"Love it or leave it"

One of the few places in the U.S. where you can't call someone a racist is the U.S. Capitol Building -- or at least the congressional chambers there. The Speaker of the House was rebuked by a member of her own party earlier this week for making the commonly-heard assertion that the current President of the United States is a racist. That's because congressional rules dating back to the time of Thomas Jefferson forbid personal attacks on the President and other politicians. It  likewise forbids our representatives and senators from calling the President (or each other) a traitor, and it presumably also discourages disparagement on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, etc. We may assume that, were Donald Trump a congressman, he would be ruled out of order for telling the four women known as "The Squad," in effect to go back where they came from. The remark that started the current trouble really demonstrates Trump's ignorance of detail more than anything else, if he made it on the assumption that all four women, not only one of them, are immigrants. The President has since revised his opinion, falling back to the typical reactionary position that people who, in his opinion, hate this country (and Israel, apparently) should leave it. On this ground the "ideas" idealized by ideological Republicans become the unalterable "culture" revered by populist Trumpists.

Dissenters hold that the nation's guiding ideas can and sometimes should change; they deny that the nation would be less "America" as a result. While the right debates whether "ideas" or "culture" define the country, some on the left take a more populist position, to the extent that their first loyalty is to "people" rather than ideas. They argue for the people's right to define the nation's ideas  without constraint from existing ideas or culture. To them, there's no such thing as an "un-American" idea -- except, paradoxically, for those bigotries some see as originally and damningly American. To them it's almost the greatest insult to be told you should leave the country for wanting to change it. They would deny that wanting to change the country, however fundamentally, means that they hate it. At the same time, of course, the other side would deny that making a "love it or leave it" demand, or even a "go back where you came from" demand of dissenters is hate speech.

Few people define themselves as haters, but just about everyone, it can seem, is seen as a hater by someone else. If you oppose Trump you hate the country. If you support him, you hate humanity, or at least large portions of it. All of this predates Trump and will persist after him. It's the slow death of a certain kind of liberalism embodied in that quaint congressional rule, which expects political differences not to be grounded in hatred. That liberalism assumes, perhaps naively in the final analysis, that the stakes in politics aren't high enough to justify hate or offensive name calling. Too many people feel differently now, and many chafe under the old rules of civility where they still apply. They may deplore a rule that seems to forbid speaking "truth" to power, but how many are ready to hear every asserted "truth?" Each of us may assume that his ideas are true, but not all truths are equally self-evident. That may grow only more apparent over time.