The morality of politics

Though any day is a good time for this kind of socio-political reflection and analysis, today is timely because of the focus on the first Democratic presidential debate that’s already here. We need to get past the cult of personality in politics because of the stakes in electing the government. And listen to what the candidates are saying beyond the soundbites and campaign rhetoric. The best thing would be for everyone to state what they believe, clearly, and make their case for why theirs is a better way.

One of the things that makes this op-ed column so compelling is that Colleen Carroll Campbell tells the narrative of how she came up through one political worldview and saw issues and activism through that lens, but then saw the political agenda carried through to its inherent consequences. And she made logical conclusions through the process.  

Mine begins with my father, a die-hard Democrat whose partisan loyalties once ran nearly as deep as his Catholic faith. Growing up in north St. Louis, Dad learned that liberals care about the little guy: working-class immigrants like my Irish-born grandfather, the hobos my grandmother fed from her porch during the Depression and the mentally handicapped whose concerns would become the focus of my father’s career in the charitable sector.

That career led my father to move my mother, brother and me to more than half a dozen states during my childhood. I experienced America’s red-and-blue-state divide firsthand, and everywhere we lived, Dad and I delighted in critiquing local op-ed pages, waging dinner-table debates and holding election night TV vigils. Dad taught me that political contests have a moral character because they have moral consequences and that we can judge our democracy by how well it defends the vulnerable and voiceless.

Those lessons were reinforced during my years at Marquette University, where I spent more than a few week- nights clearing tables at soup kitchens and interviewing homeless men for the alternative campus newspaper. An interest in social reform led me to journalism and the Post-Dispatch, where I reported on the city schools before joining the editorial page to tackle social justice issues…I wrote editorials demanding more government spending and programs to address the problems I saw. But I was beginning to have my doubts.

If more bureaucracy were the answer, why had a welfare system designed to provide temporary assistance trapped generations in dependency? I had seen the statistics showing the correlation between social ills and the breakdown of marriage and family. If marriage had no public purpose and the abolition of sexual mores led only to women’s liberation, why were we constantly enacting new laws to make men honor obligations — from child support to sexual propriety — once enforced largely by social pressure? Had our quest for absolute freedom from communal standards and conventional morality made us less free by subjecting us to the dictates of the nanny state and political correctness police?

I began to follow debates I once had ignored about the value of human life, the tenor of popular culture, the meaning of marriage and the public role of religion. I became convinced that tradition is an indispensable guide in our pursuit of liberty and happiness and that lasting social change demands solutions that are spiritual and moral, as well as material.

I still believe that politics is a moral enterprise and that defense of the weak is its loftiest aim. But my ideas about how to achieve that aim have changed. I no longer consider compassion and conservatism antonyms or calls to personal responsibility and solidarity with the poor incompatible. And I believe more than ever in the power of personal transformation to redeem families, communities, nations — even politicians.

This is the kind of intellectual honesty we need in politics, and the social arena. It comes down to personal responsibility.

And kudos to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for bringing Colleen Carroll Campbell on board. Wise move.