- But the Paul Ryans (and Mitch McConnells) have/had a special responsibility
Nathanael Blake writing at Townhall has a fundamentally sound article recommended in its entirety, excerpt here:
You Need To Do A Lot More Than Voting To Be A Good Citizen
. . . For most people the effort required to understand politics and policy is disproportionate to their ability to influence them. Unless one enjoys that sort of thing, it is rational to ignore politics, or to align with a party that seems to generally fit one’s views, even if one does not understand all the issues. And people who mostly care about only a few issues may align with interest groups, and follow their lead in supporting a party.
Even political junkies do this. The passionate and informed health-care policy wonk may ignore nuclear power plant regulations, or trade policy in Southeast Asia, or legal debates over Chevron deference. These are important issues, but we are finite beings, and not even a devoted genius could hope to master all of public policy. And many of those who do follow politics are paying attention only for daily hits of rage.
We are all rationally ignorant of many things, even those relating to our interests and passions. But it is one thing for a guitar player to not understand the physics of circuit design in a tube amplifier; it is another for a free citizen to not know the basics of the government he or she is part of. The former is rational ignorance, the latter is abdication. The difference is self-rule. In the United States, the people are the sovereign. We are not meant to simply be servants and consumers of government, but its masters.
Thus, the problem of public ignorance is not just that of politicians exploiting it—for instance, to strip away constitutional rights. It also raises the question of who we are. There is something servile about free men and women declining to participate in governing themselves. While we cannot learn all the details of policy in every domain, we can at least understand the basics, and basis, of our government. To abandon this is not like neglecting to keep up foreign language skills, or some other worthy but peripheral endeavor. Rather, it is to abandon our identity as free, self-governing citizens, and instead to become subjects.
. . . Voting cannot save us. Indeed, by itself, voting is only the most marginal form of civic participation. In a debased culture, votes hardly matter, for politics will follow the culture. If we improve the culture, the politics may follow.
However, there are no certainties in a free society. Attempts at renewal may fail, and such failure may be made more likely by the potential for rational ignorance to produce a tragedy of the commons. In a corrupt, selfish society, it may seem rational for responsible people to embrace a quietist ignorance of politics, but this only exacerbates the political problem.
. . . Those who retreat into private life will find that, although they have no interest in politics, politics is interested in them. The price of freedom and self-government is the responsibility of self-government.
In reflecting on the first article about each citizens responsibility, which we heartily endorse, we also recognize that the Paul Ryan’s have/had a special responsibility, that is if they ever believed their own rhetoric. That responsibility does not require definitive success, but to try, to be defeated (they can’t eat you), to (forgive such crazy talk) risk reelection in a way that lays groundwork for good and isolates or undermines that which needs to be opposed, to recognize degenerative compromises, the ratcheting up of big government . . .to not facilitate what you say you oppose. In that regard, this article also at Townhall is compelling:
Not Only Did Paul Ryan Not Fix Entitlements, He Made Them Worse
Concluding summation by the author of the above article after exposing the rhetoric – reality divide:
Primum non nocere—first, do no harm. Ryan may not have had the power to compel Republicans to reform entitlements, but he did have the power—if he had had the courage—to prevent his own party from making the problem any worse. He did not.
In life, family first, indeed, but military and other families succeed under more trying conditions than congressional service presents, so let us not hear of that Ryan retirement BS.
It is critical to change the underpinnings of cultural/ structural decay, especially academia (those who teach the children rule the world), to seize every day to work to restore and abide by limitations on government, and then go home. Instead he/they allowed “the system” to control, and maybe he/they favor much of it after all, with a few demurrals. We often see about the sincerity of such as them, in their retirement gigs.
R Mall
