In America today we are seeing the reddening of the justice system. Politicizing of the branch of government supposedly devoted exclusively to finding the truth is not new in the history of democracy.
During a swing from common party control of Parliament to the king’s court party control in the reign of Charles II, one historian writes, “The (king’s) court … made justice subservient to their factious views.” Both “bench and juries” showed a significant shift in political “temper,” and this also included politically inflamed witnesses, a situation not generally known in this country excepting in our long history of racialized justice in the south.
A (white) liberal leader was accused of speaking treason against the king in a public speech. Three women came forward and offered remarkably consistent separate accounts of the wording he used in his speech. “They agreed so exactly together that there was not the smallest variation in their depositions.”
The defendant proved several things that ordinarily would have exonerated him. He proved that the witnesses were of low reputation and that he had always been a royalist dedicated to the king. He also produced the notes he used for the speech and brought witnesses of good reputation who themselves took notes of the speech and provided the notes as evidence he never said the things the witnesses said he did.
He also argued that it was highly unlikely that the women could remember highly specific wording after so long a time after the event “and to remember it so exactly, as to agree to a tittle their depositions with regard to it.” His attorney questioned them to see if they remembered anything else about the speech, including what his topic was about, and none of them did.
The historian writes, “So violent were party-prejudices that the jury gave a verdict against the prisoner.”
As a post-script to this incident, the historian offers remarkable insight into the vices that extreme political faction introduces into people’s government. He writes, “Besides that it inflames all the passions, it tends much to remove those great restraints of honor and shame. Men find that no iniquity can lose them the applause of their own party, and no innocence secure them against the calumnies of the opposing party.”
We are seeing this in the MAGA approach to political life today. Violent passion is coupled with the evaporating of personal honor and shame. Party men and women find they can say or do anything and still obtain the approval of their party. Party men and women on the other side find no innocence is enough to prevent them from being removed from public office or demoted, their reputations destroyed, the truth obliterated, attacks made against them in their homes, and attacks made against their cherished statehouses and polling places.
It is not enough that we wait for the political “temper” to swing back to the blue side or any other side and hope things will get better. Things must get better on a more fundamental level, but our politicians seem to have no idea how to do that.
In fact, plenty of things can be done that involve actual work and change and not just political speechmaking. A short list: a vast improvement in civics education in schools; enhanced adult continuing education in history and law; preventing and humanely correcting crime; tempering the country’s dedication to luxury and personal leisure and substituting instead a little bit of actual engagement in democracy; stabilizing the institution of marriage and ensuring more consistent parenting.
Kimball Shinkoskey lives in Woods Cross, Utah.
