Can a Podcast Save Us?
Two former Tennessee governors (and mayors) have a podcast. Republican Bill Haslam and Democrat Phil Bredesen and their podcast try to navigate the issues of the day in the shadow of some of the worst political vitriol I’ve ever seen in my life. Haslam is a moderate Republican and Bredesen is a conservative Democrat, whatever those terms mean. I’d have to sit down with them and have them explain it to me.
In as much as I applaud them for this effort — and they’ve been at it for a couple of years now — their discussions still suffer from the scourge of political factionalism. Although party politics in their discussions aren’t as polarizing in their podcast discussions because neither are currently elected officials. That means there is no expectations for either to tow the line of their party’s political agenda. No party hack is visiting them in the middle of the night suggesting it would be a shame for their homes to burn down.
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But they still identify with their party. Their guests, many of them out of public life, actually helped fuel today’s outrage politics. Paul Ryan, for example, the former Republican Speaker of the House, has been their guest. Ryan was a party lackey whose own contributed verse to the poem of our country was divisive and fell somewhere within the Tea Party’s nonsense. The Tea Party gave us a whole host of unfit Republican hardliners. By comparison to the MAGA extremists, they seem rather tame. But theirs was the gateway rhetoric to Trump’s brand of criminal politics. (As an aside, anyone — Ryan, in this case — who gives copies of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” to their interns and new hires is missing some fundamental understandings of character, selflessness, and compassion.)
It’s hard for me to accept today’s attempt at rational behavior from those who, like Ryan, ran point on the surge forward into hate, ignorance, militancy, and political gridlock.
That said, if the efforts of the two former governors can help even one extremist move toward reason and rational thought, then I say “Amen!”
But for me, party politics will, especially in this climate, be the means to more division, not unity.
