ISO: common values
As right and left veer to extremes, MARK DESANTIS wants to hold down the middle. But he warns: When we can’t agree on core principles, trouble follows
Some of my friends are to my left, politically, and others to my right. Still others are somewhere in a broad middle, where I am. They’re all my friends, good friends. I respect them for their friendship and for their values. Among other things (and oversimplifying here), it seems my “right” friends hold dear individual liberty, while my “left” friends prize fairness.
Just like most Americans, I support both ideals, even when they appear to conflict occasionally. If all political debate and discussion started and ended with statements of shared values then it is possible our most difficult problems can be addressed and resolved, just as they’ve been for over 250 years. But the search for common values seems to be out of favor now — and that is not good.
This seems to be a time when our common, core values have been hijacked by confusing and conflicting emotions and, for some of us, tragically, infused with and distorted by personal biases and prejudices. History has too many sad examples of what comes next.
When, for whatever reason, we lose touch with what we as a society can agree on and start to move to a place where we see only threats to our beliefs then we, perhaps out of a primal urge, frustration or simply a desire to win an argument, commence a fruitless and destructive search for simple answers to complex problems. As time passes, we harden our view that simple answers are the only answers. Eventually, we (re)learn the hard truth that, according to Emerson, “All promise outruns performance,” and one hopes at not too great a cost.
My grandfather emigrated to Western Pennsylvania from prefascist Italy in the early 20th century. He left a lot of relatives and a lot of poverty back in the Old Country. Yet he would return year after year to maintain the familial connections that I was to learn were a vital part of my Italian heritage.
I vividly remember sitting at the Big Table in the dank basement kitchen of my grandparent’s home, listening to him talk about his latest trip to his homeland. In a mix of broken English and Italian, my grandfather would hold court with his Italian, Polish and Hungarian-born friends and neighbors about the intractable problems of 1960s and ’70s Italy.
Inevitably, the discussion would turn to politics and, though World War II ended decades earlier, it would also inevitably lead one of my grandfather’s friends make the often repeated claim that, “Well at least Mussolini made the trains run on time.”
But my grandfather knew a truth his friends and some of his relatives in Italy did not or would not acknowledge. Mussolini did not, in fact, make the trains run on time, or anything else for that matter.
In his well-regarded biography of Mussolini, Denis Mack Smith found no evidence of the trains, transportation systems and pretty much anything else critical to Italy improved under Mussolini’s two decades of dictatorship. In fact, he found that virtually everything a society depends on, from basic infrastructure to a functioning economy, got much, much worse.
Mussolini did, however, spend an enormous amount of effort trying to convince everyone his nation and the world that the trains and Italy were performing, which was not true. As a former journalist, he knew the inherent value of simple and bold asserted answers, boldly repeated, however obviously, utterly false. He also knew that by appealing to and then distorting certain core values held sacred by most Italian citizens, he could transform small societal and political fissures into chasms of internal disagreement and dispute within the society and politics of the day. The ensuing and unrelenting chaos allowed him to retain power over a decaying nation.
My grandfather’s formal education ceased in his early teens yet he knew, as a sometime visitor to his homeland, that the promises of quel buffone (“that buffoon,” a moniker for Mussolini) would never be met. He was so appalled by this fraud that he fully accepted that his Americanborn nephews and even his own sons would need return to his homeland to take up arms against his family members in Italy in during the war.
I have another memory of my grandfather that came much later in my life, long after he passed.
A friend of mine had recently visited Ellis Island and made a copy of the small signature my then-teenage grandfather made as a first tiny step to becoming a U.S. citizen. But it was not what I was reading but where I was reading it that made it most memorable. I read this poignantnote in the office of the late U.S. Sen. John Heinz, where I had recently accepted a staff position. The Capitol Dome loomed large outside of the window where, among the notable inscriptions on its great walls, is one from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but withoutunderstanding.”