releases: https://www.flake.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=6DE2A16B-A17B-4FF4-9075-1171B3F1A3C1
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| https://www.flake.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=6DE2A16B-A17B-4FF4-9075-1171B3F1A3C1 | VIDEO: Flake Condemns Political Tribalism in Address at New Hampshire Institute of Politics | 2018-10-02 | 2018 | 2018-10 | Republican | House | AZ | Jeff Flake | F000444 | www.flake.senate.gov | legacy | WASHINGTON U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) last night delivered a speech at Saint Anselm College's New Hampshire Institute of Politics. His remarks, titled After the Deluge: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle,' addressed the necessity of overcoming tribalism and changing the current political culture: Well, by the ways that we measure political success in this sordid era, and by the conventions of how party loyalists are supposed to behave, I hope to continue to fail my tribe. And I would encourage us all across the ideological spectrum - to take that same risk. Step out of your tribe. Do something hard and start a dialogue that you might never have thought of starting before, and that our current tribal rules do not allow. From personal experience, I can attest to the fact that it is never too late to leave the tribe. My message here today is that tribalism is ruining us. It is tearing our country apart. It is no way for sane adults to act. And most importantly - ultimately, the only tribe to which any of us owes allegiance is the American tribe. Video of Flake's full remarks can be viewed here. A transcript of Flake's prepared remarks can be found below. After the Deluge: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle Dr. DiSalvo, Executive Director Levesque, thanks so much for having me here at the Institute of Politics. And thank you all for being here. It's wonderful to be in New Hampshire again. I've always heard that St. Anselm is a safe spacepopulated by calm, reasonable peopleand I am counting on this today you have no idea. I only regret that not much of interest is happening for us to talk about But seriously, and to be clear, when I titled this speech After the Deluge I meant that metaphorically. I hadn't counted on an actual deluge. So, teachable moment: be careful what you title things. Because that makes them happen. Use your words responsibly. When I first started thinking about this speech and how to frame it, I had thought about calling it What happened to Ronald Reagan's Party. President Reagan's party was once brimming with ideas, and full of purpose and principle. It was coherent, and inspiring, and idealistic. So much so that it awakened the imagination of a kid from Snowflake, Arizona, and a whole generation of other kids just like him. Made us think big thoughts, and of our place in the world, and of what it meant to be an American in America, the shining city on a hill. Reagan's vision of America as the indispensable nation was benevolent and big-hearted, a beacon to the striver and to the oppressed and those locked behind an ideological wall that divided the world into free and oppressed. It was morning in Reagan's America. It wasn't perfect, but it was always getting better. It wasn't endless bounty, but by grace and grit there was enough for everybody. We were the sum of our goodness, not our gripes of our resolve, not our resentments. And in Reagan's America, we knew where the buck stopped. Now, you can't find that poor buck. It's wandering out there, searching for someone, anyone, to claim responsibility. And President Reagan even during his most intense partisan battles - both comported himself with dignity and accorded his opponents the respect he felt for them the dignity he felt they deserved. You know, just like we see in Washington today Let us return to the present deluge of our own creation. Because the only way we will get through this period is by being honest about it, and by resisting the cheap impulse to find a stalking horse for the damage we ourselves are inflicting. What is it the kids say? When you point a finger at someone there are three more pointing back at you? Even the wisdom of the playground has escaped us in the nation's capital. Governing is hard. Democracy is hard. Decency shouldn't be that hard, but apparently it is. You know what's easy? Being callous. Being a demagogue. The politics of vengeance that's easy. Dehumanization requires very little talent. By raging at each other with our minds vacant of reason and reeling with ill-will and conspiracy theories, we Republicans have given in to the horrible tribal impulse to first mistake our opponents for our enemiesand then we have become seized with the conviction that we must destroy that enemy seemingly oblivious to the fact that not only are we not enemies, we are each vital organs in the same body. It's as if in order to save itself, your brain decided to destroy your heart. That's about the level of care we are currently bringing to the proceedings. That's about how smart we seem to be right now. We are harming ourselves, seemingly without regard to who else we take out with us, or what institutions we plunder. There is a sickness in our system, and we have infected the whole country with it. And that was just last week. Ah, last weekOn the day before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to meet to hear the extraordinary testimony of Christine Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, on the senate floor, I gave a speech exhorting my colleagues to listen with open minds to the testimony that we were about to hear. And to resist the impulse to strip Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh of their humanity and turn them into mere props for our politics. It surely is a symptom of our disease that such a modest plea was met with rage from all sides. It was an interesting experiment, actually. Like dipping a toe into a pool of piranhas. And just as piranhas are unthinking killing machines, so, too, can ideologues be unthinking and dangerous. The left was enraged because I had failed to behave exactly as they would have me behave, and prejudge the testimony against Brett Kavanaugh. And the right was enraged because I had similarly failed to prejudge the testimony against Christine Ford. I had failed my tribe. I have been failing my tribe for some time now. Well, by the ways that we measure political success in this sordid era, and by the conventions of how party loyalists are supposed to behave, I hope to continue to fail my tribe. And I would encourage us all across the ideological spectrum - to take that same risk. Step out of your tribe. Do something hard and start a dialogue that you might never have thought of starting before, and that our current tribal rules do not allow. From personal experience, I can attest to the fact that it is never too late to leave the tribe. To self-styled smashmouth tough guy politicians, bipartisanship has become sort of a mushy word. It isn't viscerally satisfying to people who always have to get their way the way two-year-olds must get their way. No offense to two-year-olds, but they have no business in elected office. Anyone who studies history knows that when we have been at our best as a country, when we have been at our most prosperous and most principled, we have done the hard work that our constitutional system was designed to do, and we have compromised. Throughout our history, consequential moments have gone in search of statesmen and -women, and to our great good fortune, those moments have almost always found them. Our country is itself a compromise, and our system of representative democracy would not exist but for one of the grandest compromises in human history. But, stop the presses: we are not always at our best. And anyone who studies history also knows that that ours is a country that has literally come apart at the seams once before due to its tribalism our country was once almost dissolved over its differences. There are some days in Washington when it feels as if we are lurching toward dissolution once again. And yet, in our short life span, the United States has become the most successful and principled and generous civilization ever known. And America became unique in the history of nations not in spite of our differences, but because of our differences. The accommodation of difference is, of course, what a democracy is and does. But that is a lesson that we forget and relearn on a more or less constant basis, as we divide ourselves into shirts and skins and relish in the perverse satisfactions of destructive partisan tribalism. My message here today is that tribalism is ruining us. It is tearing our country apart. It is no way for sane adults to act. And most importantly - ultimately, the only tribe to which any of us owes allegiance is the American tribe. The only way that we will chart a course out of our present disaster is by resolutely failing the tribes that we have fallen into, the tribes that have separated us as Americans and turned us against each other. By rejecting that binary model of democracy, and doing things differently than we have done them in the pastBy partnering with our opponents, appreciating the goodness in them and in their argumentsBy choosing a different path than the path of bitter partisan advantage and the dopamine rush of scoring cheap political points. When I last had the privilege of speaking here, I framed my talk around the refrain that We will get through this, and when we do I went on to describe a future beyond this moment, beyond this presidency a future in which we repair the damage from this period, and strengthen our foundations so that our politics might never succumb to these base and tribal impulses again. But before we can get there, we must navigate our way out of here. And in order to see the future we must understand the past and how it led us here. Our current crisis has many fathers. But my generation has done its fair share to refine this brand of poisonous politics. In my time in Congress, I have seen the deterioration up close. In January 2011, a few days after Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot and gravely wounded while greeting constituents at a Tucson supermarket, we in the Arizona congressional delegation left an empty seat for her at that year's State of the Union address. That year, the delegation made it a point to sit together in solidarity rather than divide along party lines as the rest of the chamber typically does during the speech. One year later, when Gabbywho was working very hard on rehabilitating from her grievous injuryreturned to Congress, I sat next to her during the State of the Union. During President Obama's applause lines, Gabby wanted to stand up but was unable to do so on her own, so I helped her. That often left me standing, a lone Republican among cheering Democrats. During and after the president's address, I received furious text messages and emails from partisans who wanted to know why I agreed with President Obama. While I like and respect President Obama very much, I did not agree with him on much during that speech, but Gabby Giffords was my friend, and it was my honor to help her stand that evening. It was a gesture of affection for a cherished and brave colleague. I hadn't given it any more thought. It certainly didn't occur to me that I should worry what Republicans might think, because life is too short to worry about such things. In that moment, Congresswoman Giffords and I were not members of different political partieswe were friends, fellow Arizonans, fellow Americans, fellow human beings. And yet, all some people could see was that I was somehow consorting with the enemy. Much the same thing happened in the late summer of 2016, on the day that my Democratic colleague from Virginia, Senator Tim Kaine, was added to the Democratic ticket as the vice-presidential nominee. Tim and I entered the Senate together, and we obviously have disagreed on many things, but I know him to be exceptionally smart, hardworking, and patriotic. By way of congratulating Tim on being named to the Democratic ticket, I tweeted a playful jab: Trying to count the ways I hate Tim Kaine. Drawing a blank. Congrats to a good man and a good friend. Once again: remarkable, unhinged fury from the ideologues. At a political gathering not long afterward, I received a scolding from a die-hard Republican who felt that I was aiding and abetting the enemy: If you can't say anything bad, don't say anything at. . . . He caught himself before fully reversing the advice I'm sure his mother once gave him. Such is the conditioned response of a shattered politics. Six years after Congresswoman Giffords was shot, I found myself in an eerily familiar settinga hospital waiting room, listening as doctors described the critical condition of another colleague, Congressman Steve Scalise, who was fighting for his life after receiving a large-caliber gunshot wound to the hip. Four other victims were being treated for gunshot wounds on different floors and at different hospitals. It was an early morning in June 2017, and this one hit even closer to home. We had all been practicing for one of the rare moments of civility in Washingtonthe Congressional baseball gamewhen a crazed gunman opened fire. Arriving back at the Capitol later that morning in a daze, I navigated my way across marble floors in steel baseball cleats to the Senate gym because my gear was still in the dugout, which was by then a crime scene. As I changed out of my uniform, the red stains on my pants leg and a blood-soaked batting glove, used to apply pressure to injuries, reminded me how fortunate I had been. To discover later that the motive had been political was shocking. The gunman looked out on a ball field and saw something other than a dozen or so middle-aged members of Congress taking batting practice. He saw the enemy. It seems elementary to have to form this thought, much less speak these words, but here we are: I am a proud conservative and a lifelong Republican. That does not make the Democrats my enemies. America has too many real enemies to indulge such nonsense. We will serve our constituents when our tribal impulses take over and we cease to have human responses to each other. When we have governed best, we have sought comity and consensus. We fight and argue vehemently for our positions and our principles, but with the understanding that policies that endure always bear the imprint of both sides. That is when America is at her best. If it sounds as if I am calling for a new politics, that's because I am. Because we simply cannot go on this way. There's a fella down in Texas, very funny guy, very liberal, from back a generation or so ago before Texas banned Democrats. His name is Jim Hightower. Hightower had a stock saying that went: The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow stripes and dead armadillos. Like I said he's funny. But with all due respect to Mr. Hightower and those poor armadillos, I want to make clear that what I am talking about here today is not the abandonment of conviction in deference to some kind of soft middle-of-the-roadism. I'm not talking about surrendering belief, or putting a finger to the wind to figure out what your deeply-held convictions will be for today, subject to change tomorrow. I am a conservative Republican. That is borne out by any objective measure or grading system that exists. And my friend Chris Coons, the senator from Delaware, is a liberal Democrat. Incidentally, when I say that Senator Coons is my friend, I don't mean it in that syrupy Washington way whereby people call each other My dear friend while gouging each other's eyes out. Chris is my dear friend, and I am very grateful to know him. We are friends because we have worked together, and we have worked together because the constitutional framework that created our government ingeniously makes governing hard and compromise inevitable if we're doing it right. It makes me have to consider what is best for the people of Delaware just as it makes Chris responsive to what is best for the people of Arizona. It is when we try to avoid compromise, and take partisan advantage, and do things just because we have the numbers especially when we are as terribly and closely divided as we are now that we begin to do serious harm to the country. I don't want to get into it much here, but the compromise that Chris and I struck on Friday is one that I take seriously, and we did it because fairness required us to do it. And we did it because in that moment, our impulse to tribalism was tearing the country apart. In order for the results we arrive at to make sense to the country, we all have to have a process that we can have faith in. I, for one, am waiting for the additional information that will come with the supplemental FBI investigation to inform my decision on Judge Kavanaugh's nomination. For the past year, I have been speaking out about the condition of our democracy, because my conscience has required me to do so. Our institutions have been under assault, the independence of our justice system has been threatened, our doctrine of separation of powers has been tested like seldom before, and the stability of the world has become an open question as the administration upends the postwar world order that we created and that has kept the world safe for 70 years. I didn't go to Washington expecting to have to defend the basic institutions of American liberty. I didn't expect to find myself inveighing against the president of the United States, especially a president from my own party. I went to Washington to reduce the size and reach of Washington's sometimes suffocating effect on the American economy. To reduce taxes and regulations, and unleash the full potential and great societal benefit of American capitalism. I went to Washington to work on expanding America's markets through vigorous and free trade, and to see to it that we had a robust, secure and welcoming immigration policy. I went to Washington to challenge my ideological opposites, to learn from them, to make friends, and to compromise for the common good. Because none of our problems can be solved by just one party, by just one tribe. That kind of thinking is the recipe for our current disaster. It has unleashed all of our worst impulses and brought us to the brink. And until we solve the problem of our politics, and stop warring on each other, and imperiling our democracy, the issues I went to Washington to work on will be impossible to address. We have got to make it so that indulgence in tribalism at the expense of what's good for the country will be punished at the ballot box. We must change our political culture. So that when you come to destroy and not to build, you will pay a political price. And we've got to reward compromise again, because compromise is the rock on which we were founded. Want to make America great as an elected official? Be humble, conduct yourself in good faith, and when necessary, compromise to find solutions. If the past week has taught me anything, it is that the country is hungry for us to work together again, on their behalf. Just a few hours ago, I was interviewed in Boston before a crowd of a few thousand people at the Forbes 30 under 30 event. The moderator joked that sometimes it looks like I'm a man without a country. Truth is, sometimes I feel like I'm a man, temporarily, without a party. But I've got a country, thank goodness. The same wonderful country I've always had. It's the same country that makes me think, whenever I travel overseas and come back again, of the poem by the 19th-century poet, Henry Van Dyke. Tis fine to see the old world, and travel up and down Among the shining places and cities of renown To admire the crumbling castles and the statues of the kings But now I think I've had enough of antiquated things So it's home again and home again, America for me I want a ship that's westward bound to plow the rolling sea To the blessed land of room enough beyond the ocean bars Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars May we always remember that in this blessed land of room enough, there is room enough for all of us, regardless of our political party. Thank you so much, St. Anselm. I am very grateful for your invitation. ### | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |