The people have spoken on these issues. They don’t want to pay for sex changes for prison inmates, they don’t want people who never enslaved to pay reparations for people who were never slaves, and they don’t want to hamstring law enforcement from sending illegal aliens arrested for other crimes back home. But the self-proclaimed party of the people refuses to listen.
"The picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sitting in first class en route to a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally hosted by Bernie Sanders tells a thousand words.
"A few of those words? People who shout the loudest about fighting for “the people” rarely connect with actual flesh-and-blood individuals. The humanitarians do not mix well with the humans. Basing a political philosophy on abstractions impervious to alteration by real-life experience helps explain this.
"As Thomas Fleming wrote in The Morality of Everyday Life: “If moral and social questions are not reducible to logical abstractions — which is my central point — then it is essential for us to learn moral reasoning by considering the nuances and textures of human life.”
"Too many politicians fail to do this. On a symbolic level, Donald Trump, whether dressed as a garbage man or working the drive-thru at a McDonald’s, appeals to people rather than people cultishly devoted to abstract ideas. His common touch extends from a long line of populists, right and left (and right and wrong), who knew how to communicate with the common man.
"Populist Party member “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, referred to by well-wishers as the “Sockless Socrates,” won over the voters of Kansas-7 to win three terms in Congress during the 1890s. His nicknames alone — Have there been better ones in American politics? — generated an intense following.
"Biographer Thomas Reeves noted that Joseph McCarthy “pressed his own pants by putting them under the mattress at night.” When a limousine came for the former Marine, he revealed his class by obliviously attempting to get into the front passenger seat. “I wonder what these people would think,” the senator mumbled at a Washington cocktail party, “if they knew I once raised chickens.”
"George Wallace, a Golden Gloves champion boxer, attracted 18,000 to a Boston Common rally in 1968 not because of the past racism of his administration as governor of Alabama, but because the working-class saw in him a fighter." . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment