Miserable Ordinances Of Princes

"..... miserable man, if he cannot often say and sing to himself those lines of Pindar,

"To love the slender cypress, and to leave the Cretan pastures lying near Ida. I have but little land, where I grow strong, and have nothing to do with sorrow or faction,"

or the ordinances of princes,

or public duties in political emergencies,

or state functions hard to get off."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. First Century Greek Philosopher.

How To Avoid Politics

"Alcmæon, when fleeing from the Furies, so the poets tell us, dwelt in a place recently formed by the silting of the Achelous; but I think he chose that little spot to dwell in ease and quiet, merely to avoid political disturbances and factions..."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. First Century Greek Philosopher.

Empty Promise

"And what have they promised? Nothing! And what little they have promised they will not perform!"

- War And Peace. Leo Tolstoy.

Sleazy Moralizers

"In our rhetoric, our politics, and our media, we are a nation of grand moralizers. In the reality of everyday life, we are in one of the most immoral periods of history, and it seems to be getting more immoral, more sleazy, more grimy every day."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 

Declining Courage

"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Harvard Address, June, 1978

Accepting The Defects Too?

"The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different and which about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too, and this is hardly desirable."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Harvard Address, June, 1978

Bad Relationships Matter

"It seems a tad hyperbolic, but bad human relations do have a way of wrecking everything else."

-Former Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now.

Government Unlasting

"It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves prospect of a lasting experience."

- Sigmund Freud. The Future of an Illusion. 

 

How To Stay Angery - Politics

My dear wormwood,

"Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is "out there" in the "broken system" rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.

Keep up the good work,

Uncle Screwtape.

- "Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis ~1942

Laws Today To Hang You In Ten Years

"On this basis no single African leader has any assurance that we will not, ten years from now, promulgate a law in accordance with which we will put him on trial for what he does today. Yes. The Chinese, in fact, will promulgate precisely such laws just give them the chance to reach out that far."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1. 

Your Government Deifies Jesus

In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached.

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed:

Desire To Control Or Not

"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."

Robert A. Heinlein

What is Populism

"But what exactly is populism?....

At least since Trump's damp and dreary Inauguration Day, populism has become a loaded term. It has been made the default explanation for any political view or event that diverges from establishment opinion. Opposition to trade deals? Populism. Protest against immigration? It must be the populist. And unexpected election result? What else did populism? And So It Goes. One academic has the gist of it: most uses of the term populism are motivated by an establishment desire to denigrate any opposition to the "liberal consensus." Put differently: there is a tendency, particularly among contemporary liberals, to call political outcomes that they support "democracy," and ones that do not "populism." In other words, they see to wait equate populism with demagoguery.

That effort is itself demagoguery, for populism can have a positive interpretation. Put simply, it is any political movement that places The wider interests of the common people ahead of the special interest of the privileged few. If you think about it, in most every democracy, every political party tends to frame its core appeal in such terms, at least to some degree.

Is this such a nonsensical concept? In fact, there are times when the consensus of the political establishment diverges from the weight of a public opinion. For instance, the desirability of trade deals and of unskilled immigration are areas where the leadership of both the US Republican and Democratic parties has often parted company with the bulk of their supporters. When such divergence occurs, it is the tendency of the elites to try to take such political debate off the table. Populism is a force that can put these issues back on the agenda.

There have been many instances of elite consensus being challenged by the wider public. Economic orthodoxy in one peroid has become economic heresy in the next. Wars have been undertaken when they should not have, and pacifism has been practice in the face of inevitable conflict. Elites often have interest and perspectives that are distinct from those of the general public. And they are sometimes wrong.

Think of it this way. Populism is a framework for identifying political priorities and making political decisions. But it does not tell us much about the underlying policies per se. So-called populist politicians have stood for ideas that could be classified as left-wing, right-wing, or even Centrist."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now: Politics and Leadership In the Age of Disruption 

Voiceless

"These voters do not tend to have college degrees. They disproportionately work in Industries, such as manufacturing, they are facing ongoing disruption from low-cost competition and new technology. In short, they are in the parts of the Western economy that have fared poorly in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization. 

And they were feeling voiceless. This is a common finding in different studies of both the Trump election and the Brexit referendum. The concerns of these people have been either largely ignored or, if acknowledged at all, vigorously denounced. There can be no doubt about the extent to which these voters believe that the political establishment does not care about them. They have come to mistrust both the traditional liberal/ center-left and conservative/ center-right options."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now: Politics and Leadership In the Age of Disruption. 

No Economic Gods

"I begin by looking at market economics. The market is a powerful Institution for resource allocation and wealth creation. However, conservatives must resist market dogmatism. Policy-making does not occur within a textbook version of reality. It happens in the real world, with trade-offs, imperfect options, and non-economic considerations. Markets are a tool of good economic policy, but they are not an objective in and of themselves.

Groing public concerns about economic dislocation and trade are far from being without merit. However, they require a careful response that resorts neither to protectionism nor state dependency. People want meaningful work, as well as the financial security and personal dignity that comes with it. Conservatives must be champions for paid work and must set out an agenda that creates the conditions for it"

- Stephen Harper 

The Great Depression Politics

"It was the Great Depression, and misery, starvation, financial ruin, despair, and suicide were affecting thousands of lives. In response to the raw need of the people around them and their search for social justice, my parents lives and home were infused with a panoramic sense of history and big ideas of economic and social reform, democratic processes, and populist politics. They looked for deliverance from the awful conditions that threatened to destroy their community. Mostly, they refused to accept the prevailing political notion of the traditional political establishment that there was nothing I'm to be done but Riding the Storm."

- Preston Manning. Think Big: Adventures in Life and Democracy. 

Grinding Axe

"As a boy, I would sometimes do my homework in a little anteroom off his office. I would leave the door ajar and listen as he talked with visitors. It was there that I got my first exposure to politics and government. My father had told me that if I listened closely I would hear the sound most familiar to the ears of an elected politician - the sound of the grinding of an axe."

- Preston Manning. Think Big: Adventures in Life and Democracy

Bad Policies.

"I could have concluded what most commentators concluded. They had predicted Trump could not win- that he could never win - because he is a fool and a bigot. Therefore, they surmise, the voters must be fools and bigots as well. 

For many liberals, wedded to the belief that those who disagree with them are fools and bigots by definition, that answer may be good enough. For us conservatives, who fancy ourselves students of human nature and Human Experience, it should not. The ones with the foolish and preconceived notions were those who got it so wrong. It is a time to reexamine our assumptions. 

So here is my re-examination in a nutshell. A large proportion of Americans, including many American conservatives, voted for Trump because they are really not doing very well. They are not doing well in the world that we conservatives created after the Cold War. And they are not doing well, in part, because of some of the policies we conservatives have advocated. 

In short, the world of globalization is not working for many of our own people. We can pretend that this is a false perception, but it is not. We now have a choice. We can keep trying to convince people that they missunderstand their own lives, or we can try to understand what they are saying. Then we can decide what to do about it."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here, Right Now

An Empty Left & Right

"If we are not tasting the fullness of the now we will play the game of power to fill the emptiness. If we're playing the domination game, we can be as trapped on the left as on the right. Our greatest disillusionment with so much of even contemporary Progressive thinking is that it is still playing the power game."

- Richard Rohr. Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer. 

Mountains Are The Revolutionaries Friend

"Many of the world's most entrenched conflicts take place in mountains, and we neglect this fact at our peril. Far from being irrelevant, these remote, often archaic, and seemingly exotic exceptional communities are enormously important to the future safety and stability of the world at large. The mountain is friend to those who want to elude or destroy authority - the revolutionary, the poppy grower, the Jihadi, to name only a few. Mountains are the last place where roads are built and the first place people go to hide."

- Judith Matloff. No Friends But The Mountains.