Soon — in only two weeks —  millions of Americans will take some time out of their day to vote. 

As said two longtime congressional scholars, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, politics in the United States is more polarized now than at any time since the Civil War, when politics came to fratricidal blows for four years. Even if you disagree with that almost apocalyptic assessment of our political infirmities, no matter how you slice it the Democratic and Republican Party faithful say, more likely than not, that this will be the most important election through which our country has had to pilot herself thus far.

What is important to think about, as we leave the comfort of our homes to vote, is whether the incumbent party (in this case, the Republicans that now control the U.S. House of Representatives) has done a good job of serving as a loyal opposition to our Democratic president. We ought to consider the attitude with which Republicans have ruled the People’s House during their two years in control of that body with a 50-member majority over the Democrats.

Politics is a constant activity, and relegating it to the months preceding November cheats us of opportunities to seek, much less decide on and implement, solutions to the public problems government should address. Since assuming the majority, House Republicans should have set about trying to win the peace.

Winning that peace — the time between elections — has not been among the priorities of House Republicans since their successes in the midterm elections of 2010, and since President Barack Obama was elected in 2008. But the day after the 2010 elections which made him speaker of the House, John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he would work with Obama to the extent that he was willing to “change course.”

Instead of expressing an interest in governing, Republicans continued their deep opposition to the president. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was quoted as saying: “We’re determined to stop the agenda Americans have rejected. We’ll work with the administration when they agree with the people and confront them when they don’t.” 

 

Naturally, “when they don’t” meant whenever the Obama administration disagreed with congressional Republicans, the group charged with carrying out the people’s will.

 

Their rhetoric brings back memories of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s “We will bury you!” in 1956. It sounds eerily similar to that employed for a scene in the Clint Eastwood classic “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” when members of the Confederate outfit Eastwood’s character rode with during the Civil War were among the last units to surrender to federal authorities and swear allegiance to the United States. But the Federals were not interested in surrender and assimilation of the rebels but their annihilation.

 

The senator overseeing the oath administration sneered to the rebel commander, Fletcher, after he noted how vengeful and murderous was the federal captain administering the oath, saying: “The war’s over. Our side won the war. Now we must busy ourselves winning the peace. Fletcher, there’s an old saying —‘to the victors belong the spoils.’”

 

There was in that scene none of the grace Gen. Ulysses S. Grant put into his statement after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox: “The war is over, the rebels are our countrymen again.”

 

Variations on the idea that peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of something else abound. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza said: “Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” According to some accounts, he said: “Peace is … a virtue based on strength of character.”

 

Martin Luther King Jr. is reputed to have said: “Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the presence of justice and brotherhood.” Dorothy Thompson, the first journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, said: “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict.”

 

Republicans seem to be under the delusion that they are at war. In order to be credible politicians and deserve the votes of their prospective constituents, Republicans must, without qualification or equivocation, adopt an attitude that accepts the validity of individuals in their own right and that recognizes the basic fact of human existence that our worth is not defined in terms of the groups to which we belong.

 

We can even number Ronald Reagan among those who would likely disagree with House Republicans’ take-it-or-leave-it handling of their majority.

 

 “Peace,” he said, “is not the absence of conflict; it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”