by Walter J. Smith
Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out, but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
A. E. Housman, 1905
Three minutes will sometimes suffice for thinking about politics. It will suffice, that is, should one easily satisfy oneself thinking superficially about the political question at hand, or most any other serious matter. The poet Housman was apparently pushing his readers to think about the perplexing matter of thinking itself. But political thinking has challenged the greatest minds for three thousand years. It has stimulated these thinkers both to great blunders and also to great heights of brilliance. Consider Plato’s brilliant exploration of political justice in The Republic, and also consider his pronouncement that citizens were just featherless chickens. We should all be patient with ourselves and with one another while thinking politically.
We have a growing body of writings from serious thinkers to help us out today. Since World War II the United States has experienced an upsurge of political thinkers, with an increased quality and quantity of writing (and a lot that isn’t worth the time it takes to read it). This emergence has prompted one political theorist, Glenn Tinder, to assess what questions are included in the core of political thinking.
Professor Tinder collected his thoughts in What is Political Thinking. That book should be kept with reference books. This will not be a summary of his findings. Nor will it be a review of his thinking. The reason I will refer to it is simply that there is no better handy reference tool for keeping the citizen’s political thinking orderly and directed toward deeper and richer understanding of the whole culture of politics. This article will explore certain pressing questions of our time.
Addressing these questions can bring some clarity to what Professor Tinder calls the perennial, or, the enduring political questions, questions that never seem to get settled once and for all. For example, the current election contest for the United States presidency has raised some seemingly old and very difficult issues.
One such issue is why racism is an issue here that seems to never die, even though the nation fought a Civil War, in large part, to settle it, and then in the 1950s and 1960s enacted strong legislation following a sustained Civil Rights movement to call attention to remaining unsettled race-specific questions. Another such issue is the question of presidential power. This question has emerged in the form of “will the Republican Administration facilitate or allow a ‘terrorist attack’ sometime between August and October if necessary to prevent Barack Obama from winning?”
The point is to identify the political questions that seem to never go away, and even when they get settled, only get settled for a brief period. Once the questions are clarified, then they can be further explored and connected with other enduring questions. For example, race and presidential power have come together in this election because, during the early primaries, race was being used by both the Republicans and the Clintons to attempt a “divide and conquer through race-baiting” approach toward winning primary votes. Now race has given way to another strategy, staging or allowing a terrorist attack that may be “necessary” for the Republicans to hold onto the presidency. What is the most crucial and/or enduring political question here?
The 2008 national election, like every presidential election since 1968, has seen race emerge as an “electoral playing card” for Democrats and Republicans. But this time something strange is emerging along with the question. The recent primaries witnessed the Democratic Party, through Barack Obama’s leadership, ‘settling’ the question, at least for this election cycle. That is, Barack Obama has, at least nominally, decided that if this election must be tainted with racism, the Democratic Party under his leadership will reject that racism, directly, clearly and soundly. Unfortunately, the McCain and the Republicans do not share this sentiment. Now things get stranger.
Initially, John McCain simply took advantage of the race issue, remaining silent. He sustained that silence throughout the primaries. The silence seemed curious for many observers who’ve thought of McCain as a creative political maverick. But now McCain seems so busy pandering to core Republican factions, even the party’s racist faction, so that his maverick efforts have turned perverse. The Republicans were counting, as that party has since 1968, on ‘winning the South’ on the race issue. They’ve done this by keeping the race question alive. Obama, however, designed his campaign strategy to confront the race question however, wherever, and whenever it appears, and to vigorously denounce racial politics.
The result has been to push the whole electoral “Southern Strategy” to the point that Obama is splitting the once solidly racist South into two camps, one that rejects and another that clings to racism. All the president’s men cannot again put the Southern voting bloc together around race. When this became obvious a few weeks ago, McCain’s campaign suggested a “terrorist attack” would boost McCain’s prospects in November. Some will do whatever they believe is both necessary and publicly acceptable to retain presidential power. Ordinary Republicans now face an extraordinary choice.
As some have suggested, Republicans find a way for their party to be “born again” into a newly respectable electoral vehicle, or they can quietly go along with using terrorism to further undermine our national integrity. Meanwhile, every one of us faces an even more difficult question: how can we reverse the growing concentration of power in Washington, D. C., so that none of our citizens will ever again contemplate clinging to the presidency or any other office by perverse means?
This election indicates why it is necessary for citizens to think long and hard about politics, and particularly about political power. For without that power concentrated as it now is in the presidency, terrorism would not be so easily manipulated for electoral reasons, or for promoting the Military Industrial Complex, or for any other reasons.
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