сформулируй основную мысль идею  текста The Stem and the Flower
On the one hand, there are those who are completely cynical about politics.
But, as the columnist Michael Gerson has put it, this sort of cynicism is the luxury of
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privileged people. If you live in a functioning society, you can say politicians are just
a bunch of crooks. But, if you live in a place without rule of law, where a walk down
a nighttime street can be terrifying, where tribalism leads to murder, you know that
politics is a vital concern.
On the other hand, there are those who form their identity around politics and
look to it to complete their natures. These overpoliticized people come in two forms:
the aspirational and the tribal. The aspirational hope that politics can transform
society and provide meaning. They were inspired by the lofty rhetoric of John F.
Kennedy’s Inaugural Address. The possibilities, he argued, were limitless: “Man
holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty.”
The problem with this lofty rhetoric is that politics can rarely deliver, so there
is a cynical backlash when the limited realities of government reassert themselves.
This inevitable letdown is happening to a lot of President Obama’s supporters.
Then there are those who look to politics for identity. They treat their partisan
affiliation as a form of ethnicity. These people drive a lot of talk radio and television.
Not long ago, most intelligent television talk was not about politics. Shows would put
interesting people together, like Woody Allen with Billy Graham, and they’d discuss
anything under the sun.
Now most TV and radio talk is minute political analysis, while talk of culture
has shriveled. This change is driven by people who, absent other attachments, have
fallen upon partisanship to give them a sense of righteousness and belonging. This
emotional addiction can lead to auto-hysteria.
So if politics should not be nothing in life, but not everything, what should it
be? We should start by acknowledging that except for a few rare occasions — the
Civil War, the Depression — government is a slow trudge, oriented around essential
but mundane tasks.
Imagine you are going to a picnic. Government is properly in charge of
maintaining the essential background order: making sure there is a park, that it is
reasonably clean and safe, arranging public transportation so as many people as
possible can get to it. But if you remember the picnic afterward, these things won’t be
what you remember. You’ll remember the creative food, the interesting conversations
and the fun activities.
Government is the hard work of creating a background order, but it is not the
main substance of life. As Samuel Johnson famously put it, “How small, of all that
human hearts endure,/That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Government
can set the stage, but it can’t be the play.
It is just too balky an instrument. As we’re seeing even with the Obamacare
implementation, government is good at check-writing, like Social Security, but it is
not nimble in the face of complexity. It doesn’t adapt to failure well. There’s a lot of
passive-aggressive behavior. In any federal action, one administrator will think one
thing; another administrator will misunderstand and do something else; a political
operative will have a different agenda; a disgruntled fourth party will leak and
sabotage. You can’t fire anybody or close anything down. It’s hard to use economic
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incentives to get people moving in one direction. Governing is the noble but hard job
of trying to get anything done under a permanent condition of Murphy’s Law.
So one’s attitude toward politics should be a passionate devotion to a mundane
and limited thing. Government is essential, but, to switch metaphors ridiculously, it’s
the stem of the flower, not the bloom. The best government is boring, gradual and
orderly. It’s steady reform, not exciting transformation. It’s keeping the peace and
promoting justice and creating a background setting for mobility, but it doesn’t
deliver meaning.
I figure that unless you are in the business of politics, covering it or
columnizing about it, politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s
mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun. I
wish our talk-show culture reflected that balance, and that the emotional register
around politics were more in keeping with its low but steady nature.