On Point: Presidents, purity and polarization

By Stephen B. Young The Daily Record Newswire I think the last time two Minnesotans from the same party ran against each other for the presidency was in 1968 when the competitors were Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy. This year we had Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. Pawlenty is now out of the race, and Bachmann's chances look less than robust. Gov. Rick Perry's Texas bombast will win over much of her Tea Party base, and he has a track record of executive experience and friends with very deep pockets to give him serious credibility as a national candidate. In his day, McCarthy gathered around him the purists in his party -- against the Vietnam War and for participatory democracy against the big city machines, southern barons and labor unions -- the winning Roosevelt coalition then under Lyndon Johnson's direction and favoring Humphrey. McCarthy spoke to moral ideals. His views, adopted by the Democratic Party in 1972 for its internal rules, began the process of destroying our traditional coalition parties and opening our politics to ideological polarization. "Better true to principle than successful" became the guideline for both right and left. The moderates slowly became extinct. Not really, though. They just dropped out and became independent and unaffiliated, causing the process of polarization to gather momentum. Today Bachmann excites the purists in her party -- those ideologically opposed to government and taxation and fearful of the East Coast establishment of Wall Street, Harvard Law School and Washington lobbyists. Pawlenty could not compete with Bachmann for the hearts and minds of the purists. She was emotionally in sync with their fears and resentments, and he was not. Purity is a form of fundamentalism, and fundamentalism is a response to fear and uncertainty. And we do live in uncertain times: The American dream is in question for our children and grandchildren as it has never been before. We pulled out of the Great Depression to defeat first the Fascists and the Japanese militarists and then the Communists. We rose to unprecedented economic success and power. But pulling out of today's great contraction with the debt load we carry (and which will grow as the baby boomers age) points to a different story line. We will be a struggling economy for a long time to come. The rise of China, India, Brazil, Mexico and other developing nations will absorb jobs in those economies, which will offer us serious competition. I have never seen where good things come from surrendering to our fears and anxieties. Fundamentalism in any faith should be taken as a red flag that more confident leadership is needed, leadership that can take account of fear but not become its slave. Can President Barack Obama give us a better quality of leadership than that offered by a fundamentalism of states' rights and social Darwinism? He threw fat into the fire with last week's speech before Congress on jobs. His speech was, I think, the opening of the 2012 presidential campaign -- after Labor Day, but a year early. It will be up to the American people to choose between the alternative visions of America offered by the president and the Republicans. The campaign will be at that level -- a choice of fundamentals. The people are polarized, so no elected official has a mandate to lead vigorously. All is partisan and petty, scheming for immediate or superficial advantage. If the people remain polarized, then the future of the country will be dysfunctional and sad. If they adopt by some majority a fundamentalism, the country's future will not be much better. The only real way forward is to embrace complexity and compromise, building a better future by common sense one step at a time. Over the weekend I was reading Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France." Today known as a conservative mostly due to this essay, in his day Burke was a great Whig liberal -- contending with abuses of power, open to compromise with Britain's North American colonies, and dead set on punishment of Warren Hastings for his rough handling of colonial subjects in India. Burke rejected the principles advocated by the French revolutionaries as a wrong-headed fundamentalism. He saw clearly that rigid abstract ideas imposed on people would lead to unhappiness and abuse of power. Free government, he argued in 1789, is a compromise between power and freedom -- enough freedom to restrain power but enough power to restrain freedom. There is no litmus test or bright line of demarcation that is easy to follow to know what to do. There is but trial and error and virtue to see us through to the future. Burke ended his condemnation of the French Revolution with this affirmation as to his purposes in politics: "When the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, [he] is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise." Here, Burke has given us our mission: Preserve the equipoise of the United States of America with whatever small weight of reason that each of us retains in these spiritually dark times. Published: Fri, Sep 16, 2011