House in the nineteenth century. Those are acts of violence seen in hockey rinks and on street corners but rarely in the civic arena. We are now examining—and we always do this. The Goldwater-Johnson election was about fundamental questions. You know, the Bush-Gore election, before it got to the court, was about nothing. I think the 2012 election will be about something quite substantial.
Democracy is messy. Now, we’ve talked about the Civil War a couple times, and I think we all agree that Lincoln was a great leader, that Lincoln saved the Union and freed the slaves. And in his second inaugural, he wondered whether all of the blood that had been drawn by the lash would have to be answered by blood drawn by the sword. Lincoln’s a great hero to us. But not withstanding that, he was a civil libertarian disaster. Right?
President Wilson had all this great rhetoric about freedom and the Fourteen Points and “open covenants openly arrived at,” and his civil liberties record was repugnant. And his civil rights record was even worse.
“This is a messy, messy, messy system because we deal in this country with big, big, big questions. And maybe that’s the answer about civility.” David Shribman
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And so I think we have to realize that presidents are human. They have lots of faults and frailties. And every period that reflects those presidents is full of contradiction and contention. We think of the Kennedy period of 1961 to 1963 as a thousand days of idealism, and yet the president resisted Martin Luther King at every step, until he could basically resist him no more. And so this is a messy, messy, messy system because we deal in this country with big, big, big questions. And maybe that’s the answer about civility. Maybe there are periods of incivility, as long as they don’t become Charles Sumner moments, when things have to get a little bit nasty. I don’t much like it—I don’t like it at all—but we are wrestling with big questions that were not wrestled with between 1933 and 1945 in Germany. They were not wrestled with between 1917 and 1989 in the Soviet Union. They were not wrestled—you can go through every tyranny in history. We wrestle with big issues mostly in a civil way. And there’s flaring of incivility. And I know I’m getting off the script here because we’re supposed to be deploring incivility, and I do deplore it. But maybe sometimes you have to have a little bit of it.