It’s no surprise that so many Americans mistrust their government. American leaders today are devoid of courage and conviction. They have turned away from governing political judgments with principles. Away from putting the country first at each turn. It is more important to create clever, catchy hateful names for political opponents than to debate ideas. Iterative discussion and conversation are intolerable. Leaders at all levels of government scorn and demonize their political opponents, convinced that personal invective is the best course toward preservation of power. Which, after all, is the only objective.
We see every single idea or pronouncement through a politically colored red or blue lens. What’s good for the country depends on what is good for my party. China mandates this simple principle. In China, the Communist Party judges every action on the sole basis of its benefits/harms to the Party. Can it ever be again, in the United States, that the “other” party might actually have a good idea or two? And if that party does, can a partisan on this side of the divide actually adopt that idea and support it?
Can any American political leader ever again recognize and acknowledge that his position, or that of his party, is wrong? Or that another leader within his own party has harmed the country and must reverse course? You see, many Americans instinctively realize this. They are turned off by the dishonesty of it all. Of being treated like third graders (who probably can’t read if they were shuttled off to any public school in the United States) who must be spoon-fed information like wining babies in highchairs, unable to survive without the food of blessed wisdom painfully doled out by their care-givers.
The Founders feared that straight-up democracy wouldn’t work because the average person just didn’t know enough. The “people” lacked wisdom, they believed, and just couldn’t be trusted to vote for the public good. They created a republican system of government to balance out their concerns. Today’s American leaders most certainly agree that democracy doesn’t work. Or rather, that it only works when “we” win elections, subject to the risk of gravest of tyrannies and dictatorships if “we” lose. Both major American political parties make these claims so regularly that, I suspect, no one is really listening anymore. Which is why the Donald Trump character so easily perseveres.
Our “leaders” need to tell everyday Americans what is true and what is false. They have a God-given responsibility – teach their servile minions, and even those poor devils on the other side, that their view of what is best is the only view. Anything the morally destitute hear to the contrary is rightly and (perhaps even violently) destroyed. But more importantly – and always – only the leaders must have and maintain power over it all, no matter what “you” might think. Constitutional or moral principles are mere temporary impediments to rightness – rightness, as they define it.
This isn’t a ranting about Democrats or Republicans. We are way past that point. Both parties are hollow vessels. Their moral compasses point only in the direction of their respective parties.
Not one single Democrat in the House of Representatives mustered the courage behind a reprimand of one of its great prevaricators – the inestimable storyteller Adam Schiff – for the fibs he told. Little, shall we say, white lies that sent the country down a three year rabbit hole of impeachment, etc., etc., but which had the wonderful (intended) effect of bolstering his party and lifting it back to power in 2020. Blast, what am I thinking anyway. Of course, they wouldn’t reprimand Rock’o’Schiff; he deserves a statue in the corridors of power. Anyway, it just struck me that it’s time to rename the House of Representatives as the “Hose” of Representatives (if only for my typos when spelling it). Whenever it acts, the American people are hosed.
Think what you may of Edmund Gibson Ross, the last of seven Republican senators who (bribery allegations aside) broke party ranks and voted for acquittal in the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Whereupon, Ross never held public office again. Certainly, no modern-day Democrat would shoulder such a burden, even for a measly, meaningless vote of censure. We fully expect that none of those rapscallion Republicans would ever take a position on mere principle either.
Lincoln made the naturally following observation that a house divided against itself can not stand. The horrible war that followed killed 620,000 people. We’re not yet (I think) physically executing people in today’s divided country for their political positions. But both parties have savaged the social spirit and inherent feeling of camaraderie in America. They vaporized the essential sense of being countrymen united in a common endeavor. Some of us are just born racists, after all. The number of white toddlers identifying as racial supremacist’s based on analysis of their first spoken words has skyrocketed. JFK had it wrong, after all. He challenged Americans of his day to “ask what you can do for your country.” His successors more aptly put it, “ask what you can do to sustain the power of your party.”
Who will step forward, please?
Completely true but the problem goes way deeper than the politicians. Everyone has been feeding off of the government and our taxes since the New Deal but the politicians once had decorum and put a respectable veil over the sausage factory that has made countless fortunes for pols and bureaucrats and industry alike. I’m not sure what the answer is because all the other institutions that could otherwise be a counterforce are feeding at the trough as well. RFK, Jr has been bludgeoned for years because he has simply pointed out obvious conflicts of interest within the FDA and big Pharma which is very well known in business circles . I know nothing about immunology but when I hear someone intelligently raise issues which seem well researched and no where can one even find a rebuttal other than “conspiracy theorist” experience tells me he’s on to something. As to politicians, I have greater respect for drug dealers and loan sharks. At least they’re not phony.
There were some republican Senators, if I remember correctly, that voted to impeach Trump. The real problem in politics is that in order to get past the primaries, you have to appeal to the extremes.
In the past we had liberal to centrist Republican Senators (Mac Mathias in Maryland for one) and conservative to centrist southern democrats. This allowed for compromise. No more.
All so true and well written, JFK should have said ask not what you can do for your country but what the country can singularly can do for you.
Go O’s.