The death of Justice Ginsburg has thrown the political world into a pandemonium of threats and counter-threats. The real world, the world where politics is not all-in-all, if it pays attention at all, watches in dismay.
Those people who think that politics really is the ultimate battle, the path to the good life or the just nation or the city on a hill, see each point of contention as absolutely winner-take-all, cataclysmic, victory or death. I'm always surprised to run into someone who actually does lose sleep over political matters. Because in most of America, that doesn't happen.
I heard about the death of Justice Ginsburg via Facebook. A politically active friend (a progressive) simply posted, "Well, it was a nice nation." Later he, a Californian, vowed to go to Washington to protest in the streets if Trump attempted to fill the court vacancy before the election. Indeed, the threat of massive protests is in the air. As if the very nation, or at least the nation as we know it, is at stake.
This is not the way normal people think. This is the way highly politicized people think. Most of us are simply getting about our lives. Some of us are watching the political people with varying degrees of interest, and some are not watching at all. Because life is bigger than politics. Not just bigger, but closer, more intimate, more closely knit with our day to day, than politics.
But for now, and for many, politics is winning hearts and minds. When we make everything depend on politics, politics becomes our summum bonum. That which we can imagine for our communities is channeled through processes that happen in Washington. We become a sickly and sleepless people.
The country's great need, above and beyond any given election, is the restoration of civic virtue: what Irving Kristol called “probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.”
I know for certain that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden will restore us to health. Neither will the next Supreme Court justice. Our problems lie deeper, and our hope lies higher.
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