Introduction

Putting aside partisanship, what would we like our politics to be? This is a question that I've been pondering the past couple of years, and I think taking a moment to consider its answer may produce some insight as to how we might want to think about and interact with current events and other citizens.

Albert Einstein is reported to have remarked that "politics is more difficult than physics."¹ He was suggesting that making decisions through argument and compromise is harder than understanding the universe. Although a light-hearted comment, there seems to be some truth in it. But before we can ask why politics is hard, we should ask what politics even is, and why it deserves our attention in the first place.

Aristotle observed that "man is by nature a political animal."² Politics is how we figure out how to live together given that we don't all agree on what that should look like. It is not merely the cost of living among one another but the very means by which we make a shared life possible.

So, what do we want our politics to be?

Where we are today

Democracy is not a single, unchanging framework. Democracies vary widely in their structures, presidential or parliamentary, two-party or multi-party, federal or unitary, and citizens disagree about which choices are best. But beneath these structural differences, democracies share a set of core claims: that political power derives from the people, that representatives are accountable to those they represent, that every citizen has a voice. The gap worth examining is not between America's structure and some idealized alternative, but between the claims our system makes about itself and what it actually delivers.

Footnotes

1. Attributed to Einstein. See https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137397508_8 for provenance. ↩

2. Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 2. ↩