Scorched earth at peril to democracy

The Geneva Conventions of 1977 banned what's often called the scorched-earth policy of warfare, a strategy aimed at so destroying an enemy's assets as to leave it bereft of capacity to continue. Maybe it's naive to think that a tactic that worked so well for the likes of Napoleon and William Tecumseh Sherman could be wiped out by something so flimsy as a treaty on paper, but the generals who run armies have largely followed this dictum over the past four decades.

You can't say the same of our nation's civilian leaders during that same period. Instead, the practice of democracy in America has grown increasingly vicious, often leaving the turf between the two major parties, where most of us live, charred and barren.

Politicians who are part of the majority of the moment thus may get their way, but only by wiping out the fundamental natural resource of a democracy - namely, good will and comity. It's as though they think democracy is a game.

Yes, elections, like sports contests, have clear winners and losers, but in a democratic system voting is just the means to an end. The goal of democracy isn't winning, but rather governing. That's hard to do when you've blistered the ground around you.

Our Constitution, after all, was forged in compromise, the best example being a two-chamber Congress that honored both those who believed a natural aristocracy should rule (a Senate, initially chosen by state legislatures) and those who thought the masses should have control (the House, its members churning every other year from the ranks of ordinary citizens). Even the odious institution of slavery was preserved by compromise in the Constitution, which counted a slave as three-fifths of a person, thus giving slave-holding states extra clout and winning their votes for ratification.

The fact that our union's foundation was compromise is surely no surprise to any successful business leader. They know that a sale usually happens only when each side in a negotiation feels that it has won something.

Try to apply that notion, though, to what we've seen of our democracy in action during the past couple of weeks, as the Senate has moved forward on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. If you haven't despaired at the state of our democracy, you haven't been paying attention.

Who you blame for the pernicious partisanship that grips Washington these days probably depends on your political affiliation. In the context of the Kavanaugh controversy, Democrats may trace it to the Republican majority's refusal to even consider President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee; Republicans may go back further, and say it began when Democrats refused to confirm Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork in 1987.

What has changed over the past few years, though, is the end of the rule in place since 1806 that required presidential nominations to have at least 60 supporting votes in the 100-member Senate. That custom limited the power of the majority, effectively forcing presidents to choose more moderate candidates. It gave weight to compromise.

A contempt for compromise permeates today's politics, valuing raw clout and bluster over effectiveness and modesty. So we elect politicians who don't much care for what Aristotle called "civic friendship," in which citizens take seriously the concerns, well-being and dignity of their fellow citizens.

Danielle Allen, a noted Harvard political theorist and ethicist, describes democracy as "a system where, if you lose out in the political moment, you stay in the game, anyway." Our system, she noted in a recent public radio interview, "depends on dissent and conflict resolution" rather than on freezing out those who disagree with us.

Allen has written that Aristotle's notion of civic friendship is "not an emotion, but a practice, a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge trouble, difficulty and differences of personality, experience and aspiration."

It's not that citizens won't always have conflicts or rivalries, of course - and so will their elected representatives. But disputes in democracy must be resolved without unjustified sacrifice by any citizen, as we each seek what Allen calls "equitable self-interest."

The habits of civic friendship, though, are vanishing from Capitol Hill and from our neighborhoods. We're not just intolerant of those we disagree with; we're primed to use whatever edge we have to crush and disparage those who don't have leverage.

Scorched earth, though, is not where anybody wants to live. No wonder people abandon civic involvement. No wonder, then, that some of us are worrying that our democracy itself is in peril.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Contact him at rsmith@timesunion.com.