election

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You’re Fired!

Ole is stranded on a desert island. Years later, a boat docks on the island. Excited to see another human being, Ole invites the rescuers to view the structures he’s made. During the tour, Ole says, “And here’s my house, and here’s my barn, and here’s my church.” The rescuers ask, “And what’s that other building?” “Oh, that’s the church I USED to go to,” says Ole.

Citizens, we are Ole. We are convinced we can cleanse the system by flushing its members out to sea. Donald Trump is the spokesman for these voters, because his most famous quotable words are “You’re fired!” We are determined to elect a candidate without the contamination of our diseased system.

In today’s “Pretty Good Joke,” Ole speaks for us and our ruthless rejection of the institution. Even when he is the institution himself he finds a way to reject it and sever himself from it. It is both an amusing and pathetic response to disappointment. We refuse to look within ourselves or to interrogate the system that gives rise to the corruption.

Instead we entrust ourselves to the least-principled class of Americans, the business sector, represented by Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina. Their only qualifications beyond management in the private sector are their failures to win public office in the past. They have the capacity to say, “You’re fired,” and “You’re lying” to their enemies, and this they offer as evidence they can govern the world’s largest democratic nation. Not much of a gambit for negotiations, domestic or foreign.

We are Ole. We are indignant that our leaders have failed us, and we know we have the power of the ballot and can move them out, just as Ole moved out of his incorrigible church. But who built this government, citizens? Did we not elect them with our own ballots and with our own voices cheer on these pretenders? Like Ole, are we not in a church of our own making?

Or maybe you elected the only wise and temperate politicians in the federal government, and the rest of us were duped. Maybe you are leaving us behind to struggle with the fractious church of our own making. Or maybe you will be grieving the representatives you elected next year in the year after that.

Citizens, we are Ole, and we need to realize it before it’s too late.

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Conviction and Passion

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. (W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

When have these words from Yeats had more relevance than today?  With the retirement of Olympia Snow, the parade of moderates leaving the U.S. Senate has become a stampede.  The voices of moderation are sounding fainter and fainter.

Barry Goldwater said famously, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.” And Barry Goldwater has begun to look very amiable in this political climate.  Goldwater could always work across the aisle to draft legislation he believed in. He was a surprisingly tolerant Senator, when there was work to be done.

Today’s Congress operates as a “take-it-or-leave-it showdown,” said the New York Times today (March 1), paraphrasing Senator Snowe.  The “showdown” has become a  grinding halt.  The work of legislating has become the work of posturing, taking an inflexible political stance to demonstrate the will to get one’s own way. In some quarters this is characterized as standing on principle.  In others it is the collapse of good will.

For some reason the voting public is not impressed with “standing on principle,” as the approval rating of Congress has plummeted to the single digits.  There are principles and there are demands, even as in the international arena there is terrorism and there are sanctions.  Terrorism is taking extreme actions on the basis of beliefs, while sanctions are mounting and unified pressure to oppose repugnant policies.  Which of these best characterize the standoff we currently see in Congress?

It is certainly hyperbole to call the Congressional stalemate “terrorism,” but it falls far short of “sanctions,” because the pressure is coming from a minority of representatives and their resistance to productive legislation is losing its support. The “principled” right certainly found its limits with the passage of the payroll tax relief and unemployment extension in the last month.  Didn’t they actually cave in to the suffering of their middle class constituents? Didn’t they abandon their principles in the face of dire need? So no need to label these legislators as “terrorists,” because they were willing to compromise to save their collective necks, if not for the good of their constituents.

With eight months to go before the general election, the candidates at all levels should be choosing between “passionate intensity” and “conviction.”  And the voters should be discerning who has conviction and who has only passion. There is plenty of rhetorical passion in the media stream, but there is less conviction. Convictions have to go deeper than partisanship. They have to be grounded in serving “the greatest good for the greatest number” (John Stuart Mill).  There should be no unequivocal promises or tax covenants that would compromise this conviction. There should be no one-issue candidates. There should be candidates who will stand up to the bullies, the ones who press their case to bitter stalemate.

If the moderates are leaving, then God bless them for their service. Now we should replace them with men and women of good will, a working majority that will take seriously its responsibility to govern and not to willfully obstruct.