A Headful Of Metaphors

     That’s what comes of spending an entire day staring at a blank screen while berating yourself for being unable to finish your tenth BLEEP!ing novel.

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     One of the more contentious phrases of the past seven years, American exceptionalism, is once more in circulation:

     The listeners of this commentary are among some of the most intelligent in the country.

     Not as intelligent as the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch, Todd ol’ buddy.

     So it’s not my business to tell you who to vote for today.

     Well, that’s a relief. Everyone else seems to think it’s his business.

     But I do want to tell you what this election is about.

     No, you don’t. You want to tell us what this election is about to you.

     Read the rest if you care to do so. It’s short and pretty much what you’d expect. The part I cited here is what got my glands chugging.

     What’s this election about to you, Gentle Reader? If you take any interest in it, that is?

     The typical American voter is narrowly focused. There are a small number of issues – not infrequently, only one – that matter to him. He votes according to the candidates’ positions on those issues. He’s relatively unconcerned with anything beyond them.

     One of the reasons our electoral processes have become so acrimonious is that narrow focus. When the federal government is involved in everything – hundreds if not thousands of discrete activities – it becomes rare for voters to assess candidates in a holistic fashion. They’ll make their selections according to their personal priorities. Political strategists know this, which is why it’s so hard to get the typical candidate to focus on anything other than the handful of issues his handlers have selected for his headliners.

     Donald Trump has selected those issues that he thinks will lead with the majority of voters. Ted Cruz has articulated a set of principles and has pledged to stay true to them. Which of these candidates is currently doing better in the delegate chase?

     Doesn’t seem all that closely related to American exceptionalism, does it?

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     In commenting on “democracy,” Lysander Spooner – one of my personal heroes – wrote that “A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” Given that the federal government has burst its Constitutional bonds, that’s not a bad assessment of our electoral predicament. However, it was truer in Spooner’s day than it is today.

     Mark Steyn wrote in After America that the emergence of the “permanent government” – i.e., the millions of federal bureaucrats who can’t be fired or otherwise disciplined by the 540 elected federal officials – has reduced the Republican Party’s periods in federal ascendancy to “keeping the seat warm” for the Democrats. He had a good point: Leviathan continues to grow and to oppress regardless of who occupies the Oval Office or Capitol Hill. For instance, federal payrolls grew 13% during the Reagan Administration. (Yes, it does grow faster under Democrat administrations.)

     We no longer choose “masters,” in Spooner’s formulation. Rather, we select figureheads: persons in whom we can repose our hopes – which are usually dashed completely – and whom we can blame for the disappointments that follow.

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     “Opinions change with age; otherwise what is age for?” – James Blish, The Triumph of Time

     My opinions have certainly changed over the years. In part that’s because I’ve studied different things as time as passed: first, mathematics and physics; later on, war, economics, and moral theory; most recently, human motivations and how they bear on social, economic, and political dynamics. All those subjects are relevant to the state of our nation, and that of Mankind generally. However, the earlier lessons bear less powerfully on our political decisions, and the words and deeds of “our” governments, than the later set.

     We who live in Time are fated to pursue goals: things we want but don’t yet have, and threatening possibilities we hope to avert. Because we are fallible, and not much given to reflect on what would really be best for us, we fail far more often than we succeed. Because we are various, and variously motivated and gifted, contention among us is inevitable. Satisfaction for one often means disappointment for another.

     Perfection is denied us as individuals, and therefore as societies. We know this about ourselves. Yet our tendency to think with our wishes instead of our reason – to invent pretty fantasies to take the place of dismal realities – leads us to hope that political heroes will save us from ourselves.

     I wrote of such a hero. He’s as imaginary as all my other characters. Were he to exist, and to gain the office of president, the hopes attached to him would be prodigious...as would the tragedies attendant upon his downfall. That’s part of why the completion of Statesman is frustrating me so greatly.

     Political heroes will not save us. They cannot: they’re as flawed, as fallible, and as subject to temptation as any private citizen. To expect deliverance by their hands is to bet on an impossibility. The larger the bet, the greater will be the anguish in the aftermath.

     Why should we have expected anything else? Politics of any form is the institutionalization not of our best aspirations but our worst: the desire for power with which to make the world over into some preferred shape. But that sort of power is purely destructive. To create a paradise through destruction is not possible even to the angels...and if I may be blunt, there are no angels in politics.

     We – flawed, fallible, temptable men – are the problem we yearn, vainly yet eternally, to solve.

     Have a nice day.