I am caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, independent political voices tend to be crackpots. We have a system which produces two mainstream political parties intentionally. May the Lord save me from his crackpot followers, muttering about "the duopoly".
On the other hand, we are at least vaguely aware of the various ways in which political participation is marred by grave errors in moral judgment. It is hard to imagine that we cannot do better than what we have done.
We need better leaders, because if we have bad leaders, the people obviously will follow them, and that is now beyond question. People love to believe that they are self-possessed and independent thinkers, but they are not.
To be specific, I do not understand why it is difficult to affirm the dignity of all human life, from conception until natural death, and consequently, to defend the idea of a robust social democracy.
I do not understand why we cannot maintain basic norms of civility and decorum, and why people insist that such norms are hiding some evil underbelly, as if respecting people and wishing them well means that we must agree with them.
A radical idea need not be a dangerous idea. We may instead find that a particular consensus which has developed is not rooted in anything morally coherent.
Moral coherence and norms of civility go together, because those leaders who cannot orient themselves toward the good cannot lead others in the creation and in the implementation of a public morality. Politics is public morality. Again, the people who say, "you cannot legislate morality" are in fact saying, "I don't like this morality." If the political community cannot legislate morality, then who can? It is foolish to say that a very wealthy person who only pays $750 in income tax has somehow cheated the people, and then to say, "you can't legislate morality".
The dignity of all people rests upon the greatness of their purpose. Human dignity does not begin and end with what any one individual is able to accomplish for someone else. A person's dignity abides, even if he or she chooses to disregard that human dignity. A person's dignity endures, even if they cannot accomplish anything at all.
It is time to finally reject the apparently endless parade of false choices we have been offered, and to begin very slowly making other choices. If we know that particular things are unacceptable for leaders to do and to say, maybe we should stop holding our noses, and start holding our own.
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