David French wrote an article under the
title: “Partisan Hate Is Becoming a National Crisis,” and the subtitle: “Tens
of millions of Americans think members of the opposing party are less than
human.” It was published on March 13, 2019 in National Review Online.
The writer describes the situation in
America as he sees it, and corroborates his observation by quoting an article
that was published in the New York Times. He did so because the Times article
had itself mentioned a study containing statistics that prove America is going
through a period of “lethal mass partisanship”.
French goes on to expand on his thoughts,
then reveals his central preoccupation: liberty. He put it this way: “After all,
the defense of liberty in the public square can never be merely legalistic. To
be effective it also has to humanize. And crucially, it also has to educate.”
Well then, did David French educate his readers?
To answer that question, we need to
digress for a moment, and probe into the meaning of the word “educate.” I was a
teacher before I retired, and there is much that I can say, drawing on my
observation of students. But I'll do something different because I know I can
be more accurate. I’ll tell of the different phases through which I navigated
before I came to understand how a car does function.
I must have been around three years of age
when I sat on the passenger seat of the car that my father was driving. I could
see his feet push on pedals; see one hand manipulate a stick, which I later
learned was shifting gears, and I could see both hands steer a wheel. I
surmised that I can drive this car because it will know it must move when my
feet will push on its pedals. It will know where to go because I'll speak to it
with my hands on the wheel. As to the stick that tells the car to relax when it
buzzes loudly, I shall not worry about that because the car can buzz all it
wants, and I shall not be bothered.
For perhaps another 2 or 3 years, I came
to think of every piece of equipment as having the ability to understand human
communication, as we tell it what to do. It was just a matter of knowing which
button to push and how to manipulate a lever for the equipment to get the
message. And then it happened one day that the school bus which ferried the kids
that lived far away from school, broke down.
I didn't know what to make of the event,
so I asked a teacher what makes a bus break down. He said that a bus has an
engine which converts the energy that's in gasoline, into the power that moves
the bus. It is like our body, which converts the energy in the food we eat,
into the power that we need to move our arms and legs. Well, I gained a
substantial level of understanding, but that didn't tell me about the nuts and
bolts that made the engine function.
By that time, we lived in the Djibouti
Plateau where my father's workplace and the boys' school as well as the girls'
school were situated close to each other. There was no need for a car in the
family till my oldest brother finished school and got a job that was far enough
from home to require a car, so my father bought him one. And this was the first
time that I had the opportunity to look under the hood of a car and see the
engine. I asked my father how does this engine work?
He explained to me all about the workings
of the internal combustion engine. Suddenly, my thinking shifted from
communicating with equipment because they understand what we tell them (when
pushing on buttons and pulling on levers) to the need to engineer the parts so
that they can work together and produce the desired effect, such as motion. And
this was a level of understanding that went much deeper than simply knowing
that a car engine was converting one form of energy into another, but not
knowing how.
To get back to the David French article, I
ask: how deeply did he educate his readers on the need to be civil to better
defend liberty in the public square? See for yourself. What follows is his
contribution to that end:
“In a time of crisis, American citizens
take cues from the subset of citizens who are most engaged and informed. But
now, this cohort of Americans is driving the engine of division. As Yphtach
Lelkes put it, 'Reflective citizens might be the subset of strong partisan
identifiers most likely to fall in line with the party … The democratic dilemma
may not be whether low information citizens can learn what they need to know,
but whether high information citizens can set aside their partisan
predispositions”.
In other words, from an article that
appeared in the New York Times, Yphtach Lelkes seems to be saying, and David
French seems to agree that what's wrong with America, is that people who are in
public view, and thought to have the correct information, are the ones purveying
the uncivil attitude plaguing society today.
This happens because those people are
motivated, not by reason, but their partisan prejudices, says French. But who
are these people, anyway? Well, one of them is David French himself. So we look
into the article to see if he has finally learned the lesson and shed his usual
fanatic partisanship. But from the way that he started and ended the article,
we are left to wonder if America will ever be saved.
Here is how he began the article: “I want
to begin this piece with a word of praise for Nancy Pelosi. She rejected for
now, calls to impeach Donald Trump. Here were her words: 'Impeachment is so
divisive to the country, I don't think we should go down that path.' Pelosi is
doing something that more politicians should do when making a momentous decision”.
And here is how he ended the article: “I'm
skeptical that Pelosi's current impeachment analysis represents a true shift
from toxic partisanship. After all, her caucus just passed a grievous bill that
limits free speech and exposes more citizens to potential social shaming and
economic reprisal. But her impeachment analysis still represents the right
approach”.
In other words, David French is saying
that Nancy Pelosi, who is a Democrat, did the right thing by rejecting to
impeach the Republican president. But French does not trust Pelosi because her
caucus just passed a bill that fulfills the Democratic agenda.
What this means, is that David French will
trust a Democrat only if he or she will fully and permanently convert to
Republicanism.