Wise observers of the American scene — like documentarian Ken Burns in his recent commencement address at Vanderbilt — urge us to resist a “binary” view of our political and moral landscape. They beseech us to try to recognize the virtues of those with whom we disagree and to seek to bridge differences with understanding and empathy as if that might bring out the good in all of us.
I say nonsense! Successive generations of slaveowners in the south may have softened in their treatment of those they owned. They may have schooled their children, traded whip for compassion and slept with their women, men or children in some semblance of a loving relationship. Hitler may have coddled house pets even as he incinerated their owners. But in the larger measure of things, he and his ilk remained evil incarnate and any attempt at temporizing with them amounted to complicity in their evil.
Burns in his commencement address inadvertently acknowledged the impossibility of the inclusiveness he preached, for at the end of his speech he implored his listeners to rally against the existential threat posed by Trump and the specter of his reelection. To pretend that there is something of ourselves in Trump supporters is only to acknowledge the feral parts of human nature that must be resisted at all costs.
There is a reason that in waging war we reduce the enemy in our breast-beating rhetoric to bestial simplicity – Huns, Japs and so on — because there is, thank heavens, an innate humanity in us all that cannot harm another human being unless our shared humanity is temporarily erased. I do not propose that we dehumanize ourselves in our struggle against Trumpism by dehumanizing its acolytes. But the forgiving impulses and ecumenism that Burns wants us to hold close are biblical bullshit.
The hard fact is that Trump has placed us in mortal combat over what is indisputably right, the very essence of the American experiment. If ruthlessness within the limits of the law and common decency – emphasis: within the limits of the law and common decency — is what it takes for the right to survive, then so be it. Because otherwise ruthlessness with no resemblance to law or common decency will prevail. Listen up, Joe Biden.