In the 1995 film, The American President, Senator Bob Rumson (played by Richard Dreyfuss) decides to run against President Andrew Shepherd (played by Michael Douglas). Rumson attacks Shepherd by going after his girlfriend (Shepherd is a widower), charging Sydney Ellen Wade (played by Annette Bening) with being a card-carrying member of the ACLU who was at a demonstration protesting South African apartheid years before, a gathering at which an American flag was burned. He also charges her with sleeping her way to the top of her profession as a professional lobbyist. Incensed, Shepherd finally strikes back, asking Rumson why he professes to love America while he so clearly hates Americans.
In this sense, the 2016 presidential campaign may be a deja vu moment, or at least one where life imitates art. Candidates seem intent on gaining support by stoking fear and hatred of others. This is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Since the first party-contested presidential election in American history, the 1800 battle between Federalist John Adams and Republican Thomas Jefferson, the ground has always been fertile for candidates who wish to sow hatred and discontent.
As a vehicle for channeling passionate intensity into peaceful change rather than violent revolution, elections offer a needed safety valve for the political pressure cooker. Public anger clearly also provides a way to pump energy for change into the political system every four years. Yet, as George Washington reminded us about the "spirit of party" in his Farewell Address: "A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume."
In the current election cycle, candidates have been lighting flames in a lot of places, inciting fear and anger on a host of issues and against people as varied as other candidates, illegal immigrants (and, indirectly, legal Hispanic immigrants and citizens), Muslims, the wealthy, African Americans, gays, reporters, legal Syrian immigrants, federal bureaucrats, police, and of course anyone who can be labeled "liberal," "conservative," "evangelical," "abortionist," "gun-toting," and the list goes on.
Stoking hatred may be a productive campaign strategy, creating as it does wedge issues and energetic voting blocks. But what makes for successful campaigning makes for bad governance. After the votes are counted, the new president, not to forget representatives and senators, have to find a way to bridge the differences they -- and their nominally independent PACs -- have fostered. Jefferson understood this when he beat Adams. In his inaugural address, he pleaded: "Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions." He found these words were not enough to cauterize the social wounds that he and the electoral contest created.
American greatness is not built on fostering hatred of other Americans but on getting them to work together. They don't need to love each other, but it would help if they had enough tolerance and commitment to talk civilly. Such conversation is the foundation on which collaborative and productive political and social change gets built.
For too long, candidates have pledged to heal the political divide, ignoring the obvious fact that widening it during their campaigns provides them with an almost impossible challenge once elected. Indeed, the inability to deliver on their campaign promises, because they have so poisoned the well of social harmony, merely feeds public cynicism about the capacity of politicians to govern. Voters angry at politicians for making promises they don't keep should recognize that those promises never had much chance. Whoever is elected president will enter office with the enmity of nearly half of America. This will lead to the next cycle of broken dreams, to be followed by the next campaign stoked by fear and hatred.
Sociologists would call this an addictive cycle, the repetition of behavior we know is harmful yet that produces a short-term "high" despite its long-term damage. Breaking our addiction to political intolerance will take social and electoral reform. It will also take moral courage to forge a different path to the presidency and beyond. There is neither courage nor morality in getting Americans to hate other Americans. It would be nice if real, not just fictional, presidents and candidates acted on that realization.