The Hour of Maximum Danger - Part 2

In the introduction to my last entry I began with a question and response:

“So just why is it that I find this project so compelling that it’s worth taking a huge professional risk? The answer is twofold: first, my convictions as an historian, and second, a deep-rooted personal compulsion.”

Yesterday I focused on my convictions as an historian. The focus of today’s entry concerns the root of that personal compulsion. It centers on my relationship with my brother Scott.

The introduction to my last entry also included this declaration:

“It is my considered opinion that we are in imminent risk of losing the republic. Not since the Civil War has our country experienced a comparable moment of peril.”

Scott entirely concurs. But he approaches that “imminent risk” from the perspective of a lifelong Republican, whereas I myself have been a lifelong Democrat.

The history of our relationship is fundamental to understanding why I feel a passion strong enough to place at risk my professional career and what remains of my reputation as an historian. So the remainder of this entry is a narrative of that history.

Scott and I were born only eleven months apart, and as a result of being near contemporaries we did nearly everything together from early childhood until about the age of 22, when our life paths began to diverge to a significant degree.

Our relationship had two primary characteristics: the closeness that resulted from having so much in common—including nearly identical interests—and, paradoxically, a strong pattern of near continuous competition. For many years we acknowledged the existence of this pattern but could puzzle out its basis. In recent years, however we have come to believe that it stemmed from the very thing that made our relationship a close one so much of the time: the minimal distance in our ages.

As a result, Scott tended to resent my status as the older brother (especially because I played the role of older brother with gusto). He developed a compulsion—the tyranny of chronology notwithstanding—to catch up with me. Which in turn produced a near continual obsession with achieving that goal.

In this obsession I reciprocated, albeit for a different reason: I have a competitive nature, and when anyone attempts to compete with me my standard response is to compete right back. Thus, as a youth, if someone attempted to outrun me, I made a maximum effort to foil them. I often didn’t succeed, but my failures did nothing to dampen that competitive nature.

Thanks to my permanent status as older brother, there was really only way available to Scott in terms of overtaking me: I was pretty smart and well-informed. He sought to become even smarter and better-informed.

Inevitably, this dimension of our competition took the form of debates characterized by oversized passion and forcefulness. And as we combined a common interest in politics with contrasting political world views, we came to model in microcosm the hyper partisanship that now threatens to destroy the republic.

We had other issues that divided us, of course, the result of the numerous collisions and squabbles common to siblings. And I’m convinced that the forcefulness of our political debates owed in considerable measure to a subtext reflecting the rage and resentments resulting from those issues.

For reasons unrelated to our competition, I came to adopt the conviction that partisan political debate was pointless, because to win an argument was actually to lose it: it did nothing to convince the other person. It dug them instead even more deeply into their existing political convictions. Thus I lost interest in political discussion if it manifested itself as debate.

But Scott’s preferred style of political discussion remained debate, and eventually, between my impatience with collisions over politics and a mutual inability to resolve our other differences, I pulled away from Scott altogether. For a period of about fifteen years we were almost completely estranged. Our friends initially looked upon this estrangement with hope and expectation that it would end, but finally they uniformly formed the conviction that it was permanent.

Yet in fact the estrangement indeed ended, suddenly and unexpectedly, with the main catalyst being the birth of my daughter Chloe in 2011. Her emergence into the world generated a desire to function as a family that almost miraculously dissolved our seemingly invincible estrangement. To be sure, it did not eliminate the old grudges and wounds, but it did produce a quest to heal them.

The task proved difficult, and our relationship often remained turbulent. And we sometimes found the effort so exhausting that we would suspend our relationship, sometimes for months at a time. But we consistently reunited to continue our search for what Leo Tolstoy once expressed as “the discovery of peace.”

Scott and I retained a common interest in politics, and frequently engaged in discussions about it, but these almost invariably remained a rather militant dialogue of the deaf.
All that changed in 2016, spurred by the incredible, highly divisive rise to power of Donald J. Trump.

Concerning Trump there is practically no middle ground. One either loves him or loathes him. But Scott and I attempted—successfully for the most part—to elude this pattern. More precisely, we considered it secondary to our mutual realization that the hyper partisanship that plagued American politics constituted, at the very least, a serious threat to the ability of Americans to address the major issues of the day; and just possibly of the survival of the American republic altogether.

By now the roots of my “deeply rooted compulsion” to understand the dynamics that have brought us to this precipice should be obvious. It stems from a desire—also embraced by Scott—to find a way to sidestep the almost helpless tendency to fall into the pattern of destructive debate that bedevils and instead find a way to achieve constructive dialogue. It has become the central feature our ongoing quest to achieve that elusive discovery of peace.