Confessions of a Hired Gun
Place no trust in princes:
I ignored—or forgot—one of the most important lessons my professors tried to teach me in college: politics and law are the products of culture. You will never repair or rebuild the latter by focusing your efforts on the former two.
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And it really is a machine. However gifted a man may be in the “art of politics,” generally he won’t move above inconsequential offices without the backing of a machine.
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The machine moves money, public opinion, votes, and jobs where they need to go in order to win elections and advance legislative agendas.
It does these things through a complicated network of candidates, donors, fundraisers, lawyers, savvy financiers, political and public relations consultants, political action committees, private companies, public office holders, non-profits, think tanks, party organizations, and more. The legal lines preventing some of these groups from coordinating are crossed regularly or bypassed in such a way that violates the spirit of the law.
P.J. O’Rourke nailed it when he said that lawyers writing laws is like pharmaceutical companies inventing diseases.
There are ways around most laws regulating political activity. Generally, money in politics is akin to water working its way downhill: one way or the other, it gets where it needs to go.
The machine’s gears reach into government, for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: that’s where the real money is.
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Leviathan’s tentacles—benign as many of them might seem—reach everywhere, which is why the more sophisticated politicos have learned how to work the machine’s levers the way a master pipe organist utilizes keys, pedals, and knobs.
I cut my teeth working for the part of the machine that influences public opinion and gives lobbyists some of the leverage they need to steer the course of events in capitol buildings. We were very good at keeping certain issues and talking points alive in the press, using hard-won credibility to influence newspaper editorials and prime-time news shows, and making it as difficult as possible for reporters to ignore certain aspects of policy debates.
The hype around the purported demise of traditional media reminds me of Michael Corleone’s quip about Hyman Roth—he’s been dying of the same heart attack for 20 years. Most Americans still rely on newspapers, television, and radio for their information. Influence all of that and you’ll influence them. We were good at it.
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I began to see contemporary American politics for what it is: a binary language of false choices.
To be relevant, you must accept the warped definitions of those choices as determined by the ruling elites and professional commentariat.
In the system, you’re either a liberal or conservative, a Democrat or a Republican, a socialist or a free-marketer. If you don’t believe in corporations having their way under all circumstances, then you’re a Marxist. If you speak up for conservation you’re a radical anti-human environmentalist. The list goes on, ad nauseam.
Read the whole thing: http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/04/confessions-hired-gun-contemporary-american-politics.html
hat tip to Mark Shea: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/05/j-p-thomas-is-another-reason.html
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
