Profits at the major cable news outlets get a bump when the partisan rancor attains a new record decibel level, which supplies the incentive for them to crank it up themselves, with the result that The Great Divide they regularly invoke is half their own creation. The other half is mostly junkie pride transferred to public life. Our times are the worst ever for divisiveness! A boast.
Probably not a true one, however. Let's skip things that happened before I was born, like the Civil War. When I was 10, the issues of the day were, at home, the civil rights movement and of course the Vietnam War abroad. People had opinions then too. Sean Hannity is one thing but the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy belong to a different filing system. The campus protests and "take overs" of administration buildings and the shootings at Kent State—not sure what the current analogue would be. Good Nielsen ratings for a shouting fest on CNN doesn't seem up to the same level. People are afraid to bring up Trump at Thanksgiving? Try, "So, whaddya think of this massacre at My Lai?"
When the case is made for the transcendental bitterness of our own times, the focus is often on something that happened when I was 15—Nixon's resignation a few days after Republican leaders in the Congress visited the White House to report on the status of the impeachment articles that had been approved, with the support of several Republican members, by the House Judiciary Committee. The full House's vote to impeach was inevitable, but Nixon must have been hoping that the two-thirds supermajority needed for conviction in the Senate would be too high a bar. After hearing the bad news regarding the certainty of impeachment in the House, he turned to Barry Goldwater, the Republican leader in the Senate, and asked how many Republican votes he could rely on in a Senate trial. Goldwater is said to have replied, "Damn few and not mine." Of course, that is what no Republican today is saying. It would be false to say "damn few" today but, if the sides weren't so dug in, it seems the facts of the case would call forth a few "not mine"s. I guess there are a couple of Republican governors of blue states—Larry Hogan in Maryland, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts—who have somewhat grudgingly allowed that at least the impeachment investigation is justified.
Even the lesson of Watergate, however, might be less that back then some Republicans were willing to oppose Nixon than that the pitched fight of the day dissolved into something less substantial before being resolved by history. Nixon had his defenders, too. The first article of impeachment passed out of the Judiciary Committee by a vote of 27-11, with just six of the 17 committee Republicans joining all 21 Democrats voting Yes. Reading a contemporary account, it's hard to imagine that, in the moment, the Republicans voting No were regarded by many as heroes. Delbert Latta. Joseph Maraziti. David Dennis. Eight others. They aren't regarded as heroes today. The ones still alive can be sure that, like those who predeceased them, the first line in their New York Times obit will relate their vote "supporting President Nixon," and then they'll be forgotten, for which they should probably be grateful. It seems like a fate that more Republicans today would want to avoid, but no, they’re more worried about being "primaried" by a cultist.
Meanwhile, at least one Republican voting Yes on the Nixon impeachment is enjoying posthumous esteem at YouTube—see video above. It's Rep. Larry Hogan, of Maryland, who—fun fact—is the father of the aforementioned Governor Hogan of Maryland. Larry Hogan Sr was the only Republican member on the House Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of all three articles of impeachment against Nixon. The video begins with him being recognized to speak for fifteen minutes by Rep Peter Rodino, the chairman of the committee.
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