George Washington has not officially endorsed Kamala Harris in the presidential election. He passed away a while ago. But in 1796, near the end of his second term in office, he published his Farewell Address to the nation. In it, he powerfully writes of his main hopes and fears about our country. His words and values still speak to us across the centuries. Washington expresses the strongest worries about leaders like former President Donald Trump.
As our first president, Washington understood deeply our nation’s fragility as a new experiment in democracy — not a perfect democracy, but still not a monarchy. Washington’s chief concern was the need to preserve national unity by supporting the legitimacy of the institutions and practices of our national government. National unity, he stressed, is the main source of our independence as a nation and the key support of “tranquility at home,” our “peace abroad,” our “safety” and our “prosperity.”
The main threat to our nation, Washington warned, arises when political partisanship “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms” and “kindles the animosity of one part against another.”
He warned us about how the enthusiasm of political parties can spiral excessively and drive too many to name their fellow Americans as the enemy. This “opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.” Washington warned us to be on guard against “despotism” arising from how political parties’ lust to “acquire influence” can lead to “disorders and miseries” that may push citizens to seek “security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.”
Washington, not surprisingly, was an institutionalist. He was also a realist about the corrosive power of self- and group- interest in undermining the common good of the nation. He worried about how parties’ lies in speeches, party pamphlets and newspapers push polarization and weaken the nation.
Trump would seem the apotheosis of Washington’s fears. Remember Trump’s “I alone can fix it.” Remember Trump campaigned to “drain the swamp” and to take on “the deep state.” Remember Trump in 2016 saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you are able to find” 30,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Remember his phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes…”
It is not likely that Washington would view the insurrection at the capital on January 6, 2021, as the Republican National Committee described it, “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” or as Trump recently called it, a “day of love.”
Washington appreciated deeply the vulnerability of our democratic national experiment and how public trust in the fairness of our elections is the key to both national unity and sustainability across the generations. He would have immediately grasped that Jan. 6 was an attempted coup.
Washington in his concern to develop and strengthen the core institutions and practices of our government saw the importance of not allowing lies to corrupt “public opinion.” It was critical, he believed, for public opinion to be “enlightened” as only honest and truthful speeches and reporting can make it. Washington understood keenly that words and communication have power.
In Washington’s day, campaign communications consisted of speeches, party pamphlets and partisan newspapers. These, he worried, were the vehicles by which political parties spread their lies demonizing their political opponents.
But over the last hundred years, news media and communications technologies have greatly expanded the scope and power of political mass messaging by radio, television and more recently the rise of the internet and social media. Corporate money concerns have come to play a huge role in our national conversation as cable channels and the internet have become such dominant channels of media and news. Is the nation safer when the uber-rich like Elon Musk can buy Twitter, flip it into X and fire thousands of its content monitors who try to cut off posts filled with lies or hate speech?
Perhaps the greatest threat America faces today is posed by our national failure to erect timely safeguards regarding social media and what distinguishes protected speech and genuine news from lies.
Washington’s Farewell Address isn’t just some dusty warning from an old guy back then. It is a critically relevant diagnostic tool for reflecting on what is at stake in this election.
William French grew up in Gaithersburg and is an associate professor of theology at Loyola University Chicago, where he directs the university’s Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies program.
This post was originally published on here
