COVID has led to an even crazier polarization of politics than we’ve seen in an already polarized Trump era. Even the slightest of issues around COVID, which one would hope would be treated as a public health issue and not a cudgel to bash one’s opponent, are politicized. I excuse neither the left nor the right here, I see them as equal offenders.
The writer H. L. Mencken has many pithy quotes about politics, but there’s an exchange in Howard Fast’s book Being Red that really captures how I feel about politics. Via Real Clear Politics
Fast would run for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket, write frequently for the Daily Worker, win the Stalin Peace Prize, be temporarily blacklisted in Hollywood, hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and jailed for contempt of Congress. In the late 1950s, he turned away from communism and wrote a book about the experience called “Being Red.”
In that memoir he relates an evocative encounter in late July 1948 at the Progressive Party convention, which he attended as a credentialed journalist and where he ran into one of his idols, H.L. Mencken. When Fast went to shake the great Baltimore Sun columnist’s hand, Mencken took it in both of his own hands and told him he’d just read “The American,” Fast’s novel based on the life of former Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld.
Mencken said that if he’d ever written anything that good, he’d “put down my pen with pleasure.” Howard Fast found this praise fulsome, but appreciated it nonetheless, and thanked Mencken, who then said, in reference to the Progressives, “Fast, what in hell’s name are you doing with this gang?”
“I tried to invent some clever reply, but all I could say was that it was a better place to be than at the Republican or Democratic convention,” Fast wrote. “This was as far from a bright or witty rejoinder as one could get, but I was tongue-tied, and the thought of preaching to Mencken or haranguing him was inconceivable. It was not just that I admired him and loved the way he wrote and thought, but he had just given me the best straightforward compliment I had ever received. I had no wish to challenge him. I owed him too much.”
But Mencken wasn’t finished.
“There’s a better place than that,” he said. “With yourself.”
“I can’t put politics aside,” Fast protested.
“Put it aside?” Mencken snorted. “Hell, no. Henry Louis Mencken is a party of one. Do you understand me? You’re a party of one. You don’t put politics aside; you taste it, smell it, listen to it, write it. You don’t join it. If you do, these clowns will destroy you as surely as the sun rises and sets.”