Politics and Democracy, The Best and Worst

While substitute teaching at the local high school today I noticed a poster the teacher had put up. “Politicians”, it said, “Root word, ‘Poli’. Root word, ‘tics’”. “Poli means many; tics are blood sucking parasites”. It struck me as funny; I laughed.
Then it got me thinking. So many of us view our elected rulers with the same contempt and dislike that we show our bosses, our clergymen, our spouses, our parents and teachers, and anyone with authority over us. There’s the old non-com snarl, “Don’t call me ‘sir’; I work for a living!”
Some, perhaps many, politicians seem to work to earn our contempt—as do supervisors, clerics, teachers and the like. No doubt. But politicians seem to hold a special place in our pantheon of the loathed. Especially in today’s political world in which half the folk running for office seem to offer as their highest qualification the fact that they are not involved in government, don’t know anyone who is, and are most definitely not governmental material.
A generation of proudly self-proclaimed non-politicians holding political office have taught us to immediately distrust anyone who knows anything about governing. (Michigan, for instance, throws all legislators out after six years. That’s about when they start knowing where the key to the bathroom is located.)
How would we actually like a world without “politicians”? (Don’t be hasty with your answer.) Perhaps we’d like to go back to the founding of this nation. Government in the days of Washington, Jefferson and Madison was a wealthy gentlemen’s affair—peons like you and me had precious little to say and were expected to keep to their place.
It was only when the first real professional “politicians” in human history (Think O.K.-- Old Kinterbrook—Van Buren, from whom we get “Okay” as in “I’m O.K. with him”) became active in the 1820s that ordinary sorts of folk could get involved with their government.
Or would we prefer a system wherein we are ruled by commissars, viziers, Fuhrers and Caudillos—or kings, emperors and nobles? No politicians here! (Court politics, yes—as between Himmler and Goering, Stalin and Trotsky—but no politicians. You want freedom from American style politics? Here’s your model.)
I sometimes suspect that at least a few of the people who curse our system and its “bloodsucking parasites” would almost prefer a system with less democracy. They seem sometimes to have a radical agenda that they would be willing to ram through with no recourse to democratic—and that often means political—process.
Since politics and politicians, as we know them, only exist in democracies, one risks calling democracy itself a blood sucker and a parasite. Many rulers alive today would agree with this. They point to the corruption one finds in democratic politics (as if there were no corruption in other systems of government!).
I’ve always remembered what the character played by Charles Laughton in “Spartacus” (an excellent political film if you took out the parts with Kirk Douglas in them) said. He was the champion of the Plebeian Party in the ancient Roman Republic. He spoke truth.
“Better a little [democratic] corruption AND a little [democratic] freedom."
The other thing those who hate democratic politics fret about is its inefficiency. Remember, the founders of our republic MADE our government inefficient to PROTECT us. Pray God you never live under a truly efficient government!
Churchill said it best, speaking of democracy and its politics. “Democracy is the worst system in the world—except for all the others.” Cuss the politicians all you want—but, as Jack Benny used to say, “Consider the alternative.”