Politics of Beirut blast should serve as warning to America

When I first heard the news of the terrible explosion in Beirut, and then the rampant speculation about who might have set it off, my mind drifted back some 40 years to a dinner party I attended at the residence of Malcolm Kerr, then president of the American University of Beirut.

During the course of the dinner, someone mentioned the unusual hailstorms that had pelted Beirut the previous two nights. Everyone offered their explanations for this extreme weather event, before Malcolm, tongue in cheek, asked his guests, “Do you think the Syrians did it?”

Malcolm — a charming man and brilliant scholar, who was tragically murdered a few months later by unidentified assassins — was being both humorous and profound.

He was poking fun at the Lebanese tendency to explain everything as a conspiracy, and, in particular, a conspiracy perpetrated by Syria, which is why we all laughed.

But he was also saying something profound about Lebanese society that, alas, also applies to today’s America: the fact that in Lebanon then, and even more so today, everything, even the weather, had become political.

The United States is becoming like Lebanon and other Middle East countries in two respects. First, our political differences are becoming so deep that our two parties now resemble religious sects in a zero-sum contest for power. They call theirs “Shiites and Sunnis and Maronites” or “Israelis and Palestinians.” We call ours “Democrats and Republicans,” but ours now behave just like rival tribes who believe they must rule or die.

And second, as in the Middle East, so increasingly in America: Everything is now politics — even the climate, even energy, even face masks in a pandemic.

“For a healthy politics to flourish, it needs reference points outside itself — reference points of truth and a conception of the common good,” explained Hebrew University religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal. “When everything becomes political, that is the end of politics.”

if you listen to the street demonstrators in Beirut, you can hear how so many Lebanese are starved for a government that represents the common good. Here in America, too. Who are the leaders many of us still respect and yearn for — even when we disagree with them? asked Halbertal.

“They are the leaders,” he answered, “who believe that there is a realm of the sacred — of the common good — that is outside of politics and who make big decisions based on their best judgment of the common good, not their naked power interests.”

It is why many of us admire Justice John Roberts when he occasionally sides with the liberals on Supreme Court decisions. It is not because the decision is liberal but because he seems to be acting on behalf of the common good, not his political tribe.

It is also why we still admire our military, the guardians of our common good, and are appalled and alarmed when we see Trump dragging them into “politics.”

Think of the dignity of Al Gore gracefully submitting to a highly politicized Supreme Court decision giving the 2000 election to George W. Bush. Gore put the common good first. He took a bullet for America.

Trump would have torn America apart over that, and trust me, if he loses in November, there is no way he will put the common good ahead of his own and go quietly into this good night.

“When you lose the realm of the sacred, that realm of the common good outside of politics, that is when societies collapse,” Halbertal said.

That is what happened to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq. And that is what is slowly happening to Israel and America.

Reversing this trend is the most important project of our generation.