politics: getting, keeping, using power

If politics is about getting, keeping, and using power, with a few or many sides competing with each other to control government, then it is curious that in the history of our country politics is not often expressed this way. Politics is not often described as a competition among centers of power in the country. The competition is more often expressed as going on between the federal government and the states, or as it is now, between big (federal) government, and big business--with small government being only a proxy for the dominance of big business.

Samuelson's column in today's Washington Post is an example of the failure to confront the basic nature of politics. Samuelson admits that for its practitioners politics is a matter of power, but then he shifts the argument by saying that "for the nation, the basic purpose of politics is to conciliate." He then goes on to say that politics achieves conciliation by working out a consensus on issues. His basic complaint is that politics especially in the present "has abdicated its central role," as he defines it. He ignores the alternative definition of politics as the exercise of power. For him politics is the process of achieving a bipartisan consensus.

Samuelson admits that there has never been a golden age of bipartisan harmony, but he finds that its present lack is especially troubling, with voter anger driven to just throw everybody out. But if there has never been a period of bipartisan harmony, maybe that is not the purpose of politics. His acceptance of bipartisan consensus then amount to no more than a wishful hope: politics should be bipartisan, even if it never has been. His political theory departs from an objective description of what is, into a fantasy of how things should be, equivalent to the idealism of having a benevolent dictatorship.

His description of a cycle of disillusionment about politics is probably accurate, with initial optimism, but then demoralization. The cause of this cycle, though, is not "that leaders cannot command broad support." in the form of bipartisan agreement. It is just the opposite; disillusionment is the result of the difficulties in making political decisions resulting from the necessity of having a bipartisan consensus.

Decision making by majority rule is the mathematically, morally, and politically the best way to make decisions. The problem with our government is that we do not have majority rule.We avoid confronting this issue by discussing politics as one of big government vs big business, and pretending that consensus is all.