Why I fear the next terrorist attack

It’s beginning to look inevitable that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will manage to strike the United States on a scale comparable to the recent attacks in Paris and Beirut, or the downing of the Russian flight over Sinai.

As awful as that would be, I worry more about what would come next. Frequently, attacks from outside galvanize a population and bring them together in the face of a common enemy. But not always. Sometimes they only serve to further separate an already fragmented society, as in the fall of Rome.

{mosads}I have no metric to prove that American politics today is worse than in other eras. But I see a consistent barrage of rhetoric in which we – conservatives and Republicans on one side, and liberals, progressives, and Democrats on the other – routinely describe each another as being the enemy within, an enemy that might even rival ISIS itself.

This is not a subterranean effort. It’s happening in the light of day, led by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and even President Barack Obama himself. Democrats are caricatured as seeking to enslave Americans through dependence on social programs while giving Iran a nuclear weapon to use against us. Republicans, meanwhile, are demonized as anti-immigrant bigots, beholden to financiers whose whole business model is “greed and fraud.”

(To anyone objecting that listing the misbehavior of both sides of our political divide is a false attempt at balance or “moral equivalence,” you’ll find any number of documented cases of name-calling and demonizing from Obama, Limbaugh, and other political players at the Civil Debate Page. There are many examples from both sides. Far, far too many to be healthy.)

The selective attention that reigns in our politics – where we only see the invective coming toward us, and refuse to acknowledge the invective being sent out by us – simply adds another layer of antagonism and frustration between the opposing parties.

There are good reasons for us to argue with one another. We face a host of problems with few easy answers. The consequences of our policies are often hard to predict, and we regularly have to choose between moral goods that are in competition with one another – say, compassion versus security – rather than a simple choice between good and evil.

But, rather than engaging in these debates in the spirit of, “I believe you’re wrong, and here are my reasons why,” we chalk disagreement up to sinister, ultimately evil intentions: our opponents are communists or racists; they have no empathy for the needy or no love country and its freedom. Instead of simply being mistaken, we describe our rivals as flawed to the core.

So, if – and I fear, when – ISIS manages a bloody attack in the United States, who are Americans going to treat as the enemy? The Islamic State, or one another?

It’s confounding that we appear to be willfully forgetting how much virtue Americans have in common: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and decade upon decade of the peaceful transfer of power just to name a few.

A political culture that keeps trying to overlook that isn’t likely to endure, and maybe doesn’t deserve to.

Denvil, a contributor to The Blaze, runs a blog on civility in politics (The Civil Debate Page).