This was in 2012.
What people remember most about Mourdock’s effort to succeed U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana—whom Mourdock defeated in a contentious GOP primary—was his disastrous debate performance.
During his debate with soon-to-be U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Indiana, Mourdock proclaimed that pregnancies that resulted from rapes were God’s will. In addition to turning any notion of free will on its head, Mourdock managed to indict the Almighty on grounds of sexual assault.
After that bit of twisted theology, Mourdock’s campaign sank like an anvil dropped into a deep pool.
Most Hoosiers—including socially conservative ones—didn’t like thinking of God as a conspirator to a sex crime.
Important as Mourdock’s debate debacle was, it isn’t the memory from that campaign that stands out now as prophecy.
No, that came earlier.
At one point before his electoral meltdown, Mourdock explained that one thing he liked about being in politics was that it gave him the opportunity to “inflict” his opinion on others.
Yes, he used that word.
“Inflict.”
At the time, Mourdock’s word choice was seen as one more sign of the man’s goofiness, his inability to see governing for what it was and should be—a means and a vehicle for resolving, rather than exacerbating, differences in a large and complex society.
Particularly following Lugar, a conservative who nonetheless understood the importance of respecting other points of view and balancing interests, Mourdock’s “for-me-to-win-others-must-lose” approach seemed like an aberration.
A blip, not a turning point.
Now, though, 14 years later and 10 years after the rise of Donald Trump, Mourdock’s take on how the political process should work seems almost prophetic.
We live in a political world in which the hallmarks of what used to be thought of as statesmanship—resolving differences, finding common ground, reminding all involved of the greater good—instead are considered defects of character. In the America Donald Trump presides over, the leader who shows even a modicum of respect for his or her opponents is at best a weakling and at worst a traitor.
One seeks political power these days for the reason Richard Mourdock did—to inflict one’s views on others.
You run for office not to govern but to rule.
This is not the way it should be.
Nor is it the way it always has been.
As a teacher, I spend a lot of time with young people. They struggle to believe me when I tell them that there was a time, and not all that long ago at that, when progressives and conservatives could find ways to work together.
And even like each other.
These young people roll their eyes when I describe days when Republicans and Democrats would argue hard with each other, then sit down together over a meal or drinks and share some laughs.
It sounds to them as if I were conjuring up some sort of utopian fantasy.
But it wasn’t.
And it isn’t.
It’s the way—perhaps the only way—a self-governing society is supposed to work.
The founders of this nation sought to create a system that balanced enlightened self-interest. The hope was that if people with competing interests could sit at a table long enough, reason would assert itself and those competing interests would be at least partially accommodated.
Such a system would prize leaders skilled at grasping differing interests and identifying where those interests intersected, because that was the sweet spot where balanced policymaking could occur.
These leaders needed to be people who could listen.
People who could disagree without being disagreeable.
People like the late Richard Lugar or the late Lee Hamilton.
Now, though, folks such as Lugar and Hamilton are chased out of the process.
And “leaders” like Mourdock have come to take their places.
People often ask me how we got to this point—how we became a country of citizens with dwindling, if not disappearing, faith in our institutions and in the idea that free people can govern themselves.
It didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen all by itself.
It happened because we elected certain kinds of leaders.
Leaders who thought their views were the only ones that mattered.
Leaders who wanted to “inflict” their views on the rest of us.
