Bipartisanship instructions from Madison and Aquinas

Bridges, not fences! Published in Deseret News, in Utah.

Echo opinion:  A fence won’t bridge the political gap: The political divide in America was not what our founders intended for us. We can still build bridges instead of fences By Brad Barber.

When I was 16, my parents decided to send me to my grandfather’s ranch to work for the summer. They said it would build character.

Bipartisanship is about building political bridges.

They were right.

Grandpa put me in charge of a team of workers to install a 300-foot line of fence — a project that required operating heavy equipment and welding a daunting number of pipes. I felt like a true cowboy.

After a few weeks, my team finished installing the fence. Then grandpa came out to inspect our work. He closed one eye and sighted the fence line. “These fences are jagged,” he said. After a harsh chastisement, he told me there was only one solution: rebuild.

Today, the United States has constructed a jagged fence line dividing us. We are a nation that is grossly misaligned.

In a recent poll published by The Washington Post, more than 80% of President Joe Biden and the former guy Donald Trump voters agreed that elected officials of the opposing party “present a clear and present danger to the American democracy.” Another poll showed that nearly 80% of Americans have few or no friends across the political aisle. 

In short, Republicans and Democrats don’t like each other.

America was not born with this contemptuous spirit. Consider our founding Constitutional Convention. Two months after the assembly convened, it was on the verge of collapse from political gridlock. In the convention’s darkest hour, Benjamin Franklin showed true American spirit. He invited all delegates — federalists and anti-federalists — to his elegant mansion for dinner, perhaps in the hope that a venue change would help his colleagues overcome the stalemate. In the friendly environment of Franklin’s home, seasoned with ample food and humor, they were finally able to reach a compromise.

Unfortunately, such bipartisan camaraderie seems unimaginable today.

But, like my grandpa’s fences, the contempt that plagues our politics can be uprooted and replaced with bridges of bipartisanship. I suggest three building blocks to get us started.

Learn from our political counterparts:  We Americans dislike education in our political lives. We make our politicians pay at the ballot box for adapting to new knowledge. And studies have shown we are resistant to new learning that tends to undermine our closely-held political beliefs.

Such close-mindedness is self-defeating. Princeton researchers found the echo chambers we create for ourselves, including on social media, lead to even greater polarization.

Let’s buck the trend. Liberals, read an opinion piece from The Wall Street Journal or the National Review. Conservatives, try reading something from The New York Times or The Washington Post. Challenging, rather than constantly reaffirming, our political beliefs may help us refine our own thinking. We can all learn something new, even from those we oppose.

Love everyone:

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a theologian and a Scholastic philosopher

To love one another, despite our political differences, is an act of will. As Thomas Aquinas said in his “Summa Theologica,” “To love is to will the good of another.”

Do we “will the good” of our political adversaries? The diatribes on social media or cable news suggest not. Our friends, politicians and political commentators are too often quick to denigrate the political opposition — sometimes resorting to ugly mudslinging.

Personal attacks are counterproductive. We need positive policies that promote prosperity, not shameful tactics that promote partisanship.

Take breaks from politics:  Finally, we need occasional breaks from cable news. Instead, use that time for quality socializing with loved ones. It’s good for us. Research shows that consuming too much political news damages our well-being.

James Madison (1751-1836) father of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. President from 1809-1817.

The last word:  In 1787, James Madison cautioned that the rise of a “factious spirit” amongst the American populace has the power to “inflame (mankind) with mutual animosity” and to “render them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.” That warning is especially relevant today.

Our country was founded on a strong tradition of camaraderie and compromise, not contempt and combativeness. We must restore this American tradition.

Let’s uproot the jagged fences that divide us. Let us rebuild with bridges that bring us together.

Brad Barber is a recent graduate of Brigham Young University and Harvard Law School. He is an attorney practicing in Salt Lake City.

Antivaxxers must end hotheaded culture war against medical science

"We have witnessed how anti-mask and anti-vaccination demonstrations have become hotbeds of Holocaust trivialization and antisemitic conspiracy theories across the United States and abroad."

Using Nazi symbols to protest vaccines is disgraceful

Protecting public health should never be equated to the horrors committed by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust

Echo opinion published in Deseret News, a Utah newspaper.

By Spencer Cox and Seth Brysk

Like the rest of the nation, Utah is working hard to keep the Beehive State safe from COVID-19. Yet, in the face of this enormous challenge, some have abandoned reason in favor of hate-fueled actions.

Protests began early and spread nearly in sync with the pandemic. The right to protest is a fundamental American right. 

The star of ostracism and death

Nazis forced Jews in Germany to wear a yellow badge, which meant they were excluded from society. The identification symbol was a precursor to the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, some used the coronavirus as a convenient catalyst to focus bigotry on Asians and others. Rules regarding the use of face coverings and promotion of vaccines may have created an inconvenient imposition, yet were met with vitriol directed at ethnic and religious groups and also the leaders of the public health response.

One of the most disgraceful and misplaced of the myriad comparisons used to decry the public health measures are Holocaust analogies and Nazi symbols.

Earlier this month, a group of protesters outside the Governor’s Mansion displayed enormous banners with swastikas formed out of the image of syringes — equating vaccination with Nazism.

Comparing the two makes a mockery of the scale and scope of the Holocaust and the systematic murder by the Nazis of 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children and millions of other innocents.

Extremists have invoked new conspiracies by using old tropes to blame Jews for the pandemic or profiting from it. We have also watched with alarm as protesters have affixed a yellow Star of David to their clothing to protest public health requirements. Jews in Nazi-Germany were forced to wear yellow stars visibly on their clothing so they could be identified as Jews in the aftermath of the violent pogrom Kristallnacht on Nov. 9, 1938. Jews who refused to comply were subject to being shot on the spot.

Using a swastika or yellow star as a cheap symbol of protest against the vaccine or mask requirements is odious. The genocide committed by the Nazis resulting in the destruction of two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of the global Jewish population is not a subject for glib comparisons or politicization. Denying, minimizing or trivializing of the Holocaust is at worst an expression of antisemitism and at best a display of the ignorance of the protester invoking the comparison.

Protecting public health should never be equated to the horrors committed by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Encouraging vaccinations does not compare to schemes hastening the mass murder of millions of innocent people. Tying the Holocaust to anti-vaccine and anti-mask protests is as shocking as it is inaccurate and offensive. Policies designed to save lives do not equate with policies devised to mete out death.

Such offensive analogies by opportunists and fringe groups are an act of moral outrage. By brandishing distrust or outright disdain of research and science, they ridicule history.

To be sure, we respect and defend the right to protest. Freedom of expression and the right to assemble are core American values which we cherish. Even so, we condemn the use of antisemitic and other hate-filled slurs or symbols, which are causing deep pain and offense, intentional or not.

We believe Utah must be better than this. We believe we can disagree without hating each other.

We can make Utah an example to the nation.

We have witnessed how anti-mask and anti-vaccination demonstrations have become hotbeds of Holocaust trivialization and antisemitic conspiracy theories across the United States and abroad.

It is a testament to the need for continued and intensified Holocaust education across all ages. And it demands a strong and unequivocal call to action.

We must return to civility, whenever we disagree, through reasoned and thoughtful engagement in our collective desire to end the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Utahns can lead the way.

Gov. Spencer J. Cox is the 18th governor of Utah. Seth Brysk is the Central Pacific regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.

When "wrong" is immoral and illegal- history and human rights

Michael Gerson is a Washington Post columnist. This opinion was published in the Utah newspaper Deseret News.

Historical amnesia- an echo opinion

WASHINGTON — One of the worst things about our awful political moment is its historical forgetfulness.

Many Europeans seem to have forgotten where chauvinistic nationalism and the demonization of minorities can lead. 

Many Americans seem to have forgotten that a foreign policy of America First allowed international malignancies to grow that made war inevitable and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. 

Moreover, many in Western countries seem to have forgotten the difficult, desperate project of building a moral and legal structure around the principle of human dignity, in the aftermath of World War II.

Anti-Semitic attacks in Europe and the U.S. are both atrocities and reminders. They ring with distant but unmistakable echoes of the nightmarish events of the 1930s and 1940s: the racial purity laws, the economic indignities, the despairing suicides, the liquidation of the disabled, the digging up of Jewish graves in cemeteries, the deportations, the ghettos, the shootings in batch after batch, the pits of corpses, the emptied orphanages, the terrified walk to the gas chamber.

It is worth trying to recall how shocking these events were to the conscience of the world. The institutions of the modern state — bureaucracy, propaganda, military power — had been harnessed to the purposes of sadism and mass murder. This indicted a highly sophisticated and educated European society — along with the very idea of sophistication and education as brakes on evil. It indicted other nations who did little, even after the crimes became obvious. It indicted many German Christians who were indifferent or complicit. For some, it even indicted God, who seemed uncaring on a distant throne.

But the response was ultimately an idealistic one. The Allies would institute a new order of justice and human rights. The Tokyo tribunals and the Nuremburg trials were both legal and moral enterprises. The chief counsel for the prosecution, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, said he would not seek convictions for "mere technical or incidental transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt ... that involves moral as well as legal wrong. ... It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar."

The moral response to World War II-era crimes found expression in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which speaks of "inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable rights." There were many influences on this document, from President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms to the Declaration of Independence. But the theory was simple: The Axis powers not only lost, they were wrong. Their vision of nation, race and culture would be replaced by an assertion of universal human rights and dignity.

It was, however, more of an assertion than an argument. French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who was involved in the debates surrounding the Universal Declaration, said, "We agree on these rights, providing we are not asked why. With the 'why' the dispute begins."

Some of the challenge to this vision of inherent dignity has come from arguments associated with academic liberalism. It has become common to deny that human beings have natures that can be separated from their cultural circumstances. And without a human nature, it is hard to define a set of human rights. Without some standard from outside the culture — some statement by God or reason that every human life is sacred — we are left only with the current consensus of our culture. And we are left with no good reason to tell our children why they should hold to that consensus rather than abandon it.
But the most urgent, comprehensive attack on the universality of human rights now comes from the nativist right. 

In fact, places such as Hungary, Romania, Germany, Poland and the United States, there are politicians who are attempting to define nationality based on the dehumanization of cultural outsiders — Muslims, migrants and refugees. This type of politics is dangerous wherever it is practiced. In the United States, it also requires the renunciation of responsibilities rooted in the postwar acceptance of human dignity as the basis of global order and peace.

This is the cost of historical amnesia — the cost of electing an American president who is both ignorant of and indifferent toward the lessons of the last century, or any century. Donald Trump, is a president who always turns, by feral instinct, to an organizing message of bigotry and exclusion. A president who is throwing away an inheritance he does not value and unleashing forces that can easily move beyond control.