There are basically four kinds of politicians.
First, there are the professional, practical politicians who are men without principles and who are basically interested in staying in office. There are many such men today. They respond basically to pressure and to money. Principles do not move them: self-interest does. The less godly law and order there is in an age, the more these practical politicians respond like weathervanes to pressure. They are the creatures of the establishment, of the mob, and of any and every force that blows their way: they are weathervanes.
Second, there are the idealists in politics, and I here use the word idea and idealist in its original meaning. An idealist is a man who has an idea, ideal, pattern, or goal to which he tries to push humanity. The ancient Greeks, especially Plato, were great idealists, and their legends also contain the best satire on idealism in the myth of the robber Procrustes, who either stretched his victims to fit his standard bed, or else amputated them if they were too long. This is the technique of the idealist, whether he be Marxist, Fabian, or democratic; the idealist will sacrifice man and God to achieve his ideal communist, socialist, or democratic order. The idealist, whether Plato, Rousseau, Marx, or a contemporary liberal, believes that it is the environment which is evil and man who is good. Since man is good, who is better and more trustworthy than the elite man, namely, himself, the idealist? The idealist is thus a moral monster who confuses himself with God and seeks to destroy the world in order to remake it in terms of his ideal. Since he sees no evil in himself, he is intensely dangerous. And the first step towards remaking the world is for him the destruction of God’s world, which means a dedication to revolution. Our politics today is saturated with idealism.
Third, some men enter politics in anger at the knaves who predominate in it, at the weathervanes and at the Procrustean idealists. These men lack faith; they are governed by nostalgia for the past, or love of the past, not by a systematic body of principles, by a religious philosophy and faith, which guides their whole being. The longer they remain in politics, the more they become cynics. They begin with a love of country and a love of their follow citizens; they end with a contempt for their stupid fellow men. The cynic thinks of man as a pig and a dog, a fool to be conned. The next step, which he often takes unconsciously, is to become himself the con man who takes the greedy fools for everything they have. The purpose of the cynic in politics becomes then, power, naked power, although in the early stages he does not always recognize it. Abe Ruef, the most notorious politician in California history, began as an idealist bent on reforming society and ended as a cynic who organized his powerful “System” to control the state. Napoleon too began as an idealist, an earnest believer in the revolution, but he changed his mind during the Egyptian campaign. He decided that men were little better than dogs, governed basically by lust, hunger, and greed, and he began to move in terms of exploiting that situation. The cynic in politics is thus a dangerous man also, and we have them with us.
Fourth, the Christian in politics is governed not by his dreams or by man’s sin, but by God’s law. His perspective is not man but God. He moves in terms of objective law, in terms of fundamental justice. His purpose is to place himself, man, and society under God, and under godly law and order. Because he believes in the sovereignty of God, he refuses to accept the sovereignty of either man or the state. He believes in limited powers and limited liberties for both man and the state, a principle early established in America by the Rev. John Cotton and basic to American constitutionalism. This then is the Christian in politics, a rare man these days. In the churches, we have similar men, and the Christian is almost as rare as in politics. Some years ago I heard a churchman, holding now one of the highest positions in a major branch of the church, describe in my presence the ideal symbol of a true church: a weathervane! (There was one on top of the very large church where he was speaking.) The weathervane, he said, meant sensitivity, and a church should be sensitive to the people and to “revolutionary ferment.” I asked him later if the weathervane did not suggest to him a symbol of spinelessness and no personal standards, no caliber of resistance to evil. He answered that he had never thought of it in that way. But to return to love. Modern doctrines of love are simply doctrines of anarchism, of total receptivity to evil. Their purpose is to break down the differentiation between good and evil and to produce lawlessness. Modern sensitivity training has this function. It is a part of the love religion: it demands total receptivity to the world and a submission to it rather than a resistance to evil in terms of God’s law. Its goal is to teach a love of evil and a hatred of good.
The love religionists and love politicians are also strong advocates of equalitarianism and of equal rights causes. Total equality means that good and evil are on the same level and without differentiation. Evil must then have equal rights with good, and the criminal must have equal rights with the good citizen. This means that the criminal must have the same freedom to rob and kill that you want in order to support your family and worship God. Strict champions of equal rights like the Marquis de Sade (whose works are now being translated and published) demand precisely this, equal rights for the criminal, which means simply that the criminal has a right to rob and kill you, and you have a duty to submit to him, or else you will violate his rights.
The goal is total revolution. The language is love, forgiveness, and sensitivity: its function is subversion and destruction. Solomon said it wisely long ago: “To every thing there is a season...A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,8). We had better know it.
RJ Rushdoony CR 30