Excellent interview with Peter Thiel. If our politics cannot start to resemble or mimic or take on the characteristics of the kind of practical rationality displayed in this dialogue then it's hard to see how we move forward as a nation. It's natural for people with extreme conceptions to think only extreme actions or gestures or rhetoric will do - to imagine otherwise would be to subvert their beliefs and drain their passions of meaning - but of course democracy is about mitigating extremes, finding consensus, exploiting dynamic avenues opened up by the flexibility of freedom - extreme positioning driven by ideological rigidity is counter intuitive to the very idea of the democratic principles the hyper partisan claim to be an expression of.
Of course, bitter ironies abound - they're not necessarily wrong in thinking that - you wonder if maybe it's a function of the nature of modern media - in the sense that, the ubiquitousness of simplistic messaging has resulted in too much democracy, which is a sentiment that is both hard to defend and hard to ignore as possibly being true - I mean, when does it become a sort of alchemy to think that crude opinions are somehow made golden by being freely expressed? Certainly Obama was a slavishly superficial media creation and liberals accordingly prostrated themselves before him for the most idiotic of reasons - and now with a sort of counter-idiocy the republican nominating process, fearful of a great liberal Caliphate cresting over the horizon, tramps from one supposed 'true' conservative to another in a desperate attempt to avoid the evil moderateness of Romney - and this disgruntled peregrination is fed by the uber right media organs of talk radio and dyspeptic blogs which basically preach the gospel that any hint of ideological timidity is akin to leaving the door open to satan.
Alas, even as I scorn the right I have no choice but to empathize with them because Obama is too liberal, has been an awful president and is deliberately fanning the flames of hyper-partisanship and a ruinous class war because he's obviously decided that's the only way he can get re-elected - and it's working since the more enraged the GOP base becomes the more damage is done to Romney and the closer you get to someone like Santorum being the nominee and I see no way that an arch social conservative like him beats Obama [or that you'd want him to even if he could - I mean, put aside the problematic nature of his social views and the flawed reasoning and cloistered conscience they reveal - and forget that the aggressive way he talks about Iran and 'Islamo-fascism' suggests his opinions are grounded more in religious fervor than strategic clarity - the fact that he's so closely tied to extremist right wing thinking can only one imagines lead to more partisan rancour and deadlock in Washington, not less].
No doubt Obama's huge ego allows him the delusion that of course the republic is improved by his re-election - but, c'mon, is this anyway to run a supposedly great country? The system is becoming a caricature of the values and principles it professes to encompass. Now, I know Aristophanes made great fun of Athenian politics - but was Pericles ever reduced to such sad displays as this? What would Locke have said could he see this? What about brilliant men like Madison and Alexander Hamilton - hard to imagine them not feeling ashamed to see the great enterprise born of their keen intellects and noble passions reduced to this side show.
So then the question becomes why the dysfunction and is there anything we can do about it? If the system is a reflection of the prevailing culture and it's the culture then that's broken, then I don't know how you 'fix' that - short of I guess a revolution or upheaval that resets the parameters. If the system is independent of the prevailing culture then I suppose it can be reformed - but that's a huge undertaking that would be undermined and possibly undone by the same problems that afflict the system now, namely hyper-partisan rancour, dishonesty, demagoguery, populist pandering and a press and other media that often don't even attempt to feign objectivity anymore. If it's simply a case of bad leadership, then that's a bit more of a fixable thing - sure, bad leaders can be a reflection of a flawed system and therefore possibly just as indicative of a broken culture - Obama and Bush may be exhibits 1 and 1a in that scenario - but one could certainly envision that a wise leader with a real gift for reaching people could still manage to do wonderful and far reaching things despite the system's shortcomings - just have to find him or her and convince them to run [no one had to convince Pericles of the value and purpose of leading Athens - but then Pericles didn't have to run in no god damn primary where a media drone like Wolf Blitzer would with an accusatory tone ask his opinion of something as silly and of little consequence as say gay marriage which would be the equivalent of asking Pericles in the middle of the Pelopennesian war if slaves should be freed and made citizens and he has to somehow come up with an answer that offends neither the idiots on the right nor the idiots on the left who conveniently have diametrically opposed ideas of what a good answer should sound like - and sure, a cunning boy like Pericles just might be able to craft a perfectly reasonable and logical answer that left each party a wee bit consoled and a whole lot enlightened - but ya know old Wolfy and Rush and the NY Times etc etc etc ain't gonna let you wriggle away by just being reasonable and logical - boring! - which is a long and confusing way round to say gov't and the ideological vermin that feed off it increasingly seem like agitated, annoying, yapping, delusional little dogs chasing after a runaway train without the slightest little clue in their heads of what they might do should they catch it - because you see it's all about the yapping]
[now, of course, Pericles failed too - well, I guess one can argue that, Thucydides certainly wanted to - but assuming he miscalculated viz Sparta it raises a sobering point: if even the Pericles' of the world fail and make mistakes, what does it say about a nominating process that gives us inept, flawed or otherwise ill-suited commanders in chief like Bush and Obama? A process that has offered up the truly scary likes of Herman Cain and Gingrich and now possibly - although admittedly somewhat less scary than those two but still troubling regardless - Santorum? It's not a happy thought. And yet people still make the claim that the tough primary process makes for better candidates - where's the proof of this? The process may in some nominal way make the candidates better campaigners - but where's the positive connection between campaigning and governing? If you look at Obama, the two things are actually in opposition - great campaigner, horrible president]
