On 3/27/07, Bob Whitmire <bwhitmire@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> It's my humble opinion, as one who worked his first political
> campaign in 1960, and who has voted in every election since 1972
> (first one I was eligible for), that when you live in an organized
> political state, you _always_ are voting for the lesser evil. Life in
> an organized state is a necessary evil, and one should always seek
> the lesser leadership evil, if one wants to thrive.
I don't think it need be this way. We simply tolerate a more or less
unlimited amount of non-public money to define the issues and shape
what gets said about them. Nevertheless, there are very good people
out there in public life. From somewhat different ends of the
spectrum there are honorable individuals like Dennis Kucinich and John
McCain. I know of many more at the more local levels of government.
So long as we tolerate privately funded political campaigns, the
principle methodology for winning elections will be to fool as many
people for as long as possible.
On the other hand, the "lesser evil" notion is very consistent with
the precepts of founding fathers like Madison, who had a Calvinist
view of human nature and didn't expect that good government could do
much to redeem human kind other than hold its craven impulses in some
kind of check and balance.
The cycles I see in modern government are active liberalism achieving
a few cherished victories and then degenerating into rickety
self-promotion, which is then summarily swept away by the cleansing
fire of a conservatism which simply burns itself out when it has
removed the least entrenched constructs of liberalism. Since its job
is to defeat public activism, other than warfare (which allows it to
stoke up the cleansing fires and take it international) liberalism
eventually moves back into the void conservatism creates.
But this is simplistic (though worth every penny you paid for it). In
the end, my favorite bit of advice came from a seasoned politico who
used to say, "Well, so Jesus Christ isn't running this year. Get over
it."
Joel W.
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