Peeling the Political Onion
I’m wondering if you are finding the state of politics as confusing as I do. Maybe you have it all figured out, but I sure don’t. It’s a lot like peeling an onion, but only sort of. When peeling an onion, I take off one layer and am not surprised that the next level is still an onion. There is not much to be confused about as I peel away to the core. The onion is still an onion. When peeling away the layers of politics, I suppose it’s all still politics. I can’t figure much else. On the surface, we have the Repubs and the Demos. As best I can tell, the Repubs want as little government and government interference as possible. Since they haven’t always been in charge, government has gotten out of hand, from their perspective. The best they can do is to refuse to support any new regulations or government funded services and eliminate or at least limit as many existing regulations and services as they can. The Demos Believe that the Repubs are wrong. They believe that government is here to make sure that each of us has a fair shot at health, safety and general well being. Government is the nation’s care taker. To that end, regulation and government funded services are essential for the success of the nation. When I was in junior high, we played a game called jungle football in the school gym -- Two teams: shirts and skins of course. The gym teacher would toss a football toward the middle of the court. The goal was to make a “basket” with the football at your team’s end of the court. After a “basket,” whichever team came away with the football kept it and tried to score. As best I recall, there were no rules other than “hitting” or “kicking” another player was not allowed and intentionally hurting someone would get you ejected from the game. It was pretty much minimal government at its best. It was definitely a Repubs kind of game. I was also in the junior high band. Now that was a different deal altogether. With jungle football, everyone played, but only some of us ran to the football, ready to mix it up. The only participation rule was that you had to at least stay on the court. In the band, everyone had an instrument and was expected to play it, no matter how well or how badly. Being in the band was enough to assure participation. There were a lot of rules and regulations, and everyone was expected to cooperate in ways that enabled all band members to be successful. The guiding principle was the common good. Band was more of a Demo kind of experience. It seems important to point out that Repubs and Demos are all real people, much like the rest of us. They just have different and often conflicting perspectives, points of view, value sets and expectations for government and for the purpose and role of government in our lives. There are of course zealots in both camps, but I suspect most of us don’t give much thought to it one way or the other most of the time. If we lean more toward self reliance and think things are going well for us, and for the folks we hang around with, we likely edge toward the Repubs. If we lean more toward feeling anxious about our situation and that of the people we identify with and worry about, we likely edge more toward the Demos. In that sense, politics is always personal. Once we peel away that top level of the political onion though, the nature of politics and politicians changes rather dramatically. We learn that politics has less to do with philosophy and the nature and purpose of government than with gaining enough control and influence to individually protect and support a baffling array of interests and priorities. Since this is far from a zero sum game, some win but most fair less well. Peel down another layer and we discover that the elected politicians who appear to be the key actors in the political arena are mostly the public face of a shifting collective of interests and priorities scrambling for enough control and influence to assure the success of their individual political ...