Our politicians don’t measure up

Re “Name-calling trumps civility,” Perspective, Oct. 7

Robin Abcarian has gotten to the core of our political discourse: Namecalling has indeed come to trump civility.

But why is that? Is it a symptom of our political dumbing down? Does it mean that we have run out of ideas? Have we lost our sense of being a politically exceptional nation?

I cannot imagine members of our current Congress being anything like the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who in 1776, appealing “to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions,” pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

I am hard-pressed to imagine our present Congress doing the same.

John H. Geerken

Claremont The writer is a professor emeritus of history at Scripps College.

Abcarian’s evenhanded call for Democrats and Republicans to behave as adults misses the point, as all such appeals to civility must.

What is happening in Congress, and even more in state legislatures, is an ominous echo of May 22, 1856, when Southern Sen. Preston Brooks thrashed and almost killed antislavery Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate with his cane.

The act epitomized the loss of civility in national discourse that was driving us toward civil war.

Today’s campaign — waged for decades by one party to secure power for the powerful by degrading the political process to the lowest level of race-baiting class warfare — has spawned childish radicals who openly exult in the process of destroying the nation.

This madness can no longer be appeased by the only adults in the room. It must be confronted and named.

John Phillips

Camarillo