Rules of the game

...One demonstration of this fact is the recent attempt on the part of a lot of Republicans to move toward where they perceive the center of the abortion issue to be, once they got a hint that a strictly prolife position might not benefit them...

...I work at the edges of state government, and grew up in a political town...

...It is best as a negative thing, a system that allows so many opinions and interests to carry political weight that no single interest or faction can overpower the others...

...I don't mean at all that these people take it lightly, or think of it as merely amusing, or that they scorn idealism...

...Not only is democracy on the rise now...

...What interests me is that the people who do this work best over the long haul are the people who treat it like a game and this is important love it like a game...

...the Pol Pot regime murdering every non-compliant Cambodian...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey RULES OF THE GAME DEMOCRACY & ITS LIMITS A couple of things came together recently to make me think about the glories and limits of democracy.One of them is obvious, and is on everyone's mind these days: the wonderful and startling movement toward democracy, and away from communism, in almost every part of Eastern Europe...

...The issue may indeed have a value greater than that for a candidate...

...The success of Solidarity in Poland is still another reason for hope (this can be seen as the beginning of everything happening in Eastern Europe now), and the peaceful removal of Marcos in the Philippines is another...

...Democracy as a positive ideology an assumption that mass opinion contains real wisdom, that the majority will be reasonable more often than not is a bad idea...

...This makes a certain amount of sense...

...Our political parties have no solid ideology, but care a lot about their own side winning...

...Even Bulgaria is showing signs of change, and as I write there are massive demonstrations demanding change in Czechoslovakia...

...Correction: A line or two in my last column got dropped somewhere in between my manuscript and print...

...and when they don't count, however much you might wish they did, you'd better not play them...

...Now all of Eastern Europe is moving, peacefully on the whole, toward a degree of freedom none of us thought would happen in our lifetimes, and if it did happen, we felt sure, it would not come like this, like a sudden tidal wave...

...That is the fact that issues, no matter how important (abortion, housing, the homeless, capital punishment, education) are like a politician's personal appearance, glibness, and ability to seem sincere on television counters in a game, pieces to be placed on the board and moved around...

...Someone who understands the limits of democracy can tilt it, moving some good things closer to fruition, and some good causes closer to the center of public attention...

...This means going above and beyond ideology, and, again, understanding the system as a game in the most serious sense of that playful-sounding word...

...One is Gandhi's approach to nonviolent revolution in India, which brought a generally peaceful end to colonial rule...

...There is a cynicism that can come from that sort of exposure, but you have to earn it...

...or the reciprocation is so primary and all-enveloping that we cannot see it...

...It should be remembered that ugly as well as good things have been suppressed in the Soviet Union...

...Our century has seen Turks murdering Armenians...

...The people who don't do it well over the long haul are those whose ideological seriousness (or personal ineptitude) keeps them from understanding the limited process a democracy always is...

...Rumania and Albania (possibly the worst country in the world, where making the sign of the cross is a criminal offense) squat-like monsters in the margins of an old map, isolated and strange, now looking a little archaic...

...some you may be willing to play in a risky fashion...

...This is cynical, when the issue is regarded only as a piece in the game...

...but where we expect democracy to deal well, or even adequately, with the most important questions of meaning and value we expect far too much of it...

...a number of people were there, members of different political parties and varying ideologies, all united in respect and affection for someone who is good at politics...

...In a reasonable society we would worry more about what we are here for than about what we ought to forbid...

...Nazis murdering Jews, gypsies, the retarded, homosexuals, Communists, Slavs...

...However, to expect more of democracy than the prevention of overt tyranny is dangerous...

...We have grown so used to living without tyranny that we do not count that daily fact of life as a positively good thing...

...But perhaps this is because unlike our usual loves, for wives and husbands, friends, and children, this love is not obviously reciprocated...

...It keeps enough of the public satisfied that public interests are being served to keep the people who know how to play the game in power they get to keep playing, which is what matters to them and it keeps one kind of tyranny at bay...

...I have to be careful when I speak of treating democracy like a game...

...I'm not the first person to say this...

...The point for the people who are best at the political game is beating the people they find themselves against...

...Not much more can be expected from the system than this little, but very important, work...

...The people who are best at it, like the best athletes on opposing teams, usually have no real enmity because the system is not about the victory of one idea or point of view over another, but about which team ends up with the most power...

...They last the longest, and make the most significant changes, to the extent that they are good at it...

...Communism, a bad idea, will be replaced by other bad ideas...

...But, granting the fact that self-interested egoists are a definite and apparently permanent part of the system, and granting the existence of a lot of greedy, self-interested people at the center and on the fringes of government, there are also a surprising number of dedicated and even idealistic politicians and staff people, who (whether liberal or conservative) believe not only in the lightness of their ideology, but genuinely want to do good work for the public...

...That may sound cynical but, as the demonstrations in freedom's favor show, it is no small thing...

...There are, of course, many uncertainties ahead, and there will probably be truly frightening times...

...One important example is the situation of Ukrainian Catholics, who are now more vocal in their demand for religious autonomy, something opposed by the Orthodox church, with which the Ukrainian Catholic church was forcibly united in 1946...

...but however he or she may feel, the candidate must remember how limited its use is...

...Stalin murdering resisting peasants and anyone else who got in his way...

...The way in which the abortion issue has degenerated into a discussion of what should or should not be legal is a good example of this...

...But the other thing that made me think about democracy was a celebration for a friend who was moving from one very political job to another...

...This was a shameful episode in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, and it does little good to point out that groups of Orthodox Christians had been forcibly united with Catholicism in the past, except to remind us all how badly the alleged followers of Jesus can behave when they see their own advantage...

...Another is the relative success of the civil rights movement in America relative, because the issues of race and class in America are far from having been solved...

...But it is particularly important for religious people to look beyond a merely legal or political form of discourse (which is always, at bottom, about coercion) when such profound questions of human value come before us...

...They may find themselves regarding an issue such as abortion or unemployment, for example, primarily as a pawn that can be played against the opponent's opposite number...

...There are some moments in the bloody history of the twentieth century that give us reason for hope...

...You may or may not care about most of them...

...If the horrors of so many mass murders have made this century a low point in human history, these alternative movements tell another human truth, a profoundly encouraging one...

...Like all systems, our form of government aims at stasis, and has to be moved from the outside, either by grounds wells of public opinion or by the more dramatic expressions of unrest and opposition that worry people who want to remain in power...

...but ever since Plato's Gorgias we have been warned that oversimplification is a danger inherent in democracy, and the tyranny of a stupid majority is a constant danger...

...but those pieces have a limited use, and not to understand when not to play them is to lose the game...

...This was the original form: "The tragedy is that our response, which is something different from our feelings about God or our relationship to God, is so cold and half-hearted...

...In chess you might have a particular affection for the knight or the bishop...

...It is too easy to say of politicians that they are all crooks, though some of them certainly are...

...It can lead us to expect of law and politics what we once expected of culture and religion...

...They have been accused of making politicians too concerned with the most simple and superficial formulations of public opinion...

...Nevertheless, this movement is wonderful...

...But they realize something idealists and ideologues, right and left, frequently do not understand...

...So much of this drive for freedom has been hailed as a sign of democracy's strength and deep appeal, and so it is...

...Good liberals and conservatives know when to quit, when to shift the language of an argument if it won't play to the masses...

...This fact is what makes polls important, as terrible as they may be...

...so is a renewed anti-Semitism, in a few strange Soviet groups, as well as nationalism in its narrowest form, and old ethnic and religious conflicts...

...But a little more can be derived from the system, if not expected from it...

...But you'd better know their real worth...

...The fact that we have no common language with which we can speak at this level, in a pluralistic society, is a problem, one with no simple solution...

...The people of Eastern Europe are right to expect freedom and its best governmental form, democracy, as a human right...