uruloki’s lair

David Mamet wrote an article a few days ago called Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’. Besides him being a very good writer, the takeaway that I get from it is this:

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
[...]
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
[...]
I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting). (Emphasis added)

He’s getting a crapton of blowback, but that last line is why I am so opposed to idealogues and the extremities of opinion that go along with them. Life is built upon give and take but so often in today’s politics people are elected on the marginal case. What happens after the election? They move to the middle as much as possible so they can stay in power. It’s not worth it to stay in power if you don’t have a lot of it, so then each and every politician works to increase her power through the mechanism of the government. And the Government sucks. I don’t really care about any of the Big Government types in this year’s election because none of them will fix what is wrong about government but instead work to increase it at the expense of you and me. Otter is casting my vote this year.

Tags: Life, Politics //