It’s Election Day, so I am writing this long before the polls are closed and the results are in.
…and let’s face it, there’s been a number of really nasty ads this season.
Many of them are outright lies, while others were simply so obtuse that the fail to merit a repetition here (we’ll let the reader imagine the worst). Most of the worst were run by challengers, advised to do so by general consultants in an effort to win at all costs. Politics — we are told — is the adjudication of power. Politics — we are told — is a bloodbath, and all is fair in love and war. Politics — again, so we are told — is to be a “spirited nomination method” that more often than not is a mere euphemism for a contest that almost competes with becoming more vile and underhanded every year.
I’ve mused on these topics before. So it’s with a modicum of chagrin that I see the purveyors of dishonor almost apologize for the last 90 days of “spirited” campaigning, with dubious calls for unity after the fact.
No.
That’s right — the answer is no.
My grandfather taught me that a gentleman does not lie, cheat, or steal; nor does he associate with those who do. A very wise friend counselled me once that one should not work or associate with immoral people, because one day you will wake up and find yourself as immoral as they are.
The Romans viewed politics as a kind of sacrifice. The profession of politician was viewed with the opposite lens we Americans seem to heap upon it. Politicians were self-sacrificing, noble, and submitting to the public will… the very best of what republican Rome had to offer.
Of course, folks will point to individuals such as Seneca, Cicero, and all those countless patricians at the beginning of the Roman Empire as counterfactuals. But by and large, the Roman politician was something of a virtuous character.
…and virtuous characters are more often than not savaged by the more vicious elements in society. In fact, they draw the lightning bolts more often than not.
Horace, the great Roman poet, wrote about the loss of reputation in the face of the vicious:
“It’s not marble, carved out with public inscriptions by whereby, after death, life and spirit return to great generals; it’s not Hannibal’s rapid retreat, once repulsed, with his threats turned against him; nor is it the burning of impious Carthage, that more gloriously declares all the praises of him who winning a name from his African conquest came home, than the Calabrian Muses: you wouldn’t receive the reward for your deeds if the books were silent. What would the child of Mars and of Ilia be today, if mute envy stood in the way of Romulus’s just merits? The virtue, favour, and speech of powerful poets snatches Aeacus from Stygian streams, immortalising him, in the Isles of the Blessed. It is the Muse who takes care that the man who is worthy of honour does not die.”
— Horace, “Odes” Book 4, Poem 8 (d. 8 B.C.)
Honor is a word that is seemingly lost in the modern lexicon. We don’t speak of it: lawyers and contracts and the lidless eye of the internet have squashed it to nothing. Handshakes don’t mean what they used to. The conduct of ladies and gentlemen is laughed at nowadays… our pragmatism in capturing victory at any cost seems to allow us to forget that in doing so, such victory doesn’t last long.
Winning with honor. That used to mean something.
Obviously, our nomination contests should be spirited. But for those who win without honor, there is no rallying afterwards.
Naturally, this has to be tempered against another adolescent vice of the times, where every disagreement is hate speech and those who quibble on 5% are therefore 95% heretics. I don’t have much stomach for this either… and I could just as easily see the more vicious elements of the Republican Party in Virginia doing precisely this: mimicking the virtuous, because after all that is what vice does.
Perhaps our politicians really are mirrors, held up to the public. Nowadays, we don’t like what we see, so we have one hell of a time savaging the simulacrum.
Perhaps too, an insistence on winning with honor is an insistence upon defeat? Perhaps so. But in the choice between honor and dishonor, one also chooses between those with whom one will care to associate… and those with whom one will never associate, just merely engage.
Paul Weyrich — a leading light of many conservative circles whose example today is almost forgotten with the notable exception of one annual dinner — used to remark that politics follows culture (paraphrasing the late Pope St. John Paul the Great). If politics does indeed follow culture, as Weyrich insisted, then what does it say about the libertarian populist who is schooled in the art of political combat, believing that politics isn’t an outcropping of culture, but rather the adjudication of mere power? What sort of culture is that? Why would anyone but a crass materialist choose such a path? Whitaker Chambers puts a fine point to the argument:
Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.
Thus the difference between the conservative and the libertarian populist; the pursuit of happiness vs. the pursuit of pleasure; liberty vs. license; intellect vs. appetite; honor vs. dishonor.
If — as conservatives — the purpose of government is to create the sphere of laws necessary for a free society to thrive, then power mongering is the precise opposite of what we believe. The alarm was sounded over 50 years ago by no less committed an anti-Communist than Chambers. Yet the libertarian populist doesn’t see this. The ends justify their means, by honorable or dishonorable means, and once the gathering of “things” is done, a bloodied hand is outstretch saying “no hard feelings, let’s work together.” Really?
‘Tis a shame if conservatism is replaced by that voice for the crass gathering of things — even political offices — that seems to be the salvation of a sclerotic few. The good news is that those who live by the sword tend to die upon it. News articles are written, op-eds gathered, and sentences pronounced. Not by the politicians, but by the chattering classes and the commentariat (as coined by no less a luminary than our own Norm Leahy).
After all, it is the Muse who takes care that the man who is worthy of honour does not die.
