We all like to consider ourselves educated, if not by traditional instutitions then by life experience, and ideally by combining some elements of both. Education means acquiring information that we did not have before. Continuing education means updating old information with new and adjusting our beliefs accordingly. Therein lies wisdom, and therein lies one of the biggest challenges we face in trying to understand the world.
Changing our minds can be difficult. Emotion comes into play, and while that, too, is a component of wisdom, emotion can also be like the dust and grime that slows down the motor and causes it to overheat.
Politics recognizes the fact that most people under most circumstances are slow to change their minds about anything. This is why political campaigns only target the faithful as far as is necessary to inspire them to get out and vote. Fear and anger can be extremely motivating, and by characterizing the opponent as a threat, voters are inspired, or frightened, into going to the polls.
Campaigns also target the smaller but pivotal number of voters who are still capable of changing their minds. Fear and anger can motivate them as well, but also effective is the creation of a narrative which, when it is relentlessly pursued, can become part of a paragidm – a lens through which we interpret the world. It can happen without our noticing it, and when the undecided voter goes into the booth and has a “feeling” that they should vote a certain way, then the narrative has been successful.
An observer of politics, the business of politics and the politics of business, may also notice an additional element which affects the outcome of elections. There is an “apolitical” element, a shifting cooperation between bureauracrats and unelected officials of the administrative and national security states and the corporate interests with which they are bonded. These interests attach just as easily to democrat as to republican administrations with a goal of maintaining power and protecting the status quo.
Hannah Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher who fled the Nazis before settling in the US in 1950. She observed and analyzed the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and commented on the “banality of evil,” through which ordinary people are capable of participating in great harm. Her observations are applicable to our own times.
In commenting on how power seeks to perpetuate itself Arendt wrote, “This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
This has been one of the ugliest political campaigns in living memory, and that applies to both sides of the divide. I’ve seen conservatives who claim to adhere to Christian values making cruel jokes about an elderly man struggling with dementia. Let me remind you that Christian values also inform us that God will judge the actions of the man and the damage they may have caused to the nation, not you. Your only responsibility is to vote for or against a continuation of those policies, and to pray for the man who occupies the office even, or especially if you consider him your enemy. He is also a human being, someone’s husband, father and grandfather.
We could fill up page after page discussing the ugliness aimed at the former president, and the litany of partial truths, inuendos and outright lies aimed at him, over the past 8 years. Admittedly, he was never my first choice to lead the nation and when he and Hillary Clinton announced their candadicies I quipped that should they become the nominees I would publish recipes in this column. I hope you liked the brownies.
As recently as a few weeks ago I was resigned to choosing a lesser evil or leaving blank the choice for president in November, and wishing that someone else had stepped up so that these two old fellas could retire. I have new information now, and I’m somewhat relieved to find that I’m still capable of changing my mind.
New information arrived when I saw a man that, though an elder, was still possessed of the vigor and the courage to stand up in the face of danger to encourage the nation to continue the fight. After being attacked verbally and with lawfare for eight years, and then physically in an assassination attempt, he struck a note of conciliation in his acceptance speech and called upon the nation to put our differences aside.
It occurs to me that, his past moral failures and ambiguities aside, we could do worse than having someone possesed of both grit and determination as well as an ability to reconcile differences when it comes to negotiating with our adversaries in a dangerous world.
It also occurs to me that, if we disregard the personalities and the peccadilloes of the candidates, the chasm between the policies promoted by the left and the right is wide. The left has become, in my opinion, the chosen vehicle of the unelected state. I believe it has been drawn toward a platform of oligarchic socialism, where power continues to concentrate in the hands of the few who than take it upon themselves to address the inequalities in a society. “Democracy” is promoted as an end rather than a means toward maintaining a healthy republic.
No matter how we vote in November, the former president told the truth in his acceptance speech for the republican nomination. He said, “We rise together or we fall apart.” This has been true for well over 2000 years, echoing the words from Matthew which tell us, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”
Outside The Box 