Politics and Community

I am inaugurating this politics blog, symbolically in time for Presidents’ Day weekend 2012.  Washington and Lincoln are two statesmen-politicians to emulate.

Politikos means politics in Greek.  But for the Ancient Greeks politics meant the life of the polis, which, in turn, was an interdependent community, not a collection of individuals. For Aristotle, who essentially invented the empirical study of political life, the discussion of public affairs meant what we owe one another to keep a healthy community going, not what we can keep for ourselves. That part of political discussion has been disappearing these days, as our public debate in America has drifted toward finding how to dissolve the bonds of community – how to attack how community obligations…attacking the expansion of health care is the most prominent example.

I have taught politics – political science in its academic label - since 1956, first at Harvard, then at Princeton, but mostly at Haverford, starting in 1960. My major interests have been comparative government and international relations, concentrating on Africa. Along the way, I have been involved in the local politics of Lower Merion Township, and therefore the state and local politics of Pennsylvania, for two extended periods, 1972-1978, and 2004 to the present. I am now a Democratic Party Committeeman in Ward 9-3.  I will be at the Democratic Party National Convention in 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I intend to continue this blog from the Convention.

So what will I talk about? Several days a week I expect to comment on – and invite comments on – trends in contemporary politics, here and abroad.  Do we need more opinions?  Yes, if it is informed opinion.  Immodestly, I feel a bit more informed than the average commenter I run into on other blogs.  I am particularly disappointed in the rhetoric that passes for campaigning in the current contests that make up the Republican Presidential primaries. 

Today (February 17), for example, candidate Romney called government loans to Chrysler and General Motors (which have mostly been repaid) as “crony capitalism on a grand scale” [Financial Times, February 16, 2012, p. 6].  Presumably tax breaks for hedge fund earnings and company strippers like Romney’s Bain Capital are simply the rewards for public service.  Then, there is the Pennsylvania legislature passing a “noncontroversial resolution” declaring 2012 as the “year of the Bible”[Philadelphia Inquirer, February 16, 2012, p. 1].  Two legislators already declared their votes a mistake.  But why is the state legislature spending any time on this stuff?  Does the Bible tell us how to deal with “fees” for natural gas drilling (something that has been agitating the legislature for about a year)?  Do we love our neighbor that much more when we cut funds from our state universities?

Comments invited.