Why We Love Politics -- NYT Opinion Pages

[Baashi]

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: November 22, 2012

 

We live in an anti-political moment, when many people — young people especially — think politics is a low, nasty, corrupt and usually fruitless business. It’s much nobler to do community service or just avoid all that putrid noise.

 

I hope everybody who shares this anti-political mood will go out to see “Lincoln,” directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner. The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way.

 

It shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.

 

The challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high vision and low cunning. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” gets this point. The hero has a high moral vision, but he also has the courage to take morally hazardous action in order to make that vision a reality.

 

To lead his country through a war, to finagle his ideas through Congress, Lincoln feels compelled to ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games, deceive his supporters and accept the fact that every time he addresses one problem he ends up creating others down the road.

 

Politics is noble because it involves personal compromise for the public good. This is a self-restrained movie that celebrates people who are prudent, self-disciplined, ambitious and tough enough to do that work.

 

The movie also illustrates another thing: that politics is the best place to develop the highest virtues. Politics involves such a perilous stream of character tests: how low can you stoop to conquer without destroying yourself; when should you be loyal to your team and when should you break from it; how do you wrestle with the temptations of fame — that the people who can practice it and remain intact, like Lincoln, Washington or Churchill, are incredibly impressive.

 

The movie shows a character-building trajectory, common among great politicians, which you might call the trajectory from the Gettysburg Address to the Second Inaugural.

 

In the Gettysburg phase, a leader expresses grand ideas. This, frankly, is relatively easy. Lots of people embrace grand ideals or all-explaining ideologies. But satisfied with that they become morally infantile. They refuse to compromise, insult their opponents and isolate themselves on the perch of their own solipsism.

 

But a politician like Lincoln takes the next step in the trajectory. He has to deal with other people. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” does a nice job celebrating an underappreciated art, the art of legislating.

 

The movie is about pushing the 13th Amendment through the House of Representatives. The political operatives Lincoln hires must pay acute attention to the individual congressmen in order to figure out which can be appealed to through the heart and which through the wallet.

 

Lincoln plays each potential convert like a musical instrument, appealing to one man’s sense of idealism, another’s fraternal loyalty. His toughest job is to get the true believers on his own side to suppress themselves, to say things they don’t believe in order not to offend the waverers who are needed to get the amendment passed.

 

That leads to the next step in the character-building trajectory, what you might call the loneliness of command. Toward the end of the civil war, Lincoln had to choose between two rival goods, immediate peace and the definitive end of slavery. He had to scuttle a peace process that would have saved thousands of lives in order to achieve a larger objective.

 

He had to discern the core good, legal equality, among a flurry of other issues. He had to use a constant stream of words, stories, allusions and arguments to cajole people. He had to live with a crowd of supplicants forever wanting things at the door without feeling haughty or superior to them.

 

If anything, the movie understates how hard politics can be. The moral issue here is a relatively clean one: slavery or no slavery. Most issues are not that simple. The bill in question here is a constitutional amendment. There’s no question of changing this or that subsection and then wondering how much you’ve destroyed the whole package.

 

Politicians who can navigate such challenges really do emerge with the sort of impressive weight expressed in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It’s a speech that acknowledges that there is moral ambiguity on both sides. It’s a speech in which Lincoln, in the midst of the fray, is able to take a vantage point above it, embodying a tragic and biblical perspective on human affairs. Lincoln’s wisdom emerges precisely from the fact that he’s damaged goods.

 

Politics doesn’t produce many Lincolns, but it does produce some impressive people, and sometimes, great results. Take a few hours from the mall. See the movie.

 

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 23, 2012, on page A35 of the New York edition with the headline: Why We Love Politics.

 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/opinion/brooks-why-we-love-politics.html?ref=davidbrooks

[Baashi]

I saw the movie one week ago. It's a great movie. Impressive cast & characters as well especially the ones played by Daniel Day-Lweis (Lincoln) and Tommy Lee Jones (Stevens). Of course the subject, era and historical actors portrayed in the movie are not as simple as director made them out to be. That being said, the movie shows how the political compromise can shape and even settle the great issues of an era.

 

On the other hand American civil war as tragic as it was settled the issue of slavery and by extension brought the confederates back to the fold.

 

I couldn't helped but imagine our own version of "Lincoln". But then I realized that the culture and institutions of 1800s America were far more advanced than the ones in present day Somalia. Back then confederate leadership were smart enough to surrender when they realized they were outgunned and the Lincoln administration were wise enough to not humiliate them.

 

I post this article because I agree with Mr. Brooks that politics is not always a dirty profession. There are times when politics and its practitioners can rise to the occasion and settle the great questions through compromise.

[Abu-Salman]

Had the same fleeting thoughts too (Lincoln has interesting facets like other usually more morally ambiguous founding fathers); and yes we are far away from a society with men as Thomas Paine and idealist intellectuals taking the lead (the reason why we can't be simply compared with the 19th USA and its ethnic, class and other divisions; it's more the refinement of the elites that counts more than any other thing).

 

Look, Eritreans are patriot and prioritized litteracy/healthcare/public works or equality and volunteering spirit, all with great inventiveness even in guerilla times (surpassing similar countries soon after their recent independence);

I'd settle for that more modest aim since Che's Cuba extraordinary achievements with constrained resources is out of our reach before wider mentality revolution (albeit neither were plagued with qat or qabil)...

[Mintid Farayar]

I saw this column last week and was also struck by the contrast between the American & Somali leadership elites. However, it's unfair to compare America with all its abundance of resources (even in the 19th century) with the scarcity-prone Somali peninsula. From its inception, the United States of America was economically self-sufficient while Somalia has not experienced a day of economic independence as a modern nation-state.

 

A better social comparison to our situation is nearby Yemen or the GCC countries(even with all their oil wealth), given their societal construct on clannism based upon family lineages as opposed to neighboring African tribal groupings ( a tribe is actually a nation with its own distinctive language and culture).

[Legend of Zu]

^^^ the comparison is not the societal structure but more on the issue of a society suffering and their political elites rising to the occasion.

 

For me, the key question is "can this tragedy ultimately lead into a better future and what does it take to turn it into the catalyst we need for a better future?"

 

Cheers

[Mintid Farayar]

Legend of Zu;893322 wrote:

^^^ the comparison is not the societal structure but more on the issue of a society suffering and their political elites rising to the occasion.

 

For me, the key question is "can this tragedy ultimately lead into a better future and what does it take to turn it into the catalyst we need for a better future?"

 

Cheers

 

By understanding the societal construct, you can usually determine where the divisions within a society are. Early 19th Century America was divided between an agrarian South dependent on its slave labor for cheap large scale farming and a rapidly developing North entering the Industrial Age with its decreasing reliance on abundant manpower. This was the overwhelming division between North and South.

 

Within the Somalis, the divisions are clan-based with the usual underlying insecurities and grievances.....

[Baashi]

I take it farther and dare say there is bid of Kansas syndrome in the mix Leadership is a problem but they somewhat reflect the will of the folks who support them. There is a possibility that unemployed poor father with eight kids and three wives would forsake stability in support of perceived and nominal political dividend for his clan. If you haven't had the chance to read Thomas Frank's fascinating book "What's the matter with Kansas" I recommend you to check it out and see if you can draw parallels with our situation.

[Baashi]

^Noted . It does not take much to disappoint you