Struggle for Peace

I had supposed I’d discuss William F. Buckley, Jr., today, but although the OSU library has sent me the standard bio of Buckley and a volume of his interviews, I still don’t have his first book, God and Man at Yale, which vaulted him immediately into the front rank of movement conservatism in the 1950s. I want to read that for myself before I continue.

So I find myself temporarily on hold. Which gives me a chance to discuss the proposed main title for this evolving book: “Struggle for Peace.”

When I first decided to fashion these blog posts into a book, its title came to me spontaneously. It took me a couple of days to puzzle out what it actually meant. “Struggle” is obvious: it will take a tremendous effort to end this epidemic of divisiveness, much of it quite deliberately created and maintained. But the goal—“Peace”—what did that actually mean?

I decided that it was like the peace that prevails in a healthy family. Conflict arises, sometimes quite serious and hard to solve, but it occurs in the context of love and fundamental respect for each family member, as well as the necessary skill set to resolve conflict constructively and a commitment to adhere to that goal— constructive engagement with the conflict and a determination to resolve it in a mutually respectful way, one that does not rend the fabric of the family. Such a family may be said to be at peace, no matter the challenges it must inevitably face.

Transferring this model to political culture, it involves a turning away from the demonization of political opponents and a determination not to resolve problems; that ideological purity is instead the overriding concern. In this toxic culture, mutual respect is absent, consciously replaced with mockery, scorn, habitual imputation of the worst motives to the other side, dismissal of basic comity in legislative relationships. Efforts at bipartisanship are interpreted as betrayal.

A family whose internal dynamic followed a pattern even remotely like this would yield nothing but hurt, rage, and alienation. And it would frame the basic world view of family members, extending it to life in general: that no one can be trusted, that cries for help will be met with scorn and rejection, that even basic questions will be dismissed as invalid, as inappropriate even to dare to ask them, that rage is the only response to the inevitable conflicts that arise in in life. It is, quite simply, a world view that Is a self-imposed hell.

And it is a dynamic that tumbles down from generation to generation, like a pursuing wraith—until someone finds the wisdom and strength to turn and face this dynamic, see it for what it is, take a stand against it, refuse to replicate it in one’s own family. Such a person will save the generations that follow. These persons may themselves be forgotten, but their legacy will endure. They will have, by whatever unlikely chance or perhaps with the aid of a loving, divine power that reaches out to help, discovered peace, creating families that are also at peace, in the sense that I have described.

And occasionally, albeit very occasionally, I have seen such heroes, so I know that such outcomes are possible. They struggle for peace, and they achieve it.

There are people—more people than one might suppose—already engaged in such activity in the public sphere, who reject the toxic political culture and are devising practical ways to combat it. If they succeed, they will save the republic. If they fail, we are truly lost, for this toxic culture will also tumble down from generation to generation, chasing us down the years, driving us to the same fate as so many republics, so many democracies.