Why do view "politics" as bad? When it's all that saves us from ... Uganda, our own unCivil War?
Do we really want a democracy? To be sure, a Constitutional democracy. We all know the Freeper meme, their assumption that we are a "Republic." That a "democracy" in their view would be a tyranny of the majority, and so we "limit" our democracy. A limited democracy. A "Republic" (of freepers, in their view).
Let's take a second look at that. The unexamined assumption here is that democratic governance is defined by the mechanism we use to determine decisions: by voting. We all know better--nothing I can say that every reader here doesn't already know and understand: but sometimes it's good to restate the obvious.
Voting, whether in a popular election or on a legislative bill, is only the last--or perhaps, the second or third to last stage in a much more complicated, interesting and--here's the really important part--a process unpredictable in it's outcome. If there's any meaning, any reality to that abstract word we pretend to worship, "freedom," this is it.
Given the diversity of interests and claims to privilege and power in this country, we are faced with the choice of forming alliances with the object of killing off the opposition... or working out deals of mutual survival. It really does come down to that.
War is not "politics by other means."
Politics is the alternative to war.
We should write this on our hearts, tattoo it on foreheads. Politics is NOT BAD. Politics is the alternative to murder, to genocide, to ethnic cleansing and rape. Politics is ... talk. Conversation. Making deals. It begins and ends with an acknowledgement of the mutual right to exist between established interests that might well see in the extermination of the other their own advantage.
Instead, we ask: what do you want? What do you need? And we say in turn: this is what we want, what we need. How can we both live to the next round?
Politics is confrontation. Politics is compromise. Politics is a meeting in the public sphere, the outcome of which, is something neither side would be capable of imagining without the encounter (I acknowledge my debt here to Hannah Arendt... and recommend The Human Condition as an essential reading for the coming generation)
Political dialog unleashes unanticipated consequences... there is no better, or any other definition that I can see, for "freedom," that isn't merely an abstract symbolic club, wielded by barbarians of this ideology or that to beat their opponents into submission.
Yes, this had to do with Obama. Do we want a "Leader?" (remember the German word for that?... " ) Or do we want to re-engage ourselves in the great experiment--governance by the consent of the governed? In my mind, there is nothing more important. Not one single issue that trumps this. Either we are capable of governing ourselves, together... or we are not. And if we are not, we have ten thousand years of history to testify that those who wield power without constraint, will sooner, rather than later, wield it only for their own.
We must come together. I don't like the word "unity" in this regard. It's not about becoming one thing, but learning how to be many--together, without killing off the opposition. In other words: politics.
Yes, we have to hold Obama's feet to the fire--on FISA, on mountain top strip mining--but compromise is not capitulation. Compromise is not appeasement. Compromise is politics... in its best sense... as a working out we can live together, all of us, with what we most need and cherished... and never giving up hope for yet a better a compromise in the future.
Yes, I was disappointed by Obama on FISA.. and even more on his seeming selling out of Appalachian concerns about mountain top mining... but I really do believe in "governance by the consent of the governed." We are an imperfect amalgamation. "Democracy" is not about voting... it's how we work through our differences without killing each other.
Think about it