Today ideology seems far more important that personality because the policies offered by our two main political parties now diverge to an extraordinary degree we have likely not seen for at least the past 75 years. Personal views on abortion, immigration, education, criminal justice, and healthcare often determine voting behavior more than the personal attributes of political candidates. Consequently, behavior that runs the gamut from the boorish to the childish to the unhinged that would have previously disqualified someone from a chance at public office is overlooked in the quest for absolute ideological purity by their Party’s voters.
This isn’t a helpful development because character counts when we are choosing leaders whose decisions and indecisions will have a profound and likely irreversibly impact on both our futures and that of our nation as a whole. In fact, the preference for ideology over practicality has bequeathed us a generation of leaders who are often unable to adjust to the rapid changes around us or are simply intellectually incapable of doing their jobs.
Watching our elected officials collapse into blubbering incoherence when confronted with rising crime and costs or the economic consequences of counter-productive Green energy initiatives and regulatory overreach speaks to their inability to even acknowledge realities that fall outside of their ideological comfort zones. Worse still, voting behavior that virtually ignores the moral and intellectual attributes of candidates for elected office has opened the door for smooth-taking charlatans and schemers such as Kamala Harris, Zohran Mamdani, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who is definitely the Megan Markle of American electoral politics) to inflict their grinning vapidity on us all while spreading discord and thwarting solutions.
Of course, it is true that one cannot lead unless one has a firm idea of what the destination should be, but the difference between belief and delirium is the chasm between a guiding principle and a damaging obsession. Fanatics have plagued humanity throughout history, and their single-mindedness has inevitably led to dysfunction, decline, and death for those whom they ruled.
The best leaders are those who understand the value of the so-called “mid-course correction” when circumstances render their previous ideas useless. The divide, for example, between President Herbert Hoover’s blind faith in the theoretically self-correcting nature of capitalism, which did little to relieve the suffering of the Great Depression, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s energetic and experimental government interventions, which revived the hope of a nation without hope, demonstrates the importance of avoiding the trap of doctrinaire myopia. Inventiveness is possible only when dogma can be discarded in favor of results, but the near-religious fervor of acolytes on both the Left and the Right is an obstacle when solutions must be found to the problems that confound our nation and harm our citizens.
Refusing to adapt generally leads to intellectual contortions followed by a refusal to acknowledge reality that ultimately leads to lies to cover up the failures caused by that initial refusal to adapt. The deluge of fudged data that attempted to conceal the abysmal disasters of the Biden administration, which ranged from cooked crime statistics to cherry-picked economic numbers to daily news briefings that often sounded more like propaganda dumps, was caused by a refusal to recognize that lax law enforcement, uncontrolled government spending, open borders, and military weakness were paving a path to national decline. The wild yearnings for censorship among the most fervent Bidenistas were born both of an ideological rigidity that confused free speech with insurrection and a simple desire not to be publicly embarrassed any further by their own stupidity.
As incredibly difficult as it might be to accomplish during these politically, socially, and cultural fractious times in which we now live, we all need to stop listening to those who gain power and money from keeping us at one another’s throats and take a look at the consequences of tearing ourselves asunder rather than talking—and compromising—whenever possible.
Sounds crazy, right? (And maybe impossible)
But….
If the Left can stop being crazy about insisting “society” (a.k.a. governmentally-funded social engineers, media shills, and Humanities professors) validate their lifestyle choices and behavior by discarding over 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian thought and morality in order to be more “inclusive” of those who believe they are the only important people in the whole world, it would be a start. It would also help if they could remember that no matter how loudly and how often they speak their “truth” while blithely dismissing the truth of everyone else, there exists the distinct possibility they might be dead wrong—and offensive to many hardworking and patriotic Americans.
The Right also has their own segment of crazies who love wars just a little too much, are convinced that a nation largely composed of legal immigrants must halt legal immigration, and are willing to write off our major cities rather than use any tool available to reform and improve them. Dismantling the Department of Education, for example, must be more than a political stunt and act as the first step toward ensuring every child has access to a quality education—because walking away in disgust cannot be an option. Moreover, it would not be a mortal sin to tax billionaires a bit more and insist that the pirates of Wall Street pillage us just a little bit less, but that sort of talk might annoy ultra-rich Republican campaign donors.
Seeking out dialogue might be asking the impossible when online trolls, partisan journalists, and prima donna politicians are intent on spreading hatred, paranoia, and lies instead of facilitating—or perhaps even leading—the hard and necessary conversations we need to have to avoid fiscal and social catastrophe. It might well be that compromise is out and winner-takes-all politics will be the rule in the decades ahead, but they will be a grim and brutish ones if this is our future because the victories will primarily go to one side only and turn our democracy into a hollow and bitter memory for many Americans.