How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.
WB Yeats
The Answer is no, so you can stop and do something more useful than reading this bit of fluff. But if you’ve nothing better to do, here’s why. I’m not going to take a side just present the facts as I see them.
Politics in any society where one is relatively free to express himself is exclusively an expression of emotion, similar to the devotion a fan feels for his favorite team. The diehard fan supports his team no matter how well or poorly it does. The attachment is emotional, not rational.
People’s political allegiance is no different from rooting for the Dodgers or the Yankees. They may petition for the firing of the manager, but they will still support the team.
Consider any political issue. For example, should the government spend money to improve the well being of some of its residents? I’ll leave the legal status of their presence aside. Many people who want to help others will say “yes” without any further analysis. This is a purely emotional response.
A rational response would be to ask a series of questions, some of which include the following. How much are we going to spend? How important is this problem compared to others that might need the expenditure of resources that are always limited? Can we afford to spend the money irrespective of the importance of the problem? Is the problem one that would be better handled by private actors rather than the government? If the issue needs government intervention, which branch or level is best equipped for the job?
The above are just a few of the questions that a rational actor would pose before action. But a bevy of such actors, analyzing the same data, would or should come to the same decisions, assuming reason and logic were the only determinants of the course of action. Of course, there’s a contaminating factor. Humans capable of reasoned analysis are also capable of other impulses which often override dispassionate decision making.
Thus there’s much more to politics than intervention or neglect based on reason. There’s power, greed, the quest for glory and prestige, and the most dangerous of all, ignorance. The stupid or ill-informed can be led to any destination, no matter its end. They are subject to the manipulation of the nefarious or, even worse, the true believers in a malign cause.
The intelligent, no matter how proficient at rational examination, can be overwhelmed by the lesser angels of our nature to seek power in the name of beneficence to pervert the political process to perverse ends. Also, there are those who wish power for no other end than to exercise it. They will do anything, no matter how inane or destructive, to preserve their empty influence.
The problem of how to gain an effective and just government has baffled serious thinkers for more than two millennia. Polybius, writing more than 2100 years ago, thought the Roman constitution the best yet devised. Yet shortly after he wrote his Histories, the Roman Republic was overthrown from within first by Sulla and then by Caesar.
The authors of the US Constitution were very much aware of the problem of governing without despotism while preserving individual rights. That they were trying to distribute power between the center and the separate states, half of which were devoted to slavery, made the task almost impossible. Yet they came up with a document as slender as it is formidable is almost miraculous. Still, it took the bloodiest war in the country’s history to fashion it into a workable formula for governance that required several generations more to achieve universal sway.
Everywhere one looks, there are supposedly free governments that are torn by economic folly, cultural decay, and rampant folly. These are the countries that pretend to be responsive to the needs and wishes of their constituents. Even worse are those countries that oppress their population even to the limit of death. Rationality and analysis is not even a punch line in these unfortunate jurisdictions. Politics here is nothing more than a synonym for power.
The United States, which is or was the world’s exemplar for self-government, is about to mark its 250th anniversary as a nation. A true mark of success. But an increasing fraction of its citizens feel little or no attachment to it. They see its structure as fundamentally flawed. Many are simultaneously educated and ignorant, the product of an unbalanced educational apparatus that has been dedicated to indoctrination in place of information.
The emotional character of politics has inevitably caused many to put at the center of their belief system one previously occupied by religion. This substitution is not a new phenomenon. It goes back at least to the events leading to the French Revolution.
Almost all humans feel the need to believe in something outside and higher than themselves. When religion and power are not separate, as is still the case in many parts of the world, authority is cloaked in the divine. When they are separate, those who drive the engine of the state denigrate religion and use politics as its substitute. Either result is not salutory.
If you would lose a friend or break a relationship because of a political difference, you are in an unhealthy place. Politics is an inherent part of humanity. But it’s not, or shouldn’t be, the largest piece of a person’s identity. Especially as it often plays to our worst impulses.
Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst system known to man, except for all the others. Hardly a ringing endorsement. Lincoln, in an equally renowned aphorism, posited that “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”. He didn’t add that the subterfuge was enough to get you elected.
The sad conclusion seems to be that we have yet to devise a satisfactory means for governing ourselves without being mired in mischief.
