How McCain Can Redeem Himself
Or
Beyond Throttling Back The Hatred

So McCain has throttled back on the incitement to hatred a bit. My first inclination is to go all gushy about McCain doing the right thing...but let's face it, this is one small gesture toward undoing a world of harm his campaign has inflicted on the body politic. Furthermore, there now seem to be three levels of vitriol in the McCain campaign: face-to-face with Obama, McCain is only moderately disrespectful; face-to-face with his supporters, McCain is very disrespectful, but comes out against the most overt expressions of hatred and paranoia; in his ads, however, it's still anything goes, and he incites the very attitudes he now--sometimes--claims to oppose.

But throttling back a tad on the fear-mongering and incitement to hatred simply isn't good enough.

McCain is now in a position to do something very, very important for American politics. He could--and he should--turn his attention toward the dissipation of irrational, politically-motivated fear and hatred in America in general and on the right in particular. Having stirred up the darkest forces in American politics, McCain has inadvertently taken us to a "teachable moment." He ought to ask the right to take a look at itself, and to come to recognize and acknowledge its vices. The right must reform itself, for the sake of the country, but also for its own sake.

It is obvious that McCain is wrong, and that American conservatism is plagued by dangerous demons. Even many conservatives--David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Kathleen Parker, George F. Will, and many others--have been forced by the facts to acknowledge the failings of the McCain/Palin ticket. But more doctrinaire conservatives--who are, almost by definition, less susceptible to being influenced by the facts--are still archly, fanantically, dogmatically asserting the superiority of their team's pick. Krauthammer, Kristol, Limbaugh, and the whole team over at the Corner, continue to chant the cant. As Peirce tells us, assertion has a hypnotic effect, and many conservatives will remain under the spell so long as it continues to be woven. McCain could achieve something truly great if he came out and said something kinda sorta generally and very roughly along these lines:

Everybody stop it. Take a look at yourselves. Take a look at me. Take a look at us. Look what we were doing, and what we were trying to do. Instead of addressing the issues, we egaged in the worst form of character assassination. This is the politics of personal destruction that has poisoned our politics. Look how easy it was for me to slip into it, and how easily you were convinced to follow me. Look how readily our worst tendencies came to the surface, how easy it was to convince ourselves that our worthy opponent was evil--a liar, a terrorist, or worse. Indeed, some of our fellows even suggested--in all seriousness, that our worthy opponent and fellow countryman was the Antichrist himself. This is insanity. Yes, my friends, the conservative movement has gone a little bit insane. We cannot do this. We cannot be this. We have to change. Conservatives must recognize that we are not always right, and liberals are not always wrong. Liberals must learn a similar lesson, but that is not what concerns us here and now. This is time for us to face our demons. We must recognize that liberals are not typically evil, anti-American, unpatriotic, or otherwise morally defective. Divisiveness is destroying our politics, and we must admit that we are largely responsible for stoking its fires. We have to make a firm and immovable resolution to disagree with our opponents respectfully, without demonizing them. We might fight like hell for our policies, but at the end of the day, we are all Americans, and our commitment to democracy means that we must accept the outcome of the political process and come together to work for the common good. It is time that we put the politics of demonization behind us. It is time that we emphasize what is best, rather than what is worst, about American conservatism.

You get the idea.

Thing is, sentiments of the kind that McCain has stired up have a kind of inertia, a kind of staying power. If he just tries to let them dissipate, they won't go back to their pre-surge levels. Instead, he needs to use this moment to actively destroy them, and to do something vitally important for the country. He can take those sentiments and hold them up for examination and criticism, and he can make conservatives better for it in the long run--and, of course, make us a better country for it as well.