The newest villain in American life is not the scoundrel, the cheat, the bigot, or the bully. It is, in many circles, the Republican. In other circles, it is the Democrat. The vocabulary changes. The vice does not.
This is an odd achievement for a republic that once taught its children the value of logical debate. A person may serve meals at a shelter, coach children after work, sit with the sick, offer hospitality from their home, raise children with intention, build community, work hard and help a neighbor carry groceries through the rain. Then comes the disqualifying discovery: she is registered with, votes with, or is dating someone from the wrong party. The life disappears. Relationships just stop. The label remains.
Ostracism trains people to hate in the name of goodness. It tells them kindness may be rationed, friendship may be conditional, and neighbors may be treated as contaminants. That is not liberalism, conservatism, Christianity, Judaism, patriotism, or civic virtue. It is fear seeking to call itself principle.
The modern social inquisition has a catechism. Did you vote the wrong way? Did you decline to denounce the proper people in the proper language? Did you use the wrong word, or fail to use the mandated word? You are suspect. Your motives need not be examined. Your conduct need not be weighed. Your humanity may be edited down to a party line and a fashionable insult.
This is prejudice with better tailoring.
The people who turn “Republican” into a synonym for villainy are wrong. The people who use “woke” to dissolve every Democrat into a caricature are wrong. Both are what might properly be called lazy.
The phrase is inelegant. The phenomenon is worse.
George Washington saw the danger early. In his Farewell Address, he warned against the baneful effects of party. Both…not one or the other. His warning was not against disagreement. It was against the corruption of judgment when party becomes identity.
That corruption now visits dinner tables, workplaces, classrooms, neighborhoods, and romantic life. One person hears, “You’re dating a Republican?” and recognizes the sentence for what it has become: not curiosity, but prosecution. Another hears, “You’re a Democrat?” followed by the ritual accusation: woke. In each case, the purpose is the same. Sort.
That is the trouble with all labels. They begin as shorthand and become substitutes for thought.
This habit is often defended as moral seriousness. It is not. Moral seriousness asks what a person has done. Moral panic or virtue signaling asks for a label and stops thinking.
The temptation is not confined to one generation, party, class, religion, region, or ideology. It is a human temptation, made easier by technology, rewarded by social applause, and excused by the comforting belief that contempt is acceptable when directed at the proper target. Every age has its approved outcasts. Every tribe has its sanctioned prejudices. Every faction has a vocabulary that makes cruelty sound virtuous.
This is why citizens who feel endangered must choose a better way.
Name the danger precisely. Do not say, “They are destroying everything.” Say what is at issue. This policy violates conscience. This rule weakens local control. This proposal harms conservation. Specificity is civic discipline.
Read before condemning. Read the bill, the minutes, the budget, the candidate’s statement, the newspaper and the strongest argument on the other side. True knowledge costs real effort.
Engage in the ordinary work of citizenship. Attend meetings. Meet candidates. Ask real questions, not trap questions. Write civil letters to the editor. Vote in every election.
Build alliances beyond party. Ask: Do you also care about conservation? Do you also care about women’s rights? Do you also care about lifting up the poor? A worthy cause may gather Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals and people who care for the same thing from different directions.
Refuse dehumanization. A citizen may oppose without despising. He may disagree without inventing motives. She may criticize a party without reducing every person in it to a moral disease. Once opposition becomes hatred, the citizen becomes the mirror image of the coercion he fears.
Lincoln governed during the country’s greatest moral and constitutional crisis. He called the nation to proceed “with malice toward none; with charity for all.” He understood something Americans forget at their peril: a country cannot survive if every disagreement becomes a ground for excommunication.
Republicans are not evil. Democrats are not villains. Independents are not exempt from folly. The American human being remains mixed, stubborn, contradictory, and capable of error and amazing grace.
