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Steve Hayward’s post about the invective used against Ronald Reagan reminds me of a PhD dissertation topic I’ve long wanted to induce some energetic graduate student to take up: A quantitative study of political invective. The research design should be fairly easy to set up. One category could be political office-holders, including, from both parties, all U.S. representatives and senators. Another category could be all political columnists on a defined set of major newspapers. A third could be talk show hosts and commentators from both radio and television. A fourth could be contributors to a set of major online magazines and blogs that have high political content—Slate, Salon, the Huffington Post, National Review’s Corner, and the like. The invective could be categorized. Comparisons with hateful people from the past (Hitler, McCarthy, Stalin, etc.). Accusations of lying. Accusations of stupidity. Accusations of treachery. Accusations of cruelty. Accusations of conspiracy. Ethnic slurs. Sexual slurs. Use of obscenities. There could also be a category for witty invective, but P.J. O’Rourke has the monopoly on that.

And then add them all up. What part of the political spectrum will be most responsible for the loss of civility that everyone so piously deplores?

I have a few predictions. On minor market radio shows, the loony Right probably piles up the most invective points, partly because there are so many more right-wing radio hosts than left-wing ones, and partly because there are some truly nasty people out there. But once you move into the major talk show and television commentators, I think the Left will take the lead. My impression is that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity seldom use the kind of language that Keith Olbermann uses routinely. When it comes to columnists in major newspapers, just think of the pairings—George Will and Charles Krauthammer compared to Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, for example. Michael Barone and E.J. Dionne. Jonah Goldberg and Maureen Dowd. For that matter, have you kept track of the language that academicians of the Left like Alan Wolfe use about the Right? Try to find anything remotely like it from Harvey Mansfield or James Q. Wilson. When it comes to the actual politicians, I’d be guessing. But wouldn’t it be fun to have the evidence laid out for everyone to see?

Amy Chua is a hoot. Her WSJ op ed about the superiority of Chinese parenting, a take from her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has blogs around the world roaring at a woman who could be so cruel to her children. I was laughing out loud throughout, partly because she clearly was having the time of her life twitting the sensitive helicopter parents who can’t bear the idea that their wonderful child is stressed or criticized in any way whatsoever. I was also laughing because the mother of my first two children was half Thai and all Chinese, and it was all so familiar. The subject heading of the email attaching the Chua article to my elder two daughters was “Bring back memories?” My own archetypal memory is when my eldest daughter, then perhaps eight years old, came home with her first Maryland standardized test scores, showing that she was at the 99th percentile in reading and the 93rd percentile in math. Her mother’s first words—the very first—were “What’s wrong with the math?”

Both children turned out great and love their mother dearly.

To get a little bit serious: large numbers of talented children everywhere would profit from Chua’s approach, and instead are frittering away their gifts—they’re nice kids, not brats, but they are also self-indulgent and inclined to make excuses for themselves. There are also large numbers of children who are not especially talented, but would do a lot better in school if their parents applied the same intense home supplements to their classroom work.

But genes play a big role in whether you can demand that your child get an A in advanced calculus or make first seat in the violin section of the orchestra. With that in mind, let’s contemplate the genes being fed into those Chua children who are doing so well.

Maternal grandfather: EE and computer sciences professor at Berkeley, known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks.

Mother: able to get into Harvard (a much better indicator of her IQ than the magna cum laude in economics that she got there); Executive Editor of the Law Review at Harvard Law School.

Father: Summa cum laude from Princeton and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, now a chaired professor at Yale Law School.

Guess what. Amy Chua has really smart kids. They would be really smart if she had put them up for adoption at birth with the squishiest postmodern parents. They would not have turned out exactly the same under their softer tutelage, but they would probably be getting into Harvard and Princeton as well. Similarly, if Amy Chua had adopted two children at birth who turned out to have measured childhood IQs at the 20th percentile, she would have struggled to get them through high school, no matter how fiercely she battled for them.

Accepting both truths—parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities—seems peculiarly hard for some parents and almost every policy maker to accept.

President Obama’s jarring use of the word “enemies” to describe political opponents came a few days before I took some friends on a tour of Antietam, which is only a few miles from our home. During the tour, I told them one of my favorite Antietam stories. After hours of savage fighting—it was the bloodiest day in American history—Robert E. Lee encountered his son, a 20-year-old artillery officer. His son’s face was blackened with powder and battle smoke, and Lee didn’t recognize him until the boy approached and asked, “General, are you going to send us in again?” Lee was heard to reply quietly, “Yes, my son. You all must do what you can to help drive those people back.”

I tell the story (when I can get through it without breaking up) because of its poignancy—the commanding general finds his son alive when he must have feared he was dead, and then has to tell him he must go back into the cauldron—but when I told it on Tuesday I was struck by the words “those people.” It is said that Lee always referred to the Union troops as “those people,” unwilling to call them “the enemy.”

I grant that too much shouldn’t be made of a single use of the word “enemies.” Politicians say lots of words in the heat of a campaign, and some of them come out by accident. But it is all right to make much of Lee’s unwillingness to use the word “enemy.” And, fair or not, the comparison is unavoidable.

Image by Wikimedia Commons user calebrw.