The press likes to bring to light all the fights and contentious debates and screaming matches between people running for office and supporters and questioners. We are told that folks running for office will always lie to us in the primary season as they approach elections, and tell us untruths and then they will go back to the center when elected, and once elected we trust them to be truthful. That is form of insanity that becomes public policy – we will lie to maintain our base and then when elected we will work for everyone, wink wink nod nod. Anyway as I watch some of these debates I am reminded of a comment by G.K. Chesterton from way back in the day as he watched the eastern elites try and woo the unwashed out in the midwest. Some don’t even bother to try and woo the fly over country folk anymore. They call them folks who cling to their guns and their Bibles and that makes them deplorable. Anyway here is Chesterton –
The prigs who potter about the great plains are pygmies dancing round a sleeping giant. That which sleeps, so far as they are concerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerance in the soul of America. At present the masses in the Middle West are indifferent to such fancies or faintly attracted by them, as fashions of culture from the great cities. But any day it may not be so; some lunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buried religion; and then he will see something. He will find himself running like a man who has set the prairie on fire. He will see something which the politicians fan in its sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionaries have cursed with the name of the mob, but which in any case has had under its feet the crowns of many kings. It was said that the voice of the people is the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that it can be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics of their arrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in the last words that Job heard out of the whirlwind; and a voice they never knew shall tell them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over all the children of pride.
