The Comparative Insignificance Of Politics
What nobody is going to listen to during inauguration week is cynicism, or anything that savors thereof: the sound of pins pricking happy balloons, the minimizing tone of voice that says, "Ummm, HMMM, just you wait … "
When it comes to Barack Obama, we're not into that. We're into—no cynicism intended—a Lincoln moment. Really, a post-Lincoln moment, in that when the Great Emancipator took the oath of office in 1861 he had emancipated no slaves whatever, and in truth, didn't make up his own mind to do so for more than two years. Of Barack Obama, 28th in line behind Lincoln (if you count Cleveland's two terms separately), Great Things are expected, and expected imminently.
We'll see how it goes. For conservatives some pleasant surprises could lie ahead, for liberals some frustration and disappointment (and thus, for conservatives, more pleasant surprises!).
The "we'll see" factor in all this means that time spent prognosticating about economic recovery, or nuclear weapons in Iran, or Medicare, or Supreme Court appointments doesn't make much sense. The best thing about prognostications is that few who hear them remember them. No one really knows, though media sages—especially those on the cable channels—often seem to know everything.
A point worth noting, in precisely this context, is the comparative insignificance of electoral politics in daily life. Comparative—not absolute. Politics matters. It merely happens to matter less than politicians and their enablers, including many of us voters, generally suppose.
It doesn't matter whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in: They're going to mess up, fall short and disappoint. My own sense of the matter is that Republicans tend to mess up less frequently than Democrats, but on the evidence of the past half dozen years, that claim might not stand up even in a Republican-controlled federal appeals court.
Politics deals most appropriately with the organization of human affairs: arrangements of one sort or the other concerning the ways humans live and work together, the means by which they cooperate to keep from killing each other. In classic politics, some times all you want is to keep people from killing one another. To make them love and admire and respect one another—that's a different matter.
One gets the idea that much of the nation in January 2009 is poised for a love-fest, if not for the Age of Aquarius. It might be time, after years of acrimony, for a little sweetness and light. Who's going to make that happen, nonetheless? A new president? Not that this one lacks admirable traits, but come on. Governing is about policy choices that a majority inevitability inflicts on a minority, until their respective roles and the policies change again.
Political men and women don't "unite," they divide, as we shall see again and again in due course. Even within their own parties politicians divide over questions of power and how to wield it.
Generally, when a society functions well, it does so in those areas of life that flourish outside the public sphere—families, churches, civic organizations and the like. Here the members rarely operate on the basis of raw power, acquired during bitter, head-counting contests for supremacy; they operate on the basis of mutuality and of consent to rules clearly understood, only occasionally disputed.
For keeping the national peace, for building highways, regulating the terms of trade, punishing evildoers, and so forth, hire a politician. He understands the uses and forms of collective power. For the upbuilding of community values, the nurturing and spread of shared norms, the cultivation of the spirit, the training of the heart—apply elsewhere besides the corridors of government. Go to church, get married, or join a club.
What a good thing it is that politicians don't dominate us any more than they do. To the particular politician who undertakes now to lead us—what can anyone say but God bless and all the luck in the world.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Entries(RSS)
Very well put, Mr. Murchison.
"The Comparative Insignificance of Politics", tell that one to the unborn, who are being diced and sliced and ripped out of their traitorous mothers' wombs by order of the Supreme Court. Or tell that to those husbands and wives exhausting themselves to maintain the natural order of things by their glorious combat against sodomites and their poliltical endorsers, who are trying to impose that abomination upon the rest of us as a "normal" thing. Barack Obama has a record for supporting these heinous things. I would be truly amazed, astonished, really surprised if he ended his support of them -- but, I'm not holding my breath.
Mr. Murchison
Your piece provides the perfect contrast to modern American political movements. Obama is nothing short of a religious figure. We can now see that our society did not abandon tradition, religion, and "superstition" for an enlightened rationalism. We simply traded downward. We had God but we preferred man. We have ridden ourselves of the church and the club as unnecessary remnants of an ignorant past. Now we know why they were there. The election of this man tells us more about ourselves than I think any of us ever wanted to know.
J Meng
I think Mr. Murchison might say that abortion and gay rights are not, at their heart, simply political problems. The legality or impending legality of these acts is indeed an issue and a serious one, but abortion says more about our civilization than our politics. Let us imagine what would happen if cannibalism was mad legal in the country tomorrow. Would men begin to eat each other? Probably not. An act like abortion must find its approval in spheres of life outside politics before it is made legal.
Oh the horror of it all! While I was getting my shock absorbers replaced this morning, I heard the telescreen blathering on about this historic moment -- the inaugurion of America's first black president. Naturally, I could not resist the opportunity to ask the question, "who was America's first black president?"
It was John Hanson, a delegate from Maryland of "moorish" descent, he was elected by congress under the Articles of Confederation in 1777. I'm happy to say it was a real eye-opener for the other customers caught up in the politcally correct spirit of the moment. I'm also happy to have deflated their bubble and put to rest the notion that the United States has finally overcome its racialist past.
C.S. Lewis pointed out that the modern State insists that people keep religion private -- then keeps shrinking the area of private life. The State ends up consuming everything -- as we're seeing.
I like to sit in Church and do nothing. That is the best cure for this madness.
Mr. Gervaise:
I nominate Warren G. Harding as our first black president. The rumours swirled around him his entire life and he never denied it. Some college professor in Ohio apparently did all this research and had supposedly "proven" it.
@7 John
There are several websites naming moorish, or partly black presidents. I only mentioned Hanson because the first seven congressional presidents are all but forgotten these days.
Thomas Jefferson is considered a strong candidate as well. But I like Harding, too. Lew Rockwell calls him the least bad president of the Twentieth Century. His A.G., Dougherty, wrote a great posthumous bio on him.
Edward, @3: Although politics has its own sphere of activity in human society, and since it is exercised by men for a particular purpose, i.e., "the complete common good of the citizens in the natural order," where is it written in granite that politicians are above the moral or divine law in exercising their authority? What is morally wrong cannot be politically good. Therefore, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was not good. This was a political decision which has cost millions of human lives as a consequence. Politics reflects, at any moment, the condition of our civilization. At one time, in this country of ours, abortion was illegal, because it is immoral. This had been handed down over centuries. Any human law is only as good as the moral premise upon which it rests. The political decision to legalize abortion merely blessed immorality. That, to me, is quite significant (as well as insane) for the future of our society.
If I understand the logic of your cannibalism analogy, I would suggest it would be more logical to legalize armed robbery, since, statistics on file in law enforcement agencies of the U.S. are replete with the records of those who want to practice that crime. But, is it right and is it good for societey? You are arguing that numbers decide whether something is true or morally good. That is a false argument and one of the major flaws of the democratist system.
I see two arguments about abortion and how it was imposed on us :
Argument #1 says "Change the laws and you will change the way people act." In other words, before Roe vs. Wade, most people didn't condone abortion. But once it was legal, people gradually came to accept it as justifiable.
Argument #2 says, "No. You have to start from the grassroots. Change the culture first by attacking the root of the problem, and then the overturn of Roe vs. Wade will come as a natural result."
This argument holds that political changes don't happen in a
vacuum; they had to spring from some seed that was already planted in the culture.
On this particular topic, cannibalism not withstanding, #1 seems to be more accurate. Isn't history usually made by tiny minorities of men (like nine supreme court justices), whose beliefs, decisions, and actions subsequently affect the culture as a whole? But I am stepping beyond the boundaries of what my limited historical knowledge will allow, and so I defer to my betters by asking : was there a large cultural sway amongst Americans toward abortion before 1972?
Oh my God! We're doomed! Lil' Smokin' Barry left St. John's church and went for coffee with Bush Light. They must have shared a blunt because Obama couln't even repeat the oath of office like a professional, let alone memorize it. And to think he worked out a way to recycle the Great Emancipator's Good Book. It's awful -- I need another shot of Virginia Lightning. He's a freaking dope! We are seriously in for a rough 4 years.
@10 Michael
Abortion -- or any other form of child sacrifice -- is merely a symptom of cultural decline. The cause is guilty self-loathing usually resulting from rejecting divine guidance. Read Deuteronomy 28, and see what happens to the nation which forgets God during the good times.
Pray for poverty.
"But I am stepping beyond the boundaries of what my limited historical knowledge will allow, and so I defer to my betters by asking : was there a large cultural sway amongst Americans toward abortion before 1972?"
There wasn't, Michael.
That's why the Northeastern Liberal Elite had to make up a overpopulaton scare and set up the Rockefeller Commission (thanks Nixon...) to trick people into thinking the tiny elite who imposed the legalization of abortion had non-evil motives.
If you can manage to blindside people in the context of making them think you have non-evil motives, there will usually be very little resistance so long as the males of the area are sufficiently domesticated.
One without the other though will rarely work, as Bush found out in Iraq.
(Bush blindsided them all right, I honestly don't think Saddam thought Bush would be stupid enough to go in, but the problem is that the fascade of non-evil motives had too many cracks to work on the rather tribal and undomesticated male population of Iraq.)
Most ordinary persons don't make a clear distinction between positive laws laid down by rulers and moral laws rooted in divine sanction or in our human nature. If someone in authority tells them "This is now OK," they'll have no further qualms about the matter.
This is why the left is so very anxious to control the courts and the legislative process. They know that once something has legal sanction behind it, the great mass of humanity will acquiesce in it.
I think it is a distortion of Mr. Murchison's views to imply that he does not consider politics to be important at all. But it is a much worse mistake, and one which practically defines the left, to consider politics to be all important, to consider that the acquisition, maintenance, and expansion of political power is the most important of human activities. This is a deadly error no matter how compelling the cause on behalf of which the power is said to be exercised.
At least some of the commentators seem to have made another error here - the error of imagining that the demos is pure and blameless and simply led astray or compelled by an evil elite. This is another leftist myth, though one held implicitly or explicitly by some who consider themselves rightists. The US Supreme Court has not ordered a single abortion; other courts have not ordered a single act of sodomy.
The sexual revolution had already gained considerable momentum in the 50s and early 60s due to what would now be considered light pornography and such technological advances as the contraceptive pill and the availability of automobiles to large numbers of unsupervised adolescents. Abortion was desired as the back-up for contraceptive failure. Legislatures had liberalized abortion laws in several states, including New York and California, before Roe v. Wade.
Attempts to set-up an overturn of Roe v. Wade have recently been made in South Dakota. In one case, virtually all abortions would have been prohibited and in the other, there would have been various exceptions made. Both referendums were voted down by approximately 55% majorities in a socially conservative state which McCain carried by a similar margin. No one forced these voters to vote the way they did, nor were they deceived as to what was on the ballot.
On the other hand, the number of abortions declined considerably during the Clinton regime despite the lack even of the appearance, let alone the reality of any pro-life political victories. To a large extent, this was done with one-on-one counselling and the setting up of a vast social network of support for pregnant women.
I've used abortion as one example, but there are many others which could illustrate the good which can be done outside the realm of politics. I think that for almost anyone, the most good that they will do will be outside the area of politics. Our citizenship in the Kingdom of God makes us all in a sense aliens in this world and often illegal ones. We should not be putting our trust in princes, even if, especially if, we elect them ourselves.
Kirt Higdon @ 15
Higdon makes a point frequently overlooked by some of us. We have legalized abortion in this country because, quite simply, a great many people, both liberal and conservative, want it that way. And in America, if there is a strong enough constituency for something, it happens.
The same thing is true for prostitution, liquor, and drugs. Millions of persons want these things to be available, and they are going to get them, come hell or high water.
Why are no opera houses or theaters being built? Simple. The constituency for those two things has evaporated.
The government has been attempting to stamp out the production of moonshine since the Whiskey Rebellion. And yet I'm sure that there are plenty of participants on this website who could tell me exactly where to get a jug of white lightning in their neighborhood.
The point is that you can't eliminate something for which there is a demand. As Higdon points out, you can only try to change the demand, on a one-on-one basis.
These are interesting exchanges on the "chicken vs egg" theories of abortion. I don't think the answer is clear as to whether demand or supply has been the driving force of its availability and increased use - probably some combination of the two.
I am reminded of a fellow with whom I attended high school. He was an exchange student from Britain spending his final year at our school in the Midwest. After Oxford he went on to help the Labour Party, and fellow Oxford alum Tony Blair specifically, as some sort of political adviser and media liaison (I forget what the precise name was for the office of propoganda creation and dissemination). On one particular visit to the states he had a travel bag overflowing with the trash tabloids one finds at American and British gorcery stores. I asked why he had those and he replied that he regularly read the media of the common people so as to better serve them. Serve them or manipulate them, I wondered.
That Blair and team would later go on to change the peerage rules and gut the House of Lords is no surprise. The domestic intellectual decline, institutional degradation, and penchant for foreign violence ensued at great pace in Britain, just as in the US at that same time. One is left wondering whether the Oxford "elites" of Britain "supplied" the cultural decline or whether they merely reflected the will of the masses who were the real drivers of the decline. I tend to place the blame with the ruling class (I cannot bear to call them "elites" since they exhibit very few, if any, of the virtues that would make the term appropriate).
The sexual revolution of the 1950s and 60s was the determining factor, I believe. Recall that, before Hugh Hefner and his "Playboy philosophy," sexual promiscuity was seen as something degrading and vicious by everyone, male and female, white and black, Catholic and Protestant. Nobody defended the lecher or the rake, the slut or the tramp, except the freaky "free-love" types who were seen as just crackpot intellectuals.
Hefner and those who followed him defended promiscuous sexual behavior as normal and healthy. Once that idea became popular (it was very easy to convince young guys), then naturally girls felt a strong need for some kind of protection. Hence contraceptives, followed by abortion.
@16 "The point is that you can’t eliminate something for which there is a demand. As Higdon points out, you can only try to change the demand, on a one-on-one basis."
Is this change in demand not the job of educated people? In terms of aristocracy, when education was limited to a few, the elites set the standards, and educated people were respected. I used to work with people are supposed to be from the aristocracy of a certain European country. There was nothing aristocratic at all about them--they were just snobbish and not well educated.
But now the goal of everyone is to be "successful"--you are respected by how much money you have, does not matter how you become "successful" you just have to be so. So of course, standards will also decline.
Gargi @ 19
Yes, it is part of the job of an aristocracy to set standards. That is the truth behind the French expression "noblesse oblige" -- that is, "nobility has obligations to fulfill."
But in America today (and in the rest of the planet, which seems to be aping America more and more) there is no real aristocracy except as measured by money. As long as you have plenty of money, you can be as stupid and tasteless and vapid as you wish. Watch the current TV series "The Real Housewives of Orange County" and you'll see this with an eye-opening vengeance.
@21
A society always has a natural aristocracy of the mind. How much political and cultural influence these people can wield in a society are questions that have been debated since the times of Plato's Rebpublic.
The majority is not always enlightened--and when they dictate culture and values, this can be dangerous in a democracy.
But what is most dangerous is when those of the educated classes can be "bought" as is happening today.
Gargi @ 21
The trouble today is that "a natural aristocracy of the mind" and "the educated classes" are no longer synonymous. The vast majority of persons teaching in our colleges, and producing our newspapers and magazines, and directing what are called "cultural institutions" here in America are left-liberal scum. They have plenty of degrees and credentials, but I would no more call them a natural aristocracy of the mind than I would a pack of hyaenas friendly pets.
Yes, most of our educated class is as completely bought and paid for as a street prostitute. They are bought with tenure-track teaching jobs, high five-figure salaries, government grants, publishing contracts, half-pay sabbaticals, 3-2 teaching schedules, subsidies for travel to conferences, not to mention free sex from their groupie graduate students.
Kirt @15: "...the number of abortions declined considerably during the Clinton regime despite the lack even of the appearance, let alone the reality of any pro-life political victories. To a large extent, this was done with one-on-one counselling and the setting up of a vast social network of support for pregnant women."
I would add to those factors (as I have in other posts): the inevitable demographic winter from the Culture of Death. Children who might have been born to its constituents and lived to abort or contracept their own offspring were themselves already either aborted or contracepted.
Metropolitan Jonah delivered a sermon at the 2009 March for life. I posted it on Youtube but will not add the link here, because then the comment will not be posted. He quoted the Bible when saying, "We do battle with powers and pricipalities in high places."
Forces of darkness are working while we sleep to advance their satanic agenda through a network of well financed useful idiots. And it's not just here in the US, it's worldwide. And it's not just abortion; homosexual marriage, pornography, historical revisionism, and possibly fiat money are issues the "progressives" who wish to tear down tradition are involved in, also.
@19: The vote was also limited to those who were self-employed or did not need to work for wages. Anyone else was considered dependant on his master's money and unable to rule objectively.
But now everyone is equal! We're so much better than our snobbish, bigoted ancestors!
@18 Joseph
Before dirty old man Hefner was the even stranger crackpot Alfred Kinsey who proclained that bisexuality was the norm with homos and heteros forming the two extremes. Hef's daughter turned into a lesbian.
E. Gervaise @ 26
Yes, Kinsey was weird. And if you read his Report ("Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female") you'll be hard pressed to explain how such a boring, turgid, ill-written piece of bureaucratic English ever managed to become a best-seller.
@27 Joseph
All his weirdness is laid out in an excellent, yet unkonon book called Kinsey, Sex and Fraud. I don't remember the author offhand, I lent out my copy and never saw it again.
27 Mr. Joseph Salemi:
"...how such a boring, turgid, ill-written piece of bureaucratic English ever managed to become a best-seller..."
Because sex sells? (duck!)
H.F. Wolff
Yes, you're probably right. You could put the word "Sex" on an auto mechanic's manual for carburetors and it would sell out quickly.
Lest any of you start quoting Mr. Gervaise about the first black president being John Hanson, you should do some research. One pretty quickly realizes this is a hoax. The nonsense about his picture on the $2 bill and a photograph(!) of him taken 1780's is quite disreputable. There's a website at johnhanson dot net whose author (Stanley L. Klos) seems to be an authority; at least he was the best I found. I'm willing to be corrected.