G’day. Thanks to all those who’ve emailed ‘welcome back’. It’s good to be back, except I feel like I’ve left a dark room and am still blinking in the light. Writing a book is a lonely thing to do, but luckily two Webdiarists who contributed to the book – Jack Robertson and Antony Loewenstein – put some fun into it.
When I wasn’t writing or worrying about writing I followed the Democratic primary in the US on the web, and was very disappointed when Howard Dean bowed out. His ‘Take back America’ campaign hit the spot with me, and at least his outspokenness on the Iraq war and the takeover of the US government by crony capitalism energised liberal voters and caught on with the other candidates. He’s now planning a transformation of his huge internet support base into a grassrooots activist movement. He said on February 26:
On March 18, I will announce our plans to build a new organization, using our nationwide grassroots network, to continue our work to transform the Democratic Party and to change America.
We are determined to keep this organization as vibrant as it was throughout our campaign.
There are a lot of ways to make change. We are leaving one track, but we are going on another track that will take back America for ordinary people again.
Democracy, Freedom, and Action will be the watchwords of this new effort.
Our new effort will change America by working for the following principles:
* We will promote grassroots democracy and bring new people into politics.
* We will support candidates and office-holders who tell the truth; stand up for what they believe; and oppose the radical agenda of the far right.
* We will fight against the special interests.
* And we will fight for progressive policies like: Health care for all. Investment in children. Equal rights under the law. Fiscal responsibility; and A national security policy that makes America stronger by working with allies and advancing progressive American values.
We want everyone involved in Dean for America to stay involved, stay together, stay with the Democratic Party, and support the Democratic nominee. As I have said before, I strongly urge my supporters not to be tempted by independent or third-party candidates.”Let me tell you how I think the Democratic Party can win in 2004.
This year, our campaign made the case that, in order to defeat George W. Bush, the Democratic Party must stand up strong for its principles, not paper over its differences with the most radical Administration in our lifetime.
In order to win, the Democratic Party must aggressively expose the ways in which George W. Bush’s policies benefit the privileged and the most extreme ideologues.
I will do everything I can to ensure that the 2004 Democratic nominee runs as a true progressive, as a champion of working Americans and their hopes for a better future. Because – I will say it again — that is the way to win in 2004.”
There’s a detailed backroom look at what went wrong in Dean’s campaign at Divide and bicker: the Dean Campaign’s hip, high-tech image hid a nasty civil war, which shows how difficult it is for people to work together in politics.
I love Dean’s aim to attract new people to go into politics, people who see the job as entailing a duty of care to voters, and to their nation. Maybe voters in a few seats in Australia could have a go at this. The trouble is, trustworthy, thoughtful, courageous, ethical and tough people are what you need, yet how many of them would even consider jumping into the snakepit? The only way they might is if enough people were willing and able to work together to back a campaign and give on going personal support to the candidate, down to making dinner and doing the washing! As ‘Divide and bicker’ shows, personal tensions can ruin the best intentioned campaign, so you’d need a couple of great people people to forge a united team.
The website I go to for US election news is daily Kos, which recently linked to an essay by German sociologist Max Weber, delivered in 1918, called Politics as a Vocation. He sets out his criteria for a good politician, and gee they’re tough! Some extracts follow.
What makes a good politician in your view? It’s a timely question in NSW, where we elect our local governments on March 27. 5000 candidates are standing for 142 councils, and the trend is AWAY from big parties to local independents and the Greens. I’d also love some Webdiarist reports on what’s going on in your local election – issues, contests, moods.
You’d think there’d be a huge backlash against the Labor Party, given Carr’s exposure as a terrible Premier since last year’s election. The train system is a mess, as is the hospital and education system, due to years of underinvestment and a focus on managing perception rather than dealing with reality. Carr mentioned nothing about council amalgamations before the election, but the developers knew all about it and donated heaps to Carr’s campaign. After the election he promised no forced amalgamations, them forced them anyway, particularly the Sydney City Council, where Labor wants to take over. I don’t reckon electors will let Carr’s blokes get their hands on the council because they know full well State Labor would do deals aplenty to fill its coffers with developer money and produce results for developer mates.
I reckon Mark Latham would be hoping Labor gets creamed at the local council elections and that voters feel they’ve lodged their protest at Carr’s government and move on. If they don’t, Latham’s caring, sharing rhetoric of cleaning up our democracy and devolving power back to communities will sooner or later run into the reality of the NSW Labor government, and could cost Latham at the federal election. Latham is in the NSW right but not part of the ruling right faction, but will he be game to take them on to prove his credentials to govern Australia?
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Extract from ‘Politics as a Vocation’ by Max Weber
A State is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. ‘Politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state. He who is active in politics strives for power either as a means in serving other aims, ideal or egoistic, or as ‘power for power’s sake,’ that is, in order to enjoy the prestige-feeling that power gives.
Now then, what inner enjoyments can this career offer and what personal conditions are presupposed for one who enters this avenue?
Well, first of all the career of politics grants a feeling of power. The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one’s hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in formally modest positions. But now the question for him is: Through what qualities can I hope to do justice to this power (however narrowly circumscribed it may be in the individual case)? How can he hope to do justice to the responsibility that power imposes upon him? With this we enter the field of ethical questions, for that is where the problem belongs: What kind of a man must one be if he is to be allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history?
One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
This means passion in the sense of matter-of-factness, of passionate devotion to a ’cause,’ to the god or demon who is its overlord. It is not passion in the sense of that inner bearing which my late friend, Georg Simmel, used to designate as ‘sterile excitation,’ and which was peculiar especially to a certain type of Russian intellectual (by no means all of them!). It is an excitation that plays so great a part with our intellectuals in this carnival we decorate with the proud name of ‘revolution’. It is a ‘romanticism of the intellectually interesting,’ running into emptiness devoid of all feeling of objective responsibility.
To be sure, mere passion, however genuinely felt, is not enough. It does not make a politician, unless passion as devotion to a ’cause’ also makes responsibility to this cause the guiding star of action. And for this, a sense of proportion is needed. This is the decisive psychological quality of the politician: his ability to let realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness. Hence his distance to things and men. ‘Lack of distance’ per se is one of the deadly sins of every politician. It is one of those qualities the breeding of which will condemn the progeny of our intellectuals to political incapacity. For the problem is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul?
Politics is made with the head, not with other parts of the body or soul. And yet devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual play but rather genuinely human conduct, can be born and nourished from passion alone. However, that firm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the ‘sterilely excited’ and mere political dilettante, is possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. The ‘strength’ of a political ‘personality’ means, in the first place, the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion.
Therefore, daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity, the deadly enemy of all matter of-fact devotion to a cause, and of all distance, in this case, of distance towards one’s self.
Vanity is a very widespread quality and perhaps nobody is entirely free from it. In academic and scholarly circles, vanity is a sort of occupational disease, but precisely with the scholar, vanity – however disagreeably it may express itself – is relatively harmless; in the sense that as a rule it does not disturb scientific enterprise. With the politician the case is quite different. He works with the striving for power as an unavoidable means. Therefore, ‘power instinct,’ as is usually said, belongs indeed to his normal qualities. The sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal self-intoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of ‘the cause.’ For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and – often but not always identical with it – irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins. This is more truly the case as the demagogue is compelled to count upon ‘effect.’ He therefore is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the ‘impression’ he makes. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power. His irresponsibility, however, suggests that he enjoy power merely for power’s sake without a substantive purpose.
Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere ‘power politician’ may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless. (Among us, too, an ardently promoted cult seeks to glorify him.) In this, the critics of ‘power politics’ are absolutely right. From the sudden inner collapse of typical representatives of this mentality, we can see what inner weakness and impotence hides behind this boastful but entirely empty gesture. It is a product of a shoddy and superficially blase attitude towards the meaning of human conduct; and it has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge of tragedy with which all action, but especially political action, is truly interwoven.
The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. This is fundamental to all history, a point not to be proved in detail here. But because of this fact, the serving of a cause must not be absent if action is to have inner strength. Exactly what the cause, in the service of which the politician strives for power and uses power, looks like is a matter of faith. The politician may serve national, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldly, or religious ends. The politician may be sustained by a strong belief in ‘progress’ – no matter in which sense – or he may coolly reject this kind of belief. He may claim to stand in the service of an ‘idea’ or, rejecting this in principle, he may want to serve external ends of everyday life. However, some kind of faith must always exist. Otherwise, it is absolutely true that the curse of the creature’s worthlessness overshadows even the externally strongest political successes.
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Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth – that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.