by Stephen M. Krason
Crisis Magazine
As we head into another election season, we’ll see the customary television sound bites, vague bloviating speeches by politicians far and wide, politicians pandering to different groups with a host of promises, and the usual recent practice of “gotcha politics.” While the fundamental causes of the woes of our electoral politics are poor citizenship formation and democratization—the Founding Fathers established a republic, not a democracy, and as Federalist 10 makes clear they shared with all the great classical political philosophers a deep suspicion of democracy—we can’t expect in the short run to do much about this. We at least can try to get those politicians inclined to the “conservative” side—to use an inadequate and misunderstood term—to see that the stakes in American politics nowadays are nothing less than the preservation of our constitutional principles and what’s left of Western civilization. Further, the politicians who do apprehend this reality, even if inadequately, need to be urged on to recover the long-lost educative function of politics and to develop both the sophistication and courage to carry it out.
That means, of course, that sound bites, platitudes, avoiding “touchy” subjects, gearing political discussion to the least common denominator in terms of voter understanding, and, yes, utterly sacrificing the “bigger,” long-run questions to the often elusive hopes of immediate electoral success cannot be the norm. Immediate electoral success accomplishes little if the Republic and the culture are in shambles.
Stephen M. Krason's "Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic" column appears monthly (sometimes bi-monthly) in Crisis Magazine. He is Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville and co-founder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. His is the author of several books including The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic(Transaction Publishers, 2012), and most recently an edited volume entitled, Child Abuse, Family Rights, and the Child Protective System (Scarecrow Press, 2013).
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