Republican Invective and King Lear

One of the memorable moments in the history of the U.S. Congress occurred in 1954 when Joseph Welch, head counsel for the United States Army, found one of his young lawyers being attacked by Joseph McCarthy.  The turning point in the hearings occurred when Welch said forthrightly, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” and then, a little later, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense  of decency?”  That moment helped break the hold that McCarthy held over the American political scene.

Is there anyone today able to ask that question with such authority?  The level of vitriol directed against the president is worse than anything I have ever seen.  To be sure, the left directed a fair share of invective against President Bush as well—I remember liberal columnist E. J. Dionne chewing out a caller to the Diane Rehm Show when the man compared Bush to Hitler.   But the rhetoric seems to have ratcheted up a notch or two.  When people shout out “baby killer” or “you lie” from the floor of Congress, when members of Congress let loose with irresponsible accusations (the Democrats want to “pull the plug on grandma,” Obama is a fascist or a socialist [take your pick] who is trampling on the liberty of the American people), I find myself wondering whether high ground is possible any longer.  Where is a sense of decency?  Where are the grown-ups?

Events of the day can add their tinge to whatever one is reading at a particular moment.  Right now I am reading and teaching King Lear and am suddenly finding connections left and right.  Hold on while I explain.

I’m seeing Lear as the Republican Party as it is currently behaving, a man who wants the privileges of kingship without any of the responsibilities.  He was once in power but now is acceding the hard task of governing to someone else.  He spends his time drinking with his riotous knights (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin) and complains that he is not treated with due respect.   

As a result of his self-indulgent behavior, he throws the country into turmoil.  First of all, he divides his kingdom up into three, thereby all but guaranteeing a civil war.  Truth tellers who try to rein him in (let’s call them Republican moderates like David Brooks and David Frum) are treated like Lear’s loyal follower Kent: dismissed as apostates and traitors.  I’m not sure that the current Republican Party even has any fools that are standing up and speaking truth to them (say, conservative comedians).  But it might not matter anyway: Lear doesn’t heed his fool.

A political truism has it that a powerful political party that has become arrogant and corrupt must sometimes spend time in the wilderness to find itself again.  This was true of the Democrats in the 1980’s and 1990’s and may be true of the Republicans now.  In any event, King Lear provides us with some of literature’s greatest images of a man lost in the wilderness.  We all know the passage where Lear rages at the storm that batters him:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once

That make ingrateful man!

The world in which Lear wanders has lost all sense of decency.  An irresponsible Gloucester has had an affair (that certainly sounds like a modern politician) and now is being manipulated by his bastard son.  Goneril, the irresponsible daughter of an irresponsible ex-king, brings to mind Liz Cheney, who is throwing around wild accusations, including one that the lawyers who defended Guantanamo detainees are traitorous.  Good men like Gloucester’s legitimate son Edgar have been forced to go underground (again I’m thinking of Republican moderates), and there seems no one with the moral standing to restore order.  Although to give credit where credit is due, there were a couple of principled Republicans who called out Cheney (Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and former Clinton prosecutor Kenneth Starr).

One possible voice for morality in the play is Albany, Goneril’s husband.  But Albany is weak.  His wife speaks with far more authority, calling him a wimp when he protests what is happening.  While he is horrified that Gloucester has been blinded by his sister-in-law sister Regan, Goneril says that Regan didn’t go far enough: Gloucester should have been killed because now he is evoking pity and turning people against them.   Albany can’t afford to have moral qualms, she states, when France (the Al Qaeda terrorists?) is knocking at their door:

                                                      Milk-livered man!
That bear’st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs:
Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning
Thine honor from thy suffering, that not know’st
Fools do those villains pity who are punished
Ere they have done their mischief.  Where’s thy drum?
France spreads his banners in our noiseless land,
With plumed helm the state begins to threat;
Whiles thou, a moral fool, sit’st still, and cries
“Alack, why does he so?”

Can Obama and the Democrats call for decency?  But if they are cast in the role of the invading French army, then any complaints would just be dismissed as partisan rhetoric.  In fact, talk show hosts like Limbaugh and Beck claim that Obama is the real racist, not them.

Can the press invoke moral authority?  Can the Church?  Can university professors?  All our institutions, it seems, have become so undermined or compromised or politicized that no one is able to step forward and shame the shouters.

Is it enough that the Democrats just act like grown-ups?  In the face of such a response, will the  scurrility pass away?  Is there a foundational decency among voters that will reward maturity and vote out immaturity?  We’ll see.  Whether it works or not, I want the Democrats to take the high road, and when they don’t, I’m willing to call them out. There are certainly instances of Democrats who have been guilty of invective, including Barney Frank, who called some of his Republic colleagues  “clowns.”*  But most of the accusations of being unpatriotic, socialist, or fascist these days are coming from the right.

Back to Lear.  The power of this play is that, after having given way to vengeful vituperation and having been stripped down to virtually nothing, Lear begins to find his soul again.  He begins to care for others, empathizing with his shivering fool and bringing him into a shelter.  Above all, after having tried to dictate the terms of love at the beginning of the play, he finds real love at the end.  Of course, he finds it and then immediately loses it—Cordelia is hanged and his heart gives out.  But in those few final moments, first with Cordelia alive and then with her dead in his arms, he is more in touch with his soul than he was at any time when he was king.

In other words, being stripped and humbled gives us a chance to find ourselves.  The Democrats have been humbled many times in the past couple of decades.  The casual assurance with which they ran American society from the 1930’s through the 1970’s was given an abrupt check by Ronald Reagan.  Obama seems to have learned some lessons from that and in fact gives credit to Reagan.  Our current president is a practical progressive who has figured out how to move within tight constraints.

So will the Republicans, after raging for a while, learn humility and rediscover their center?  Let us pray that they do.  The country needs a responsible conservative party just as much as it needs a responsible liberal one.

I am aware that, as a life-long liberal, I am not entirely objective when I speak on these matters, even though I have tried my best. I invite civil disagreement.

*Franks’ comments came when his colleagues cheered visitors to the Congressional hearings who shouted “kill the bill” and were escorted out.  These visitors were people from the same Tea Party demonstration outside who had called the openly-gay Franks a “faggot” and who (according to Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank) had been openly encouraged by various congressmen.  So Franks was provoked.  But that is my point: human though we are, we must find ways to transcend the name-calling or everyone will descend into the same pit together.  A model is pointed out to us by another Washington Post writer, Courtland Milloy, who found it remarkable that John Lewis, spat upon and called “n______” by Tea Party demonstrators, was able to handle the incident with grace.  Of course, Lewis was a hero during the Civil Rights Movement when he was beaten bloody by a racist mob.