On the Turning Away

Hadley Arkes wonders whether we have become a different people than the one who came together to form the Constitution.  His evidence:

The historian J.G. Randall complained years ago that Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had gone through Illinois in their famous debates, unsettling the countryside, and instead of focusing on what he regarded as the “real” issues – issues such as the opening of western lands or improving conditions in factories – those two politicians agitated the countryside over that moral issue of slavery. And everyone knew that there were no answers to moral questions.

Mr. Romney, in that second debate, looked into the camera and earnestly said that fixing the economy and lifting the condition of the middle class was “what this election is all about.” But of course he must know – and he has more than intimated that he knows – that the election is about far more than that.

And yet, we hear at every election, with the voice of J.G. Randall, that “the economy” is the overriding the issue. Either the political class has come to believe that the economy drives everything else, or that it is the thing that people care about most of all.

The pundits hold to that view even as many voters persistently show that they care profoundly about other things. But there was once a time when political men seemed able to talk about the questions that ran to the root of things, and find a public that took quite as seriously, as an issue, the terms of principle on which they lived as a people.

And the haunting question is: when did we cease being that people?

I think there are many of those kinds of people left, but the number is unfortunately decreasing.  The arguments and language used by most in the political class are slowly turning more and more away from being the People who came together to make the Constitution and the Union that predated the Constitution.  Instead, we talk about the peripheral issues -- the radii if you will --, and, in the words of Lincoln, we almost never get to that central point from which all those minor thoughts radiate.