30 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
ANNALSOFPOLITICS
THE VIOLENT STYLE
A bitterly contested election embodies a deep American conflict between persuasion and force.BY E VA N OSNOS
I
n the hours after Election Day, as
Donald Trump seemed on the point
of losing the Presidency, he spiralled
through emotions like Lear on the
heath—raging at Fox News for calling
Arizona for Joe Biden, fantasizing about
“fraud,” vowing to seek salvation from
his appointees to the Supreme Court.
Biden, in his campaign, had presented
himself as a firebreak, a barrier against
the inferno of another four years. But,
to Democrats’ disappointment, Amer-
icans had not delivered a blunt repudi-
ation of Trump and his values; instead,
they had shown themselves to be in-
tractably divided. A century and a half
after the Civil War, America was again
a cloven nation. Ending Trump’s Pres-
idency would not solve the underlying
problems that produced it, leaving
Americans to face a haunting question
of history: Can a country argue its way
back from the abyss?
In the summer of 1858, as the Amer-
ican experiment careered toward war,
two foes—Abraham Lincoln and Ste-
phen A. Douglas—met in northern Il-
linois, for the first in a series of debates
on the future of slavery. Lincoln, who
was challenging Douglas for his seat
in the Senate, loomed a foot taller than
his opponent, a squat, tenacious debater
celebrated as the Little Giant. The men
embodied both sides of America’s fatal
divide: Douglas, who warned that Lin-
coln would make the prairie as “black
as night,” advocated “popular sover-
eignty,” which would hasten the spread
of slavery into the Western territories—a
prospect that Lincoln could not abide.
By the standards of politics today,
the debates—seven in all—were an ex-
hibit of unrecognizable democratic rigor.
In each one, either Lincoln or Douglas
spoke first for an hour; then the other
responded for an hour and a half; finally,
the first spoke for another half hour. (In
a previous encounter, they had held forth
for seven hours.)
Since the ancient Greeks, effective
politics has combined spectacle and sub-
stance. For a people untouched by tele-
vision, Lincoln-Douglas was “the best
circus in town,” as a reporter on the
scene described it. Before the speakers
began, bands played and liquor flowed.
But, if the debates were social occasions,
they were not trivial ones. Thousands
of people crowded around to listen, with-
out the comfort of chairs or shade or
electric amplification. Politics was mostly
reserved for white, wealthy males, but
on the edges of the crowd were women,
European immigrants, and semiliterate
frontiersmen. Attendees were so des-
perate to hear the debaters that they
climbed onto a wooden platform, which
collapsed under their weight. They
shouted encouragement (“Hit him
again!”) and hung banners with taunt-
ing nicknames (“Douglas the Dead
Dog—Lincoln the Living Lion”).
Week after week, the debaters tra-
versed Illinois. Lincoln, short on cash,
travelled by coach and ferry, while Doug-
las, a wealthy man whose wife owned
slaves, journeyed on a private train, an-
nouncing his arrival by firing a cannon
marked “Popular Sovereignty.” At times,
the discourse onstage neared combus-
tion. When Douglas falsely accused
Lincoln of a conspiracy to abolish slav-
ery, Lincoln leaped from his seat and
advanced on his opponent until a col-
league pulled him back. But the event
stayed in the realm of persuasion. As
Lincoln had put it, “Reason—cold, cal-
culating, unimpassioned reason—must
furnish all materials for our future sup-
port and defense.”
For Lincoln, the debates became the
venue for the full expression of his hu-
manism. He sought to be progressive
but electable, “radical without sounding
too damned radical,” in the words of
David S. Reynolds, the author of the
new cultural biography “Abe: Abraham
Lincoln in His Times.” Lincoln’s bold-est comments came in the final encoun-
ter, when he made a stark distinction
between “one class that looks upon the
institution of slavery as a wrong, and
another class that does not look upon
it as a wrong.” Framing the issue in clear
moral terms, he said, “It is the eternal
struggle between these two principles—
right and wrong—throughout the world.
They are the two principles that have
stood face to face from the beginning
of time.”
Lincoln lost his race for the Senate,
but his performance in the debates made
him famous. In the Presidential contest
of 1860, he won the North, which in-
cluded all the states in which Black men
could vote and also the six states in which
the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been
published. When he received invitations
to speak, he often told people to read the
debates instead. The Lincoln-Douglas
debates came to be regarded as a preëmi-
nent example of American political dis-
course in the nineteenth century—a fierce
clash of ideas, sustained by the close at-
tention of the public.
But they also came to represent a
darker lesson: for all their eloquence,
they could not avert the Civil War,
or protect Lincoln from assassination.
American political culture was bounded
by a contest between reason and vio-
lence—a seesawing battle that contin-
ues to this day, between the aspiration
to persuade fellow-citizens to accept
your views and the raw instinct to force
them to comply.I
n 2018, the comedian John Mulaney
offered an analogy for Trump’s man-
agerial style: he compared the President
to “a horse loose in a hospital,” a wild-
eyed creature dangerously out of place.
“No one knows what the horse is going
to do next, least of all the horse,” Mu-
laney said.
In 2020, instead of Lincoln-Doug-
las, Americans were subjected to the