One of the great joys of my life is my decades-long friendships with people who are far to my left. They’re as pro-choice as I am pro-life. They have different ideas of what religious liberty means. They opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom, but when I volunteered to serve, they printed T-shirts with my name on them as a symbol of support. Once I got there, they helped flood my unit with care packages.
And for election cycle after election cycle, the conservatives and liberals in the group debated the races — sometimes in email threads that stretched into thousands of words — but none of it shook our friendships.
Baseball brought us together. We met in law school, discovered our shared love for the game and formed a fantasy baseball league (yes, I’m fully aware of my abject nerdiness). It was a fun marriage of convenience between relative strangers that I thought might last through law school at most.
But 33 years later, our shared values have kept us together — a commitment to truth and compassion in our dealings with each other, a respect for open debate and honest inquiry, an underlying humility that told us that we needed to hear opposing views because none of us is perfect and a willingness to be able to live with disagreement without surrendering to bitterness or anger.
This part of my life is one reason I’m not surprised to see the easy rapport onstage between Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, or to watch the mutual affection between Adam Kinzinger and the crowd at the Democratic National Convention this summer. I’ve seen Democrats erupt in applause and appreciation for other, less famous, Republicans who’ve laid careers (and sometimes their lives) on the line to defend American democracy.
There are political positions, and then there are deep values, and ultimately — when it comes to the deep values — like often finds like, and friendships that seem unusual can suddenly make sense. And so it was with us. Over time, the baseball part of our relationship faded into the background. The friendship is now the core.
It’s easy to be cynical about politicians (and pundits, for that matter). In fact, it can be naïve not to be cynical about politicians (or pundits, for that matter), but it remains a fact that not every move they make is coldly calculated self-interest. Maybe there is some place for some dissenting Republicans in a Harris administration, but if cold self-interest were the only factor in play, there is a much easier path to power for Republicans in 2024. They can bend the knee to Donald Trump.
I’ve spent much of the last nine years in the company of Republicans and former Republicans who can’t abide Trump, and while they’re a collection of human beings like anyone else — full of quirks and foibles and manifold imperfections — there is a common thread. There’s a sense that the Republican Party has changed its deep values, and that any remaining policy agreements are the decaying artifacts of times past.
I worry sometimes that the effort to describe this emerging American realignment is hampered by the shorthand phrases we use to describe big concepts. “Democracy is on the ballot” has a nice ring to it — and the virtue of raising the right kind of alarms after “Stop the Steal” and Jan. 6 — but it’s imprecise and potentially wrong. After all, I fully expect that America will have another election in 2028. My alarm is rooted more in the kind of democracy we’ll have than whether we’ll have any kind of democracy at all.
I’m perhaps more persuaded by a different, far less catchy slogan: the rule of law is on the ballot. If Trump wins and exempts himself and many thousands of his supporters from legal accountability, it’s more like America will have something like royal justice, where accountability exists for all but a ruthless ruling class.
We know that Trump loves the aesthetics and personality of royalty and autocracy. He lives an opulent, gold-trimmed life and has openly envied the perceived absolute loyalty and obedience that kings and dictators command. He has long sought their authority. Now he wants their freedom from accountability.
But when I speak of the deep values that are driving some Republicans toward Democrats and some Democrats toward Trump, I’m speaking of something beyond policy, to ways of thinking, being and knowing that make pluralism possible.
This week, Americans were treated to two very different closing arguments — one in Madison Square Garden from Trump and his allies, and one in the nation’s capital from Harris. The difference was striking.
On Tuesday night, Harris made the case for unity. “Unlike Donald Trump,” she said, “I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”
Days earlier, at Madison Square Garden, an insult comic called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage,” Tucker Carlson engaged in racist mockery, saying Harris would be the first “Samoan, Malaysian, low I.Q. former California prosecutor” to become president, and Trump himself, well, he was exactly who he’s always been.
When I watched Trump and his allies speak, my lawyer’s mind drifted to a common law concept called the “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” In law, extreme and intentional mistreatment of individuals could be so outrageous that it actually gave rise to a right to sue in court for damages.
That right is rooted in a transcendent cross-cultural revulsion at the idea that one would actually try to inflict pain on a fellow human being. In a very real way, Trump’s campaign — and the entire MAGA ethos — is rooted in a political version of that legal concept. He is trying to hurt his perceived enemies.
When we say that Trump attacks democracy — or that Trump attacks the rule of law — those are just symptoms of the underlying disease. He hates everyone who doesn’t serve him, and democracy and the rule of law have been two of the principal obstacles to his cruelty.
Those obstacles exist by design. The founders feared the damage that demagogues could do in democratic societies, and they placed roadblock after roadblock in their path. They divided power. They ratified a Bill of Rights. They established four-year terms for presidents so that they’d be accountable for their performance. During the second founding after the Civil War, the United States abolished slavery, codified equal protection of the law and extended the protection of the Bill of Rights to guard against oppression by governments at every level of American society.
Think back to my description of my friendships. There was passionate disagreement, but never cruelty. In those rare times when anger burned too hot, alarm bells rang in our collective conscience.
These basic principles of friendship are also basic principles of community. We can endure conflict. In fact, conflict is both healthy and inevitable in a diverse democracy. Truth and wisdom are not exclusive to any single American community. But nothing can close our minds and hearts to the virtues of our neighbors faster than outright cruelty and malice. That’s exactly the moment our consciences should rebel, when we should raise our hand and say, “Stop.”
That’s why it’s important to see former bitter political rivals unite as ex-presidents to present a united front in times of political transition or national mourning. That’s why it was important when Tip O’Neill, then the House speaker, was at Ronald Reagan’s bedside after he was almost killed in an assassination attempt. That’s why it’s touching to see George W. Bush and Michelle Obama hug in a moment of seemingly genuine affection.
That’s not the “uniparty” or “regime” or “elite” displaying malignant solidarity against the people. It’s leaders showing us what decency in a pluralistic democracy looks like.
It is just as difficult for a career pro-life lawyer to extend his or her hand to a career pro-choice activist as it is for the career pro-choice activist to take that hand. These are not small differences. Nor was it (or is it) a small thing to disagree over the Iraq War. But none of us should be arrogant enough to presume that disagreement over even the most consequential issues is proof of the thoughtlessness, much less bad character, of our opponents.
The longer that MAGA persists as the dominant faction of the Republican Party, the more we will see this realignment take place. At the level of deepest values, like will continue to find like. It’s not just conservatives who are crossing the aisle to join Democrats, there are liberals who are crossing the aisle to join Republicans.
MAGA brags that it’s expanding the Republican coalition to include Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard and people who like and admire them. Conspiracy calls out to the conspiracist.
Make no mistake, the realignment is not yet complete, and it may never easily track onto partisan politics. I voted for Kamala Harris this week — the very first vote I’ve ever cast for a Democrat in national politics — but if she wins I will oppose any effort to revive Roe, legislatively or judicially.
There will be arguments. Some may be intense. But this much I know — temporary tolerance can build into permanent affection. Wary partners can become fast friends. Many of us have been ejected from places we never thought we’d leave, and some of us have entered rooms where we never thought we’d be welcomed. And it is in these spaces where the seeds of American renewal are planted and nurtured.
Some other things I did
I thought long and hard about what to write in these last days before the election, and I settled on a trilogy of sorts. Today’s newsletter was the second piece. The first came on Sunday, when I reflected on what I’ve learned from the ongoing failure of the Never Trump movement. Why did so many Republicans seem to change so much, so fast, and why did I misjudge the people I thought I knew so well?
If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only.
In fact, that’s a prime reason so many conservative writers dismissed the Trump phenomenon out of hand. We were all familiar with the unyielding ideological litmus test. Many of us remembered the slings and arrows directed at anyone who stepped out of line. The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party.
Right until they didn’t. Trump has changed the equation entirely. He’s a big-government, isolationist libertine who — despite nominating half the justices who helped overturn Roe — has made the G.O.P. platform more pro-choice than it’s been in almost 50 years. Not only has he not been punished for this ideological transformation, but devotion to him is the new Republican loyalty test.
Don’t think for a moment that is because he won an intelligent ideological argument. When he gained a critical mass of support, millions of Republicans faced a stark choice: ideology or community?
I also wrote a first round of thoughts for our blog about the Harris-Cheney alliance and the differences between the MAGA movement and the Harris coalition:
MAGA has a high floor and a low ceiling. The ferocity and group solidarity of MAGA means that it’s hard to ever see Trump polling below his 2016 vote share. His support is baked in and unshakable. At the same time, the same characteristics that bind MAGA together repel much of the rest of the country.
Harris’s coalition, which ranges from Liz Cheney to the Squad of congressional progressives, has a lower floor and a higher ceiling. Harris doesn’t enjoy the cult following of Trump, but there are more Trump opponents than Trump supporters, and if she can extend a welcoming hand to as many people and factions as possible — without alienating other people and factions — then she’ll probably win.
The post The Harris-Cheney Partnership Is Not Just a Marriage of Convenience appeared first on New York Times.
