I ALSO FIND IT INTRIGUING THAT POLITICAL OPINION IS as fluid as the seasonal fads of designer fashion.  I suspect the fickle aspect is due, in large part, from the fact that we are neither the source or benefactors of popular opinion.  It hasn't any intrinsic or primary value to individuals, as it is not a manifestation of some deep and personal concern, but a side-effect of our association with institutions and the issues they contrive for political expediency.

More and more these days, political opinion is dictated by contrary responses to the opinions and actions of an opposing party. Conservatives would be hard-pressed to explain philosophically or in principled terms, why, in recent decades, they've habitually resented public concern over the environment.  And the pursuit of clean and renewable energy resources. Efforts to wean us from dependence on foreign oil and ultimately from fossil fuels. Improvements to public education. The protection of civil rights of minorities. Regulation of corporate giants. The tracking of firearms distribution. And a woman's reproductive rights. 

It's not that conservatives are unaware that they depend, as everyone else, on the health of the planet and the preservation of species.  Or that they breathe the same air.  Or that there's a finite supply of petroleum resources.  Or that oil reserves and our conspicuous consumption dictate foreign policies that entrench our military interests in Middle-Eastern tensions and conflict and generate anti-American sentiments across the Arab world. Or that an educated citizenry will make well informed choices as an electorate. Or that all citizens deserve protection under the Constitution. Or that unchecked financial institutions can destroy economies. That outsourcing takes millions of jobs from us. That industries pollute rivers, kill neighboring communities, and harm the public when unsupervised. Or that gun controls help law enforcement track weapons used in crimes. Or that limited access to birth control and/or medical procedures results in young women getting unintentionally pregnant by the tens of thousands and can resort in back-alley coat-hanger abortions, throwing babies in dumpsters, even suicide. They're not blind, stupid, or sinisterly evil.  They merely take the anti-position to every cause championed by Democrats, even when such causes should be the undeniable concern of Everyman.  Conservatives, of all people, should understand, ideologically, the importance of ecological conservation, energy conservation, limited involvement in exhaustive international affairs, educational advantages, reverence to Constitutionality, prudent banking practices, law enforcement, and reducing the population explosion. 

But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote over a century and a half ago, political parties – though founded on instincts and having nothing perverse in their origins – are perpetually corrupted by personality.  And, as a result, abandon the deep and natural foundations on which they are erected at the bidding of some leader obeying personal considerations. Thus, they throw themselves into the maintenance and defense of points inconsistent with their system.  Their vice, he said, is that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momentary measure in nowise useful to the commonwealth.

"We might as wisely reprove the east wind or the frost," Emerson said," as political parties whose members, for the most part, can give no account of their position, but stand for the defense of interests in which they find themselves.

"What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic," he asked,"which for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?"

Trickery alright. Conservative pundits have become more adept then ever at harnessing right-wing angst and steering Republican voters in directions that serve their own political ambitions, no matter how self-defeating these positions are to their constituency of dupes. 


I HAVE AN IRRITATING HABIT OF DEFERRING TOO OFTEN TO EMERSON. But he read our national dysfunction so perfectly.  Of the two great parties that share the nation, he said, one has the best cause, and the other the best men.  The artist, philosopher, and poet, he said, will wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating access of the young and poor to sources of wealth and power.  But will rarely accept the persons the so-called popular party propose as representatives of these liberalities. "They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it."

The conservative party, he said, is timid and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, aspires to no real good, brands no crime, proposes no generous policy, does not build, write, nor cherish the arts, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.

"From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation."

Foreign states were alarmed, he said, at the thought of our institutions lapsing into anarchy, that the despotism of public opinion leaves us no anchor.  One observer thinks he has found the safeguard in the sanctity of marriage, he added, while another thinks he has found it in our Calvinism. But Emerson, himself, did not fret over these defects of our democracy.

"It makes no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure resists from within the lungs.  Augment the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two poles, two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and each, by its own activity, develops the other."

Danger only arises, he said, when some find dominion over themselves insufficient, and undertake the direction of others also. Then, they overstep the truth and come into false relations. They may have so much skill or strength that their victims cannot express the sense of wrong.  But it's a lie that hurts both. This undertaking for another is the colossal ugliness in governments of the world, he said, the same in numbers as in a pair, but less obvious, because public support clouds the seriousness of the offense. 

"I see a difference between setting myself down to a self-control, and making others act after my views. But when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what to do, I may be too disturbed by the circumstance to see the absurdity of the command  . . . . Any laws but those which men make for themselves are laughable."

MY OPINIONS REGARDING SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND MORAL particulars seem to preexist long before the occasion rises to access them. They shoot forth instinctively the instant a topic poses itself to my mind for consideration. These opinions, though born fully developed, possess the strength of deeply explored and time-honored conclusions, and I'd be remiss if I said I can account for how I've reached them. I believe them to be intrinsically tethered to some moral and philosophical constitution sustained beneath the surface of my awareness, which I could never articulate no mater how hard I might try.  My opinions rarely change.  And the more detailed information and history and points of view I absorb about a particular issue, the more support it lends to my primary impulse. 

I realize how ass-backward this sounds. Reasonable people must consider every side of an issue and seek all relevant data available before planting roots in a static position.  But this is how I've always found myself to be possessed of an opinion, and I know of no other mode of operation. If they were consistent with a liberal or conservative consensus, I might consider them programmed partisan responses. But they rarely enjoy any correspondence with opinions of others from either persuasion.  And are consistently and universally unpopular. 

While working on a book with a friend and famous author several years ago, I proposed the term "radical common sense" for the sudden insights and unexpected answers that emerge from the subconscious in a heightened state of attention.  She was so excited by the idea, she used it in the subtitle and rewrote the entire book to weave the concept into all twenty chapters as a foundational theme throughout the work.   

I STUMBLED ONTO A PASSAGE FROM THOMAS PAINE'S “AGE OF REASON” that I associate with this phenomenon:

" . . . there are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts; those we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking, and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.  I have always made a rule to treat those voluntary visitors with civility, taking care to examine as well as I was able if they were worth entertaining; and it is from them I have acquired almost all the knowledge I possess."  

After I was introduced to the Transcendentalist essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I came across endless references to some innate capacity of the mind to form thoughts, intuit truths, and access insights with no tangible effort.

From the essay "Intellect" he wrote:

"All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe."

In "Self-Reliance" he wrote:

"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within . . . . Yet he dismisses his thought because it is his. . . . . Great works of art teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we are forced to take our own opinion from another."

In "Social Aims":

"Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.  . . . The way to have large occasional views, as in a political or social crisis, is to have large habitual views. When men consult you, it is not that they wish you to stand tiptoe and pump your brains, but to apply your habitual view, your wisdom, to the present question, forbearing all pedantries, and the very name of argument . . . ."

And "Courage":

"If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because they come only so long as they are used ; or, if your skepticism reaches to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any foreign mind, then be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of consequence to you, namely, your own."

MAYBE THE SHIFTY INSTABILITY OF PUBLIC OPINION is a consequence of the public delegating its cognitive functions, moral conscience, and social responsibility to opinion manufacturers who form theirs for them, rather than relying on the instinctual wisdom within that would never betray their faith. 

This takes something that should be sacred to the individual, and which should find its community through an organic process of public discourse, and renders public opinion a sport o' kings, a prize for which aggressive special interests manipulate the collective consciousness of the country to win.

It's just a thought.