In the 48 hours since the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden has made repeated pleas to the nation to turn down its rhetoric amid the 2024 presidential election.
“You know, the political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. And we all have a responsibility to do that,” Biden said in an address from the Oval Office Sunday night. “Yes, we have deeply felt, strong disagreements. The stakes in this election are enormously high.”
But amid all of the calls for unity and that disagreements do not make enemies, there is a real question about whether the temperature of modern political rhetoric can, in fact, be turned down.
The political conflicts of this moment are more than just policy differences. These are moral and philosophical differences that have to do with basic questions of human life and dignity. How do you live alongside people who believe that the taking of human life in an abortion is a justifiable action while you believe it is murder? Or that, rather than being banned, pornography is perfectly fine to show to children as long as it is educational and appeals to LGBT groups? How does someone who believes that the United States should be a secular nation coexist with others who believe the nation was founded as a Christian one?
The culture wars are exactly that: a war between two competing visions of what the U.S. is and what its culture should look like. These two visions are so fundamentally opposed that any policy that is implemented will be seen as borderline violence by the other side.
These are the sort of foundational differences that have caused some of the most dangerous conflicts in the history of nations.
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For instance, the American Revolution was fought over far more trivial matters than the conflicts we see today, but nevertheless, it involved irreconcilable differences between the colonists and the British crown. And the last time the nation was so deeply divided on moral issues, it took the Civil War and the deaths of hundreds of thousands to resolve the conflict over slavery.
It is a sobering moment in our history, and it should be the hope and prayer of every person in this nation that these conflicts can be resolved without further bloodshed.