Friday, August 24, 2012

The poison in our politics

Human political history has witnessed some really bad actors. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Nicolae Ceausescu and Pol Pot come to mind. The United States has never experienced the sort of deranged depravity that led these men to slaughter millions of their own citizens.
This is not to say that American political leaders have not made some big mistakes. Legalized human slavery was sustained for over two centuries, and native populations were deprived of their lives and lands. Egregious affronts to human dignity and freedom, to be sure, but committed largely out of ignorance rather than venality. No doubt our population has its share of depraved and mentally deranged people. We are not immune from those tragedies of the human condition (witness the recent shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin). But we have somehow managed to keep those people from positions of power. Perhaps it’s part of the genius, or good fortune, of our constitutional, republican democracy.
But you would hardly know it from our political campaigns and media pundits.
The blogosphere is filled with confident assertions that Mitt Romney hates women, gays and blacks. In fact it seems he hates everyone except the rich, for whose exclusive benefit he is running for president so he can lower their taxes while increasing the taxes paid by the middle class. Meanwhile bloggers and activists on the right claim that President Obama hates America and the Constitution and seeks to weaken the United States and turn everything over to the United Nations.

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