Politically, I tend more and more to adhere to the famous statement of one-time Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neil, who said, “All politics is local politics.”
I turn on the left-wing CNN and I may hear for the umpteenth time the near exact phrases about, for instance, former FBI Director Jim Comey’s recent testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee that I heard the preceding day and the day before that. I turn on the right-wing Fox News and I hear the exact same thing over and over, except with a different emphasis and viewpoint. Interrupted sound bites of people talking past each other are actually referred to as “debates.” Every several days there is a slightly different story and then that story is beaten to death for the next several days.
I listen to the radio on the way to work and hear someone’s take on a recent current event. I listen to the radio on the way home from work and I hear the same story almost verbatim and it is called “breaking news!” I hear little to nothing about what is happening in France or Palestine or any of the African countries or even Great Britain. I hear nothing at all about any interesting news from any of the individual states of our United States.
To further pervert and undermine our one-time respect for high political office, recently a “personality” in a photographic stunt held up a model of the severed head of the President of the United States, a stunt which went way beyond distasteful and for which she provided a disingenuous apology, followed a few days later by a statement indicating herself as a victim of some sort of harassment.
Just recently news came out about a performance of Shakespeare in the Park in New York City. It was the play “Julius Ceasar,” wherein Ceasar is assassinated. The role of Ceasar was played by an actor made up to look like President Trump.
And recently a famous pop singer at a rally shouted to thousands who cheered her on, “And yes, I have thought about blowing up the White House!”
I am taken aback by the vitriol of these open and public cruelties. Something is horribly askew here.
The recent shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice actually did fit the bill as “breaking” news. But it was interesting to see how even that horrid act was spun differently by different news outlets. Maybe, just maybe the congressional charity game itself did force a tentative unity, a much-needed bipartisan moment for our country. But of course, it didn’t last.
But then again, politics itself is not politics anymore. A wonderful Catholic scholar, Anthony Esolen, recently wrote, “Politics, in our age of all-intrusive media, is not the science of governing the polis (the city-state). There’s little left that resembles what Aristotle would have recognized as a polis at all: a smallish self-governing city-state wherein pretty much everybody knew everybody else by sight or by reputation or by family. Current politics is not even a way, though incomplete, of looking at the world. It is instead a way of not looking at the world, of refusing to credit what is right in front of your eyes.”
Indeed, listening to national media outlets has become a way of “not looking at the world.”
So why would I resort to local politics? Because of the famed and very Catholic principle of “subsidiarity” wherein those in governing positions attempt to handle matters of state at the lowest, least centralized level rather than at the largest – that is, the federal government. This is not to say the federal government does not have a proper role, for instance, in various projects of our infrastructure, in our national defense, in the breaking up of big business monopolies, etc. But, as much as we possibly can, looking to local government is preferred.
Because I’m not very fond of the inner workings of any of our political worlds, I tend to reduce subsidiarity to the most local unit in my life: my family. That is where I concentrate my energy, political or otherwise. And, when possible, I try to contribute a measure of time and talent to certain other communities with which I also have great affinities. One of those communities is my work. And as I think about that relationship, I note that my work is all about Aristotle’s body politic, the politic that concerns itself with individuals in their closest and most genuine communities: families and towns and churches and workplaces.
It is not always easy to do! But when we try to boil it down, simplify it and give it perspective, what I come out with is the commitment to loving myself as a child of God, my family as the finest fruit of God’s grace in my life, my work as a God-given foundation for the structuring of my family in the world, various local communities as the outlets and opportunities for my own fulfillment as a human being, and my faith as a path to heaven. These are the parameters of my personal body politic. And here’s hoping, with God’s grace, it remains an honest and ongoing campaign, where the only thing lobbied is truth.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.