I have two random thoughts on the circus maximus that we call presidential politics.
First, the pagentry of modern politics is the pagentry of a false religion. In saying this I am of course not referring to the simple process of selecting a leader. That part of it is necessary and just fine. The problem arises with all the messianic stuff.
Some unbeliever, I forget which one, said that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. This is a riff off of the old “religion as the opiate of the people” line. God was a necessary tool for us to manage our affairs, but now, here in the modern age, we have relegated belief in God to the private sector — you may believe in Him, if you wish, in the recesses of your hearts. But with God banished from the public square, we still need to manage everybody. We still need crowd control.
What the secular state does — in order to be a more effective savior — is manufacture various crises in order to be able to provide us with our small-s saviors. Maybe we will be content with that. But there is something in the heart of man that doesn’t want the kind of competent leadership that goes home at five, Calvin Coolidge style. We want someone to leap to the center of the stage, with a rich, purple cape billowing behind him. We want progress, activism, change, salvation!
This means that candidates for public office are like the nerdy junior high boy who hires a thug from the next grade up to attack the cute girl on the way home from school so that he, the nerd, can rush up and chase him off. The different candidates choose different thugs, ones that they will believe will be the scariest to the broader electorate, and then they hold debates in which they all flex their muscles and make faces. Okay, I think it is time for this metaphor to be done.
The looming “crises” vary, and the contending saviors vary accordingly. This is not to deny the reality of genuine threats in the world, for they are out there, and we do need competent leadership to deal with them. But in modern political campaigns, the momentum that carries them forward is an emotional investment in the candidate as a person (which by itself is fine and healthy), but when this is combined with the crisis/savior approach it leads directly to a weird civic idolatry. People get attached to their candidate with a religious fervor (and even Christians do this), and when it comes out that you are not voting for that guy, they respond as if you had just heaved a dead cat into the Holy of Holies.
The thing I am building up to is that we need to cultivate our suspicions, and we need to be suspicious about more than the integrity or competence of the candidates. We need to be suspicious of the crises from which they promise to deliver us. Not giving way to fear (“but what if Hillary is elected!”) is the second step is avoiding civic idolatry. The first step is being suspicious of our own hearts.
My second random political thought for the evening is this. Ronald Reagan used to say that government doesn’t solve the problems; government is the problem. And before my purist libertarian friends rush to remind me that Reagan talked a good game, but that the federal government grew significantly under his administration, let me point out a limitation in the gripe. But first my bona fides. I am a minarchist, and if Ron Paul were elected and was engaged in burning down the Department of Education, I would be right there with the lighter fluid. That’s how it goes in thought experiments and daydreams. That’s not how it goes here, at least not now. So what good is Reaganism or attempts at it?
The issue is not the growth of government by itself. The issue is the growth of government relative to the growth of the private sector. Over time, it would be quite possible for government to grow (even unacceptably) and yet be growing at a much smaller rate than the private sector was growing. And thus, you could have a situation where there was increasing government and increasing freedom — but only because government was having trouble keeping up. When Reagan first took office, the federal budget was a larger percentage of the GDP than when he left office. Riding the brake made a difference.
Reminds me of the joke where two hikers are out in the mountains, and they round a bend in the trail to encounter an angry grizzly bear just up ahead. One of the hikers sits down promptly, takes off his pack, and sheds his hiking boots in order to put on a pair of sneakers. “What are you doing?” his companion said. “You can’t outrun a grizzly.” “No, I can’t” was the reply. “But all I have to do is outrun you.”
If the state is the slower hiker, we can clearly see that things are improving. A good example of this is the Internet, and the economy that has exploded around the Internet. When radio and television were first invented, the state got the bridle on quickly and effectively. But they have not be able to do that with the web — as much as they would have liked to. This is not just a matter of timing, but also of people, money, momentum, and where the real growth is.
Out of all the candidates who (in my judgment) have an actual shot at the office, I can’t in good conscience vote for any of them — Obama, Hillary, McCain or Romney. But whoever is elected, we can rejoice that God is still on the throne, and He is guiding human history perfectly. This is what ties my two points together. If I refrain from civic idolatry in the campaign, the relative importance of this election will become clearer to me. And if I realize that in many respects the governance of the world has already gotten away from the ostensible leaders of it, the relative importance of the election will also become clearer to me.