In response to an article by a female Republican that she desired a strong, decisive leader for President, and, in particular, one who conforms to the ideals of manhood presented in paperback romance novels (here’s the link, though it’s not really worth reading: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/06/responsible_adults.html):
I always found it ironic that right-wing party members pride themselves on being strong and supporters of strong leaders--without ever seeming to recognize the inherent contradiction in assuming that those who support strong, decisive leaders are themselves strong and decisive, and prove and enhance their strength by supporting such leaders. In reality, the strength of the leader and that of his individual followers is inversely proportionate--Hitler's strength presupposed the weakness of his followers. The same held for Stalin. Order and responsibility are achieved through enforced conformity and the curtailment of civil rights. It is the weak in spirit who desire to submit themselves to strong leaders, whose fear whelms their passion for freedom and for its concomitant burden of personal responsibility. This contemptible praise of strong leaders does not consist with the small government, libertarian ethos once espoused by Republicans.
Praise of strength for its own sake has always been an invitation to tyranny and to the correspondent diminishment of the individual. My first premise: The supreme political value is the freedom and integrity of the individual. The less of this value permitted and encouraged under a given political dispensation, the lower the presumed value of that system. Much as I would like to place upon the head of the Bush significant responsibility for erosions of individual rights, his misguided policies are of only marginal consequence in the long term. The major, seemingly inescapable trend that threatens to erode individual rights into museum pieces is ongoing, radical technological advance which simultaneously increases the individual's power for destruction and the state's power (and perhaps its imperative) to impose control. This technological trend is like the relentless tide washing in; the politicians are like individual waves preceding or following the tide that will change all things.
I might also note that the connection this rather shallow little woman draws between strength of leadership and "adult responsibility" is highly dubious. Responsibility means providing intelligent, analytical, defensible reasons for decisions, preferably before they are actioned. In this sense, strong leaders tend to be less responsible because they can get away with it.
Comparing the Marine's motivation (who volunteered for the Marines in 2004 after graduating from an Ivy League school) to that of Romney, Giuliani, or Thompson is rather unfair to the politicos. To stay on such a high-pressure, high-reward track for decades in our corrupt corporate and political arenas strongly suggests that these three are motivated primarily by supreme power lust--just like Hilary and Obama, or for that matter Bill and Bush I, Tricky Dick, Johnson, Kennedy (though maybe not Reagan, Carter, Eisenhower).
I sometimes wonder whether most of those men who succeed in climbing such long, compromising career ladders are not psychopaths. It seems almost a precondition to undertake such all-consuming work-lives in a profession inherently manipulative at every level and in all directions.
My impression of the article: the whimperings of a witless little herd animal, or a demonstration of why the enfranchisement of women has proven a misfortune for the male of the species and probably even for women themselves--women are psychologically predisposed to submit more readily than men--ergo, upon their enfranchisement (with a delay of only a few years) the federal government morphed into the nanny state, and now, at the first sign of a threat to domestic security, all the women join the weak-spirited men in calling for security to take precedence over freedom. What do women know of freedom? Their sensitivity to fear floods their sense of appreciation for freedom. They therefore relinquish it at a lower threshold of cause.
Have I now sufficiently distanced myself from all normative political persuasions? Good.
Politics is the pursuit of power and nothing else. As a private citizen my power potential is largely determined by the latitude granted me by my civil rights and the limitations imposed upon me by all manner of government intrusions and presumptions. I believe the government should be granted and left to exercise so much power as consists with its relative, not absolute duty to prevent its citizens from inflicting harm upon each other and to guard them against foreign powers. I consider all other activities to be, at least presumptively, beyond the scope of the government's sphere of justifiable action. I call this political philosophy liberalism; it is intended to promote individual liberty and the “greatest possible development of the type man.” N.
