A moral lesion in noding through analogy:
It occurs to me, that throughout my community there is a feeling of distrust and hostility directed at the the state. This is, not surprisingly, extremely upsetting to me, and though I’m myself am not overtly political; I have been forced to try and come to terms with this phenomena by the fact that all my friends seem to be up-in-arms, and really won't stop talking about it. So this is what I have determined:
Politics have always been a popularity contest. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s a reality, and it can’t be the source of the problem. However, at some point in the relatively recent past something has changed, and I believe it to be the advent of the career politician.
Originally, the founding fathers I believed envisioned a system where an individual who felt the calling would present his ideas to the public, and if the public agreed with that individual they would vote for the same said individual. Now what made any given person successful is hard to tell, perhaps they were in tune with the Zeitgeist of the time, and would just be saying what everyone was thinking. OR, perhaps they were blessed with rhetorical skills, so that what they thought was so pleasing to the public that they couldn’t help but like the person. OR, perhaps their ideas were so startlingly new, that they were able to challenge the public into thinking of new things. It’s hard to tell.
But then, the system was corrupted by the career politician. Now, an individual no longer said what they meant or meant what they said. Their primary concern became their reputation. Now, they would cater to the masses through the use of focus groups and some such.
The result is A Crisis of Personal Integrity.
Because the system breaks down, as the career politician says what they think the masses want to hear, their ideas become perverted, and a faint echo of the lowest common denominator.
The problem is that the career politician is more concerned about acceptance rating than doing the right thing.