The Thing They Fear Is The Thing They Are: What Happens When You Make Politics Your God

In one recent ad, a couple in the area who identified themselves as “open-minded” and liberal advertised a $500 room in their home: “If you’re racist, sexist, homophobic or a Trump supporter please don’t respond. We won’t get along.”
 –from “New York Times Classified Ads”
 
In a February 2017 online article, “No Republicans Need Apply,” Kevin D. Williamson writes of the centrality of politics in some people’s lives. (I have taken both the title and the quotation from Williamson’s article, which you can find at http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444832/politics-new-york-times-classified-roommates-no-republicans-need-apply.)
           
Long ago, I knew a woman who told me “Politics is everything.” To do her justice, she lived by that slogan. Art, religion, family, friendship, work: to her, everything was political. 

---

Since then, I have met an increasing number of people, folks on both the left and the right, for whom this slogan serves as the guiding light of their life. Politics is their only reality. Reading Mr. Williamson’s article regarding the deficiencies of this point of view struck a chord with me—I’m hoping you get the irony in the NYT quotation above—but he didn’t go far enough in his explanation of the harm politics does to such believers and to society.
           
The people who have made politics their god and who worship in a  temple built from idealism and a hatred for those opposed to their views surely miss some of the joy in living. Those who cut off friendships and even family ties because of an election lost or won, men and women who have crying jags and near nervous breakdowns over a political race, radicals who take to the streets destroying property and beating people because their candidate lost an election: all do obeisance to the great god, Politics. All of them, however, worship at an altar whose god will never be appeased.

People who worship this false god look at politics as a race to perfection. For many liberals, and even for some conservatives, heaven on earth is just one more lap away in this race. Unfortunately for them—and for the rest of us, because we have to live with them—the tape at the end of the race keeps moving ahead of us, elusive, never to be broken. From these believers in terrestrial paradise we hear such words as these: “If we just change this law…” “If we just win this election….” “If we just gave government more power….” Enact the legislation, in other words, and we will live in Eden.

Sorry, you worshippers of elections and government. It doesn’t work that way.

Politics is not a god. Human perfection is an impossibility. To the contrary, politics is an imperfect means of dealing with human imperfection. So if you are one of those who lives by a political creed, who make Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump or anyone else some sort of totem for all your dreams, know you are doomed to perpetual disappointment.

Some things are more important than politics. Here are a few of mine.

1. The God who is the source of life and whom I have disappointed again and again. This God with his promise of grace and redemption means more to me than the little gods of platform and party.
2. My family. My daughters and sons, their spouses, my grandchildren, my brothers and sisters, my other relatives. For them I would lay down my life. A politician only gets my vote.
3. My friends. I am of an age where my remaining friends are few in number, but solid in my affections. If one of them voted for a candidate I oppose, we might chide each other, but we would remain friends. (Long ago, when I was in my late twenties, a college professor who had taught me, who had become my friend, and who was politically distant from my own views, asked me why I thought we were able to maintain our friendship. “Because we can laugh together,” I replied. He laughed and agreed with me.)
4. Books. For nearly sixty years, books have served as my companions. Reading—and writing—are much more important in my life than the jabbering about Trump’s sexist views or Hilary’s wealth. I learn more about the meaning of life from The Great Gatsby or The Little Paris Bookshop than from the latest squirrelly hub-bub in the news.
5. Beauty. The smile of a child at the library, a cloud-tumbled sky, the sound of a hard rain on the windowpanes in a house at the beach, the scent of new-mown grass: these and a thousand other sensations count more to me than most of the current “issues” copping the news.
6. Justice. Here politics and life may hold hands and embrace, but not always. Politics and law helped end institutional racism when I was a boy. Excellent. But questions of justice can be tricky. Take immigration. On the one hand, an illegal immigrant coming out of poverty is seeking work and a better life. On the other hand, uncontrolled immigration places enormous burdens on the economy or can create violence and possibilities of terrorism. Which course is just?

 
These are some of the things I love. Politics to me is a necessary evil, one means by which we attempt to create justice and liberty for all.

One last thought: The word fascist is much in vogue these days. We smear those with whom we disagree by labeling them fascistic. If you are one of those who shout down speakers at a university by calling them fascists, if you are beating up people whom you consider fascist, if you are calling for the murder of policemen or politicians or anyone else because you think they are fascists, or if you give tacit approval to any of these deeds, understand two things.

First, you don’t know what a fascist is.

​Second, you have just become one.