Op-Ed: George Washington has a warning for Donald Trump — and all of us (via latimesopinion)
Every year since 1896, on or near George Washington’s birthday, a member of the U.S. Senate has read aloud the first president’s farewell address on the Senate floor. The party of the reader alternates every year.We can’t know, of course, what George Washington would make of our current president or the state of partisan politics in America. But we can make a pretty good guess..
Republican Senators, also, would be targets of his ire. Before the Senate trial Sen. Lindsey Graham made it clear that he didn’t intend to be an impartial juror in the impeachment trial of Trump. As he said, “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.” His performance during the trial was true to his word.
Washington seems especially prescient in his warning against demagoguery and its link to factions and political parties, which he worried would over time “become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Washington also predicted how a party leader would gain and keep power. At worst, he said, a party head “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, [and] foments occasionally riot and insurrection. [This] opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.” Surely that, too, echoes in today’s heated Twitter-filled rhetoric.
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