Let's Not, Please

 A friend of mine with more stamina than I have stayed up for the Hillary Clinton speech on the first night of the DNC. He described a moment—which was also noted by the media—when the crowd started chanting "Lock him up," referring to Donald Trump. Clinton didn't lead the chant or join in (as Trump would have done). But she didn't make a point of hushing the crowd, either. Instead, she gave a strained smile, in my friend's telling, that effectively gave them permission to continue. The press portrayed the moment as her "revenge" on Trump for initiating the "lock her up" chant eight years ago. 

I really hate to see the Democratic Party go the direction of normalizing this sort of thing. I get that it is all part of the current strategy. After choosing to hold the moral high ground for several election cycles, today's Democrats appear to have decided that this simply doesn't work. You have to fight fire with fire. As one party strategist told Politico, Michelle Obama's famous counsel, "When they go low, we go high," has been replaced in effect with a new dictum: "When they go low, we go with the flow." In other words, Democrats have chosen to echo Republicans' appeals to the lowest common denominator. 

People will defend this approach by saying: Republicans went there first. And they remain so much worse. So aren't we justified in doing whatever it takes to defeat them—even if it means using a bit of demagogic rhetoric of our own? And yet, the reason I support the Democrats isn't out of some tribal affiliation. It's because they are the alternative in this election that supports the democratic process and our republican institutions. If they start to echo the same kind of autocratic rhetoric as Trump—chanting about "locking up" political opponents—then they undercut the reason I want them to win in the first place. 

I've quoted the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace before on this point, and I say it still stands. In a classic poem on the theme of choosing between love and honor, he argues in effect that there would be nothing left to love, if he did not preserve his honor. "I could not love thee, Dear, so much/ Lov'd I not honour more." Democrats need to adopt the same principle. The choice is not actually between victory and fighting with honor in this election. If the Democrats become Trumpy, in the course of fighting Trump, then not only is honor lost—but the victory is lost too. The means are the ends here. 

The whole point of trying to beat Trump in this election is to preserve the peaceful transfer of power and to try to remain the sort of the country that settles its political differences at the ballot box, not through violence or retributive criminal investigations. So, if Democrats' means do not conform to that end, then the election is already lost. The choice, then, is not between love of the country and love of honor. Without honor, there is no country to preserve. In speaking to the nation and their followers, therefore, the Democrats need to echo Lovelace: "I could not love thee, Dear, so much/ Lov'd I not honour more."