Politics used to be fun.
I grew up outside the Beltway in Virginia, the son of a wire-service journalist and a public schoolteacher. One parent leaned left, the other was solid right. One parent went to daily Mass, the other, well, I could count on one hand the number of times I saw that one inside a church. We ate dinner together a lot. We talked about politics. Both parents had strong feelings — about many things — but one was typically a terrific listener while the other could be dogmatic, insistent on having the last word.
The day I was born, news had just broken about the Watergate tapes. By age 7, I had watched All the President’s Men. I could’ve recited my father’s litanylike explanation of the Saturday Night Massacre, when two top Justice Department officials resigned in succession, refusing President Nixon’s demand to fire the special prosecutor. This was high drama, but as my 1980s childhood unfurled, I was innocent of its weight. We were past all that. Everything was Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill and hating the Soviets. America had righted the ship of state, and I could read the pile of Time and U.S. News & World Report magazines next to our easy chair in search of new intrigue — and understanding.
I don’t know. Maybe I was a weird kid. Serious matters continued to beset the United States. I just felt like we the people could talk about it.
Best at my house were the Sunday brunches, when journalists and their spouses would cross the Potomac for my father’s bloody marys and my mother’s eggs Benedict and hash out their surprisingly wide-ranging political differences while I inhaled the strange, alchemical, adult-world mist of rivalry, freewheeling contempt and friendship. The conversations were informative, sharp-elbowed, shocking, hilarious, like a taping of The McLaughlin Group in our crackerbox dining room. I was the television camera.
No one was shamed for any opinions. No one went home angry. Or canceled.
I came of voting age in time for the 1992 campaign season, delighted that my time had come.
As things turned out, I would enjoy exactly two presidential elections where I felt good — meaning, I suppose, a satisfying values alignment with the candidate and party of my choice.
In the run-up to 2000, disappointed with both candidates, I lapsed into a lesser-of-two-evils mindset. Then 9/11 hit and we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and I watched as our two major parties allowed the nastier animosities of the 1990s to harden into ideological extremes. Moderate politicians disappeared. Republicans parroted the hypocritical sneers of talk radio hosts about the “drive-by media” and Democrats cheered offensive remarks about clinging to guns and religion and the “basket of deplorables.”
What changed? American political insults go back at least as far as the Jeffersonian assault on John Adams’ “hideous hermaphroditical character” in 1800. But it seems to me the insults and mutual revilement were never more than a sideshow to sober, knowledgeable deliberations over the day’s issues that retained a sincere regard for our Constitution and our shared values as Americans. While candidates and their publicity teams could always get personal, those rhubarbs around my parents’ dining-room table never did. There, without anyone having to lay out rules of engagement or create “safe spaces” that always seem to be safer for some than for others, it was ideas and opinions that got slammed, not people.
It’s like we’ve forgotten the dictum that ad hominem attacks are the lowest form of disputation. They’re not really arguments at all, when you think about it. They cover for an embarrassing inability to argue.
We’re now in what I consider our third straight presidential election season where the referendum on the candidates’ personae — and the accompanying national fret over what my vote and yours signal about our virtues or lack thereof — has eclipsed genuine scrutiny of matters that affect us all and that never boil down to the easy binaries of R or D, blue or red, good guy/bad guy, path A versus path B. Life is so much more complicated than that, and our politics should be, too. Ask vegetarian America how it’d feel about a dinner menu that offered a choice of burgers or pork chops night after night after night after night.
But OK, you are happy with the American divide, and feel good about the choice you’ll make this fall. I’m sure you have your reasons. Voting Democratic? Voting Republican? When’s the last time either party’s platform emerged from careful debate among an ideologically diverse spectrum of party leaders and the convention vote mattered, the outcome of tense, high-stakes compromises aimed at making an appeal to the widest possible number of voters? When is the last time you read a party’s platform to determine whether the candidates were really running on those things that mean the most to you — or had any intention of delivering on their promises? In 2020, the GOP simply reissued the same document it produced four years before. Did that affect the outcome of the race?
Other questions are surely rising in your mind. Who is this guy? Where’s he coming from? What’s his agenda?
I know, I play that game, too. I may have lost my youthful taste for American political life, but I still read everything I can, and I’m always sizing up the author.
You may think you have my political persuasion pegged; I’d bet you are wrong. But here goes: What three-plus decades of American citizenship and seven increasingly disappointing presidential election cycles have taught me is that I am a Catholic in political life as in morals and worship, and like virtually every other adult I know — Catholic or otherwise — I would like my vote to reflect my conscience. But not as boiled down to a single issue or filtered through a lot of crossed fingers, cynicism and insincerity. I want something better than a lesser-of-two-evils choice, options that inspire me and persuade me of their goodness, not just for me and my family, but for the commons, the political community as a whole.
Without that, what’s our democracy for? If it’s just a ruse for the perpetuation of power among an elitist, wealthy leadership class, then I say what Flannery O’Connor once said of the Eucharist were it really nothing more than a symbol: to hell with it. But the truth is, voting my beliefs without having to choose which few to prefer over the rest is simply not possible under the present two-party system.
I don’t have space here to run down the issues, but being what I have long called on my dusty Facebook profile a “political Catholic,” I believe things like this:
Public policy need not pit the needs and health of women against the lives and sufferings of unborn children.
Nor must it address climate change and the energy crisis on the backs of families and the working poor.
Nor does it have to foment class struggle or racial animosity, or frame the immigration debate as a choice between border security on the one hand or, on the other, solving national economic problems while welcoming the millions of human beings who just want the same chance at a roof, safety, three hots and a decent job that brought my great-grandparents here from Hungary and the Netherlands 125 years ago.
Political compromise today comes at the level of the individual conscience rather than the group deliberation, leaving many of us feeling internally split. Again, it seems I may have some of my beliefs, but not most and certainly not all of them.
Libertarians in America love their freedom of choice and come in every political stripe. Move left to see demands for reproductive control get broader and bigger. Move right to see school voucher plans pushed toward a no-strings-attached extreme. Many of us appear comfortable, though, with the simple chocolate or vanilla of the two-party system, particularly where national offices are concerned. Where’s the room for other points of view, or a party apparatus willing to brook dissent? Political compromise today comes at the level of the individual conscience rather than the group deliberation, leaving many of us feeling internally split. Again, it seems I may have some of my beliefs, but not most and certainly not all of them.
In 2016, I started looking around to find a political party that represented me. I knew what I was looking for: a vision based on Catholic social and moral teaching, a communitarian corrective to exhausted libertarianism, a renewed embrace of e pluribus unum and a realistic hope — in the face of accelerating wealth disparities fueled by societywide addictions to convenience and greed — of reshaping our economy around the assurance of equal opportunity for all.
Because I’m an American, I didn’t realize that what I wanted has a name: Christian democracy. And it’s never been viable here, for a lot of reasons.
First, we Americans prize individual liberty over our genuine but secondary concerns for the common good. Second, we are given to very fuzzy (and inaccurate) notions of the separation of Church and State as some kind of constitutional bedrock and hear terms like “Christian democracy” as thinly veiled attempts to impose theocracy. Imagine my surprise to learn of European parties winning with the full collaboration of Catholics and Calvinists, and even more of the success of Muslim parties at least inspired by Christian democratic principles in Indonesia, the Philippines and Turkey — and their participation in the Belgium-based Centrist Democrat International.
These parties affirm “confessional liberty.” They’re not about evangelism but a chance to show what Christian principles taken seriously might contribute to a society shared by Christians and non-Christians alike.
Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher most closely identified with the movement and its spread across Europe and Latin America after World War II, is said to have thought the U.S. didn’t need a Christian democratic party because the country already embodied the ideal. Indeed, much of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had already borrowed from ideas articulated in the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931).
Since then, the American consensus began to erode, religious identification has gone into decline, and Christian democratic parties abroad faltered as they diluted their principles or gave into one form or another of infighting, corruption or general human failing. This is, after all, a valley of tears.
But the principles endure. Christian Democrats call for solidarity with the marginalized, for decision-making at levels as close to those affected as possible — the notion of subsidiarity — and for a “personalist” approach to political and economic life that favors the rights and dignity of each person while respecting the legitimate interests of the community as a whole. In my mind, these are principles worth fighting for. I believe they hold the last, best hope we have of reprising what Lin-Manuel Miranda calls the “great, unfinished symphony” of America in another glorious movement.
The performance of American third parties over the last 165 years doesn’t offer me much hope. Socialists have never mustered much support here, to the puzzlement of certain European observers. At the helm of the “Bull Moose” Progressive Party in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt nabbed 88 electoral votes, most probably from his unpopular former Republican vice president, attracting reform-spirited voters largely on personal appeal. In 1948 and 1968, Strom Thurmond and George Wallace showed regrettable regional potency. Ross Perot drew nearly 20 million voters in 1992. Today’s Libertarians and Greens, on the ballot in all or most states, do well to attract 1 percent of the popular vote. Still, in June this year, Gallup reported more than 51 percent of Americans identifying with neither political party, the highest figure for political independents since it began tracking affiliation in 2004. People are looking around.
I have no illusions that the Christian democratic American Solidarity Party founded in 2011 and hustling to appear on the ballot in as many states this year as it did four years ago, will win the White House. It will struggle to gain traction in a handful of state and local races in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas. Running for president, Peter Sonski, the U.S. Marine veteran and former radio host whose highest elected office is school-board member, spoke at Holy Cross College last spring to an audience of maybe five dozen people. But the party has options and heart and the attention even of nonmembers like me. Where else should it start?
And what would success look like? If the two-party system proves intractable, and the national Rs and Ds yet find a way to rally voters around something more than rage against the other tribe, then perhaps it’s a centrist, bipartisan ASP caucus working together toward consensus and the common good. “I think ASP people would be open to that,” says Daniel Philpott, a Notre Dame political scientist who sits on the party’s board.
Is there room in the political ecosystem for the ASP pelican in a landscape of donkeys and elephants, Libertarian porcupines and Green sunflowers? I’m not recruiting you. If your vote for a Democrat or Republican this fall expresses your vision for the ideas and policies you believe are best for all of us, you should act on that. But it strikes me, as it appears to have occurred to half the voters across the land, that it’s time to demand more choices, if only to shake up the ideologically petrified parties we have.
I don’t need politics to be “fun” again, but I would like to believe I can engage in public life with my whole self, mind, body and soul. I’d welcome substantive, good-faith disagreements with diametrically opposed political adversaries, provided I may articulate my beliefs and my reasons for them and not have my livelihood threatened by social-media trolls or be co-opted by a party that would readily dispense with half or more of what I’d have to say.
That’s attractive. Making it reality requires political animals, you and me, thinking, speaking and acting on conscience — and insisting that the lesser of two evils is beneath us.
John Nagy is managing editor of this magazine.