Citizen Tom

We now have the candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign rooted in Pennsylvania. Amazingly, the Democrats are talking about exactly what the Republican Party’s rank and file have always thought what the Democrats are about, bitterness.

What are the candidates saying? Here is a video of Hilliary Clinton on the campaign trail followed by Barack Obama’s response. Of course, John McCain is getting in his licks too. Here is what he is sending the party faithful.

How are folks responding? As Below the Beltway has discovered (here), the polls in Pennsylvania do not look good for Obama. Calling the electorate bitter does not play well. Clinton bloggers are feigning outrage (here, for example). And some pro-Obama voters feel woefully insulted (here, for example).

Nonetheless, Obama’s condescension towards the “bitter” folk is hardly unusual. This is merely big government unmasked. Don’t each of us have a tendency to approach the rest of humanity with a certain arrogance? Is it not inevitable that our arrogance will affect our approach to government? The more condescending we are towards the intelligence and motives others, the more likely we are to assume that we can run their lives better than they can themselves.

Consider what such condescension entails. Instead of listening carefully to what people say and respecting their arguments, we “empathize.” We put them on the couch and feel their pain. Without listening, we tell them the cause of their sorrows and how all their problems can be fixed.

What we forget is that many of those other people in the rest of humanity look upon us in the same way. Too often mirroring our own behavior, they think they can run our life better than we are running it. So it is that instead of leaving each other in peace, we form alliances. We unite into cliques, tribes, factions, and nations of the knowing chosen, and we strive to dominate each other.

When the Founders wrote our Constitution, it is just this sort of silliness that they sought to prevent. The colonists had suffered enough from the condescension of royalty. The colonists wanted to run their own lives. They understood that to prevent tyranny, even the tyranny of good intentions, we must each be allowed to find our own way. So the colonists threw the British royalty out, and they sought to devise a government with strictly limited powers.

Here is a good book about the subject that I am in the process of reading now, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights by Richard Labunski. Most of us are familiar with the history of Constitutional Convention, how a group of honorable men came together in Philadelphia and wrote what was then a very strange document designed to governed a continent. But that was hardly the end of the story. As Labunski reveals, the adoption of our Constitution was touch and go. Its ratification only barely succeeded. Then the real struggle began. They had to make it work, and that battle continues today.

Empathy is not enough. To live in peace, we have to respect each other, and we have to respect each other’s rights.