A few days after the mainstream media went wild over the transitory compatibility of Barack Obama and Chris Christie, I attended the kickoff of the return of train service to my Maine town after 52 years. Present were the high school band, the Portland Seadog mascot Slugger, and the harbormaster, among many others.
When
the train arrived, a squad of dancers leaped off and after they had
distributed T shirts and the older, less mobile passengers had
disembarked, it was time for a string of talks. Among them:
- Republican Senator Olympia Snowe,- Democratic congresswoman Chellie Pingree (who praised Snowe for her fine efforts on behalf of the train).- The transportation director for Tea Party pal Governor Paul LePage- The independent candidate for Senate, Angus King, who had arrived to board the train in Portland in the same automobile as Senator Snowe, who is retiring.
As
I watched, I wished that one of the crisis cultists named Chris from
MSNBC (either Matthews or Hayes) could be on hand to learn that American
politics isn’t necessarily the dysfunctional bipolar activity that they
report with such vigor. And that the pragmatic Chris from New Jersey is
far more in our political tradition than the dysfunctional Washington
crowd that now hogs our airwaves.
No
one at the train station seemed excited or perturbed that the
politicians speaking were not adhering the evangelical moral positions
assigned to them by the Tea Party, Move On, CNN, or the collective
political science departments of American universities. Instead of
choosing between left and right, big government and small, capitalism
and socialism, they had reached the joint conclusion that bringing the
train back would be a good idea.
And
the crowd clearly agreed with them. But if you major in political
science, listen to the evening news, or read too many op eds, you don’t
learn about the politics of bringing a train back. Instead it is
expected, nay demanded, that politics be based on a hyper simplistic bifurcation of options.
The
best politicians never used to do this. And it wasn’t just a matter of
finding a muddled middle. A really good politician knew where to go and
when to take a detour. The middlers simply cut things in half. When
I was at Coast Guard officer candidate school, our navigation
instructor explained the danger of this: “If you take a navigational fix
and it places you on one side of a rock and then you take another fix
and it places you on the other side, don’t split the difference.”
There
is a world of difference between being a mushy centrist and being
someone with a destination yet still willing to adjust, delay or
compromise for practical reasons.
Further,
there are a whole realm of factors that can diminish the importance of
bipolar ideology such as what your constituents are thinking, where
you’re getting your funding and who you don’t want to piss off because
you need their help on something else.
This
is one reason why Romney and Ryan seem so foolish as well as such
liars. They present a totally indefensible message and then repeatedly
get caught not following their own rules.
This
is also one reason liberals don’t do better. Once you’ve established in
your own mind that big government is good and small government will
return us to the Confederacy, then you’re no more equipped to deal with
reality than a Ryan or Romney. If you can’t tell the difference between
the federal role in Social Security and in what goes on in a local
classroom, then you’re not doing much better than Mitt.
What’s
behind all this is that politics has become a secular evangelical
religion in which the sincerity of faith outweighs the utility of works.
And
it’s not just the right, When, for example, was the last time you heard
a leading economist talking about the relationship of competition,
culture and cooperation in small business? When was the last time
Washington, in any meaningful way, sought to decentralize its programs
on the basis of what was once called subsidiarity, i.e. government at
the lowest practical level?
My
whole life I have been enthralled with the complexity of things around
me. It was one reason I majored in anthropology rather than economics or
politic science; I didn’t want to reduce life to a few theories that
intellectuals could argue about into infinity while the rest of the
world fell apart.
I loved the reality and complexity of politics. As I once put it: “Politics is the sound of the air coming out of the balloon of our expectations and it is the music of hope”. . .
It
is not about theories but about principles butting into hurricanes. It
is not an evangelical order but a secular trade. It is not an ideology
but a pragmatic exploration. James Michael Curley put it this way:
‘Wherever I have found a thistle, I endeavored to replace it with a
rose.’
Politics
is never a neat place. A young legislator once asked Earl Long whether
ideals had any place in politics. "Hell yes," said Ol' Earl, "you should
use ideals or any other damn thing you can get your hands on."
Which is how we get train service restored and disaster relief delivered.
