In tribal times, don't forget what unites us

As the heated debate over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court boils down to a simple question of which tribe will win, it's an excellent time to revisit Abraham Lincoln's reaction to signs that his nation was coming apart.

It would not be "some trans-Atlantic military giant" that threatens our political institutions, he said in a speech to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., in 1838, 22 years before his presidency and the Civil War. Rather, he said, the greatest danger would come from our own battles with each other.

"If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us," he said. "It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."

Lincoln's Lyceum address has special meaning to me, for it came in the wake of the murder two months earlier by a pro-slavery mob of Elijah P. Lovejoy, an anti-slavery newspaper editor and Presbyterian minister in Alton, Ill., whom I call the patron saint of editorial writers.

I hear echoes of those angry times when President Donald Trump fires up a rally crowd with a harangue against mainstream media as "fake news" and "enemies of the American people." I'm not surprised to hear that media bashing still offers a great applause line in a way that transcends party lines.

But how much, I wonder, does that crowd really love democracy, especially when it offers a soapbox to views that disagree with their own?

A poll last year by the Pew Research Center found that only 49 percent of Republicans viewed press criticism as very important for maintaining a strong democracy, compared with 76 percent of Democrats who said so.

Another poll last year by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Polling found that only 53 percent of those surveyed said they "trust judges more than President Trump to make the right decisions for the United States." Among self-identified Trump supporters, about half (51 percent) agreed that Trump should be able to overturn court decisions. Only 33 percent disagreed.

With the revival of racial and ethnically based nationalism here and abroad, particularly in European politics, it is not hard to see comparisons with the tragedy Lincoln saw boiling up in the pre-Civil War times.

"Americans on both the left and the right now view their political opponents not as fellow Americans with differing views, but as enemies to be vanquished," write Yale law professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in the special October issue of The Atlantic on the subject of whether democracy is dying. "And they have come to view the Constitution not as an aspirational statement of shared principles and a bulwark against tribalism, but as a cudgel with which to attack those enemies."

Chua, famous for bringing "tiger moms" into our national conversation on child-rearing, has a new book, "Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations." The Constitution has had unique success as a model for uniting a nation that, even then, was much more diverse than the white men who wrote it -- not along racial, ethnic or religious lines but around a platform of ideas.

Sure, it was self-contradictory to declare a land of freedom and equality where only white, land-owning men could vote. But as Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court's first African-American justice, observed, we should celebrate the document for including the legislative mechanisms for its own improvement, even if it took a Civil War and a civil rights revolution to bring that improvement.

In that sense the coming midterm elections, called the most important midterms ever by people in both parties, really are more important than most. The divisions that have brought political gridlock in Washington call upon us to examine not only opposing platforms of issues but the fundamental obligation that all citizens have to take our politics more seriously than "Which side are you on?"

The rise of resentment as an organizing principle is hardly new, but dueling resentments left unresolved through reasoned debate and cooperation only takes us back down the path against which Lincoln warned, yet which would soon consume the nation and take his life in civil war.

We Americans came here on different ships, goes an old saying in the civil rights movement, but we're all in the same boat now. We may have rough sailing ahead, but we must never lose course as Americans.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)