Still Thinking About Indiana's Political Parties

A bit of me floowing up on my And Republican Hoosier's Got On Their Knees For Trump.

Here is what comes from reading more than the headlines. What caused this post was Indy Democrats weather test to establishment (Indy Mirror). Which had these two paragraphs buried down towards the middle of the story.

But some political observers are cautious to draw too many conclusions from the results, given that only about 15.8% of registered voters in Marion County actually voted in the primary. While that was the highest percentage since at least 2010, it’s still a small sampling of the electorate.

“We’re still talking about a small percentage of people that chose to participate,” said Gregory Shufeldt, associate professor of political science at the University of Indianapolis. “That’s with a competitive congressional primary and a lot of money being pumped into races throughout the area.”

 One takeaway would be the disengagement of Indiana voters. Except  this is a primary election wherein party candidates are chosen.

I read it as a lack of party affliation. My opinion may change after November if the percentage does not change.

Indiana politicians and those running the parties can rest content with control of their political duopoly. They can put forward any candidate on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, lose or win, and still keep their jobs. Whatever good that does for the people of Indiana is an open question, in my mind. 

What if we had a truly open primary, what I think is called a jungle primary? Well, those in power of both parties might find their jobs at risk.

I have held onto this piece for too long, and while its relevance might be slim to the preceding, it is not non-existence.

OPINION: Micah Beckwith’s un-Christian, un-conservative crusade (Indiana Daily Student)

Beckwith’s has been the Trumpist response. This means it is, by origin, neither Christian nor particularly conservative, as President Donald Trump far more closely resembles Nero than St. Louis IX the king of France and a reactionary populist than a steward of this country’s traditional institutions. The form of public discourse Trump has innovated is new and beyond the old pale. 

Why, then, have so many self-described conservative Christian politicians throughout the country, especially in Indiana, adopted this way of addressing their opponents? 

Contrast this approach with that of St. Francis de Sales. The 16th-century Catholic bishop and theologian — and patron saint of journalists — reconverted, according to tradition, 72,000 people in a hostile territory. His region of southern France had recently, and enthusiastically, embraced Calvinism amid a time of fierce, and bloody, religious conflict. Yet de Sales won so many people to his cause through small virtues: gentleness, temperance, modesty and humility. 

There is a tradition of Christian thought that would resist the reduction of Christianity’s public relations to gentleness alone, that would insist the faith must sometimes wield muscle, even state power, in addition to meekness. This tradition is found in St. Thomas Aquinas: False beliefs obstruct our enjoyment of the common good, so the state, whose job it is to foster that good, has a valid reason to curb such beliefs. Presumably, Beckwith might place himself in this tradition. 

But the difficulty is that Beckwith’s actual relationship to the tradition seems nonexistent. The belligerence that characterizes Beckwith’s rhetoric is not Thomistic. Nor is it clearly the product of theological reflection over St. Thomas. Instead, it appears to have been absorbed from a post-Trump politics that favors the social media attack, replete with all-caps and bad-faith assumptions, as its foremost method of expressing grievances. Christian vocabulary like “demonic” is thus fitted onto a form that postdates it, is unrelated to it and degrades it. 

De Sales’ practical counsel, written five centuries earlier, serves well as a response to this trend. 

On language, de Sales warned against impolite words. Even without poor intentions, those who hear them may interpret them differently. The problem with Beckwith’s use of the word “demonic” is thus not only that it is uncharitable but that it prevents the conversation Beckwith should want. Rather than persuade, he performs disgust that only confirms, in the minds of band kids, that Christians are exactly what their naysayers have long suspected them of being: intolerant prudes. 

I was thinking today as I walked down to the convenience store that it seems politics have become a team sport. It is the winning that matters. But politics is what is good for the community; what enables people to live better with one another. Therefore, current politics substitutes the rightness of its victory as being good for the whole, and a loss as the destruction of the community. Viciousness replaces persuasion. It is an either/or proposition imposing a totality on human beings rather than a unity. It allows the loudest, most vicious to gain power. Such certainty in one's political views seems to have substituted the theological for partisan social views. This theological view of one's political views stifles the imperfections of human life. Sooner or later, death to the enemy becomes the only political slogan.

I do not know if a jungle primary will undermine the idea of politics as warfare; I have a deep, abiding distrust of simple answers, of one size fits all. I do think it will be a start. Perhaps we can restore reason by requiring crackpots like Beckwith to persuade rather than blather, by making them try to explain themselves rather merely bluster.

 

sch 5/7