America on the Brink

spend our days attacking, insulting, and belittling one another. Today our citizenry follow leaders – Democratic, Republican, Independent, Liberal and Conservative - who have embraced verbal violence and employ it to ground and advance their political careers, campaigns, offices, policies, and public service. Worse yet, they engage in verbal political violence themselves. This is a small part of a broader political crisis others are noticing. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic , waded into these issues in a provocative essay titled “A Nation Coming Apart.” Out of the conversations, and others like it, emerged the idea for the special issue you are now reading, what we have called “How to Stop a Civil War.” We don’t believe that conditions in the United States today resemble those of 1850s America. But we worry that the ties that bind us are fraying at alarming speed – we are becoming contemptuous of each other in ways that are both dire and possibly irreversible (Goldberg, 8). 1 An issue invoking language of a civil war should cause alarm as animosity and division run bone deep in this country. Jonathan Rauch’s article “Rethinking Polarization” in National Affairs examines the dire conditions of polarization today. 2 He begins with a story of a mechanic called to help a motorist but left her stranded because of her political affiliation. Human decency and civility are declining. I found his assessment of our inability to compromise as a rejection of governance incredibly insightful as well as his analysis of the tribal nature of partisanship today and its threat on liberal democratic ideals. Yoni Appelbaum’s essay in the aforementioned issue of The Atlantic “How America Ends” references startling research by Vanderbilt University that show how “both Republicans and Democrats (are) distressingly willing to dehumanize members of the opposite party” (Applebaum, 46). 3 Researchers found that our political rhetoric describes members of the opposite party as lacking basic human traits. This is where we are today. Appelbaum then notes how “overheated rhetoric has helped radicalize some individuals who resort to violence. This is just a small sample of work being done on the condition of our political system today and this work shows just how low we have sunk into the morass of evil all “ in the name of good – God, country, political party, and ideology. ” Verbal Violence and Politics For a citizenry that spends so much time paying lip service to Jesus Christ (remember WWJD – what would Jesus do) and leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who sought to live by his example, it is evident that we have not heeded their warnings about the temptation to be drawn into evils like retaliatory violence – verbal and physical. Given the moral condition in which we find ourselves as a society, I felt led by God to use this quarter’s article

1 Jeffrey Goldberg, “A Nation Coming Apart,” The Atlantic (December 2019), 8. 2 Jonathan Rauch, “Rethinking Polarization,” National Affairs (Fall 2019), 86-100. 3 Yoni Applebaum, “How America Ends,” The Atlantic (December 2019), 46.

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