“The United States is becoming like Lebanon and other Middle East countries in two respects. First, our political differences are becoming so deep that our two parties now resemble religious sects in a zero-sum contest for power. They call theirs \u201cShiites and Sunnis and Maronites\u201d or \u201cIsraelis and Palestinians.\u201d We call ours \u201cDemocrats and Republicans,\u201d but ours now behave just like rival tribes who believe they must rule or die.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFor a healthy politics to flourish it needs reference points outside itself \u2014 reference points of truth and a conception of the common good,\u201d explained the Hebrew University religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal. \u201cWhen everything becomes political, that is the end of politics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To put it differently, when everything is politics, it means that everything is just about power. There is no center, there are only sides; there\u2019s no truth, there are only versions; there are no facts, there\u2019s only a contest of wills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you believe that climate change is real, it must be because someone paid you off with a research grant. If you believe the president committed an impeachable offense trying to enlist the president of Ukraine to undermine Joe Biden, it\u2019s only because you want power for your party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Illiberal populists like Trump \u2014 or Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia \u2014 deliberately try to undermine the guardians of facts and the common good. Their message to their people is: \u201cDon\u2019t believe the courts, the independent civil servants or the fake news generators \u2014\u00a0only trust me, my words and my decisions. It\u2019s a jungle out there. My critics are\u00a0killers<\/em>\u00a0(which is what Trump called his press corps on Friday), and only I can protect our tribe from theirs. It\u2019s rule or die.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And second, as in the Middle East, so increasingly in America:\u00a0Everything is now politics<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 even the climate, even energy, even face masks in a pandemic.”\u00a0
…
“But a society, and certainly a democracy, eventually dies when everything becomes politics. Governance gets strangled by it. Indeed, it was reportedly the failure of the corrupt Lebanese courts to act as guardians of the common good and order the removal of the explosives from the port \u2014 as the port authorities had requested years ago \u2014 that paved the way for the explosion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n