Now We Move Forward, With Malice Toward None

There was a moment of civility following the election, with both the president and the vice president calling the president-elect to congratulate him on his winning campaign and assure him of their full cooperation in the transition. He reportedly accepted it gracefully.

The factions should leave it at that, courtesies, cooperation, politics, competitive as always but without the end-of-times hysteria. Politics ain’t bean bag and never has been, just review the hatred — not to mention an armed rebellion — George Washington, father of the nation, put up with. But in America, you must know even very bad moments are not the end of anything, and even when they are, they are also the beginning of something.

The truth is, though, some people just will not quit. Matt Walsh, one of the funniest observers of our odd times, explains in a recent skit how some innocent sarcastic comments of his on the Project 2025 bogeyman were taken literally by down-melts, some of whom expressed without irony a wish to make him dead. It is not only here: the sharp and witty Elizabeth Moutet, writing from Paris for the London Telegraph, reports on paranoiac Euro reactions to Trump’s win.

Which is not to say the stakes are not high. The campaign marked the clashing moment in what has been for many years a spirited debate about the nature of American society and the place of government in sustaining, or changing, it. Two pieces written during the campaign, James Piereson in the New Criterion and Chris DeMuth in the Wall Street Journal, lay out what conservatives have been saying about the urgent need to let the air out of the Washington blob and reduce the size and reach of the federal government, which must include restoring the  balance among its branches.

In this regard, the best indicator of the incoming administration’s success may turn out to be a devaluation in the real estate market in Washington D.C. and the surrounding Maryland and Virginia counties, which are among the richest in the country. By all rights it should be happening while the nation experiences a bullish stock market, and a job-creating economic expansion.

There is no call, whatever the urge, for schadenfreude. Comity would in fact be welcome. The Republic faces enemies, within and without, that wish us devastating harm. We ought to be able to agree what these enemies represent, who they are, what strengths they have.  Then we can agree on prudent strategies to confound them without doing damage to our liberties, our way of life, and our system of government.

In the past we have made mistakes in this area. John Adams, second president and one of the greats, was perhaps overbearing with the Alien and Sedition acts, however well intended. They were never applied to the degree the far worse disloyalty and treason laws of the Woodrow Wilson (28th president and one of the worst) administration. Internal and foreign security can be achieved without prejudice to liberty within a broad consensus.

After all, we have had such consensuses in the past, marred at times by boneheaded execution, but we can learn and improve by studying history, ours and others’.

We Define Our Enemies

And we should, because if we cannot agree on the threat, it is difficult to see how we can avoid another eruption of partisan strife with the concomitant insults, as well as the abuse of federal agencies and the courts, which as we have seen lowers the people’s esteem and trust.  So, let us begin with a list of enemies that all can agree on.

An enemies list should be made up not of national or ethnic or cultural groups, because then you miss the tree for the forest, of worse, the tree you see misleads you regarding the forest.  You define enemies by what they do.  Murderers would make the list, and other sociopaths, such as pickpockets.

Here’s a better way to put it: an enemy is anyone who breaches the accepted moral code. But do we have one?  That is the big question now.

One way to let the code reveal itself in practice would be to go big on magnanimity. With malice toward none is one of the classic phrases in the American language, and rightly so. Magnanimity, absence of malice and charitable impulse, requires empathy and the will to serve and protect others. Donald Trump understands this: his dismay at the shortcomings of our culture, our press, our legal system, our political system, and much else in our society and nation motivated his entry into politics and propelled his disruptive victories over a failing status-quo.

Notwithstanding fits of temper that had deplorable results, notably in the aftermath of the 2020 election, he is what Southerners used to call a champion, a battler who establishes a rapport with his people because of a demonstrated willingness to defend them, speak for their cause. The good humor and especially the connection with voters he achieves repeatedly are the marks of a man with a heart, a beating heart and, this matters too, a heart that he knows he sometimes must close.

Go big, then: rather than punish anyone, offer Jack Smith and Alvin Bragg — to take two sorry examples of persons toward whom another man would feel bitterness — new positions in traffic courts. Judge Merchan might be assigned as a public defender in a precinct next to a red light district, where he could learn to exercise some compassion to tone down the show-me-the-man-I’ll-find-a-crime vindictiveness that seems to be his forte.

Leaders of the opposition party ought to be invited as soon as possible to meet with the new president that he might hear their perspectives as well as their most dire fears and grandest hopes.  My own suggestion would be a nice lunch somewhere, low key and casual, though with correct dress required. The host would sit and listen and say nothing except the occasional quiet “yeah” or “yeh, innarestin'” or “umm, never thought of that” with the slightest accent on “that”; and then, “Well, thank you ladies and gentlemen, have a nice rest of the day, goodbye.”

The gestures of the moment must include the “charity for all” part of Abraham Lincoln’s revered line. Beginning with a major dinner party for the liberated January 6 hostages (with meaningful financial compensations) and others, like Daniel Petty, the president can show that American justice cannot work if it is based on politically-defined categories of victims and oppressors.

Re-Value Work

Charity, to last, must involve a new dedication to the value of work.  Teach a man to work, and more to the point in a land of opportunity like ours, remove the obstacles to gainful work, and the need for in-kind or monetary charity will be much reduced.  Welfare for the truly needy is fine, as is public education and essential health care, but the private sector is, or should be, the leader in these areas as it should be in most other areas of life in a free society.

The aim, expressed by conservatives for as long as there have been governments trying to corner the market for compassion, is to build character, self-reliance, and to remove obstacles to opportunity.  If we can explore space and find cures for cancer and make double rye whiskeys — all of which and much more we have done — by God we ought to figure out welfare reform.

I myself, for example, know many fantastically gifted cooks who could give McDonalds a run for its money — which by the way would be good for McDonalds — in the fast eats business.  And they never ask for help, only the lowering of barriers to entry.

Enterprise, a thousand-ship Navy, the best Air Force in the world — America will be safe, America will be sound, there will be no percentage in changing genders, no need to fret over time clocks between pitches on the baseball field or serves on the tennis court, no reason to steal from CVS stores, priests will be kind and rabbis will be wise, pastors will be steadfast in faith and teachers will be strict and patient and, yes, kind.  Screw up and succeed, fall and rise again: in America, nothing is impossible.

READ MORE from Roger Kaplan:

Reflections on the End of an Election Cycle

Are We About to Replay the Alger Hiss Affair?

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