The tirade of intemperate political invective tied to 2022 midterms that’s been hitting our email inboxes, flashing across our TV screens and filling our mailboxes isn’t just negative campaigning gone viral.

It’s more dangerous than that — a worrying symptom of a political system pulling itself apart into warring camps where compromise, rational debate and civility are seen as weak. Instead, a zero-sum game of total domination becomes the goal, pushing both political parties to extremes.

Already we see suggested in the hammer attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul the possibility that the angry rhetoric of political parties and candidates has lowered the bar of violence. According to The Los Angeles Times, the accused attacker later told San Francisco police he sought to take Nancy Pelosi hostage and break her kneecaps if she “lied.”

All politicians — even those who might have stayed silent about the unprovoked assault — surely felt the ripple of danger to themselves. Over time, all politics can become a wave of cause and response, where one party emulates the other.

By making political attacks personal (remember “Lock her up!”); by spending in this election cycle tens of millions of dollars to demonize Pelosi (“fire Nancy Pelosi and take our country back”; show “the strength to fight Biden, Pelosi and the woke mob”), the GOP was emulating what they’d earlier decried: The personal vilification by Democrats of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (and other justices) over the leaked draft overturning Roe v. Wade. Anger over that had prompted Kavanaugh’s accused would-be assailant to travel from California to the tree-lined Maryland street where Kavanaugh lived, diverting from his planned assault only when he saw federal marshals guarding the home and texted his sister, who urged him to give himself up.

How do we temper the invective and break this cycle of toxic vilification of the other side?

One way might be to follow the example of Abraham Lincoln, whose Second Inaugural Address came as the nation’s horrifically costly Civil War was drawing to a close. His address on March 4, 1865, can be seen on one level as a defiant restating of the war’s just moral cause — to end slavery — and the need to persevere until that end was achieved.

But yet, there were no taunts, no epithets, no denigrations of the other side.

A National Park Service summary of the occasion notes the remarkably inclusive, conciliatory language Lincoln chose to use in his 703-word speech.

“Unlike previous second inaugural addresses, Lincoln’s words are directed away from himself. Instead of words like ‘me’ or ‘I’, he uses more inclusive words like ‘all’ or ‘both’ to draw attention to his broader intent,” observes the unsigned article, posted on the National Park Service website.

“Another unique component of this inaugural speech,” the article adds, “is its use of Biblical verses and theological language. Lincoln provides quotes from the Bible four times, mentions God 14 times, and summons prayer three times.”

In other words, Lincoln sought through conciliatory words and Biblical references familiar to virtually all Americans of the time to find a common language to heal, rather than further inflame and divide.

Lincoln concluded with those famous words:

“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan (tilde) to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Did Lincoln’s impassioned words in themselves bind those wounds, abate the resentments and cool the animosities that four years of war had wrought? Obviously, not in themselves. Forty-two days later, Lincoln was dead, felled by an assassin’s bullet at Ford’s Theatre.

But Lincoln’s instincts were right. Words matter. A divided nation is a weakened nation — and must heal itself to regain its strength and vigor. That’s no less true of the sharply divided America today than it was after a terrible Civil War.

So let us all bind ourselves together to work to end the toxic political rancor that’s dividing us by ever greater degrees. Let us, from Main Street to the U.S. Capitol, look for common ground; eschew divisive, angry, accusatory words; listen rather than attack; and look to the future to try to make our politics less personal, and more conciliatory.

— Cleveland Plain Dealer