a device used for the dilemmas on the MX missile, Social Security, Central America and hunger. While it has helped produce notable results for the MX and Social Security issues, the resort to the commission procedure represents an admission of political gridlock.

Democratic presidential strategists say privately that the only way their candidates ever gain attention is to attack what Ronald Reagan says and does. Presidential Candidate Senator Alan Cranston practically points with pride to the fact that he is against virtually every major Reagan policy. Reagan, of course, got into office as a partisan fighter. He has calmed a bit, but the old instincts rise when the bands play and the G.O.P. elephants parade.

A good deal of the blame for today's exaggerated political uproar belongs to television, which turns politics into programmed entertainment. The more extreme the event, the more TV air time it tends to get. James David Barber of Duke University believes that the networks will have more to say about who the presidential candidates will be next year than the political parties; hence all the witless clamor.

Analyst Horace Busby, a former Lyndon Johnson aide, went to Princeton the other day and warned that "unbridled partisanship implants within our free system the seeds of its destruction." A collision is coming, he said. "Americans are demanding performance, not partisanship, not provocations, not promises." The Democrats in their midterm convention in Philadelphia last summer seemed like a collection of caucuses (gays, women, blacks, et cetera) fiercely loyal only to themselves. If there was a transcending theme, nobody caught it amid all the self-centered statements and accusations.

Not long ago, a group of moderate Republicans, as alarmed by the New Right as the New Left, formed a fund-raising unit to help their ilk. Among them was Arthur Larson, an Under Secretary of Labor, director of USIA and political theorist in Eisenhower's Administration (he wrote the book A Republican Looks at His Party). Ike, believes Larson, was the last President to understand fully that national progress is almost always made in the authentic American middle and not on the edges. Ike sought out common ground, not partisan differences. Larson's wry comment on today's political babble: "It must be very comfortable to be an extremist. You don't have to think--just shout." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.