Stump speech: The Ambiguous Party

Fourth-party candidate Duard Farquhar:

“The matter is not capitalism versus socialism. It's reasonable sharing versus pathological selfishness.* I don’t believe that Conservative philosophy is wrong or that Liberal philosophy is wrong. Or right. A person will feel, time to time, that he is his individual self, in his family, in private ownership of his life: ‘Get your feet off my lawn and your hand out of my wallet.’ At other times, he’ll feel that he is an obligated and self-obligating member of society. If she is clear-sighted enough to know that both natures are true, she will not support a hidebound Republican or a nationalize-the-doctors liberal or socialist. She’ll vote ambivalently for the ambiguous. If he is not so clever, thinking ‘I am a rock, I am an island!’; if he believes we all have some natural yet compulsory bond to every stranger, he will be a dogmatist, an ideologue.

“Here we leave the rancid air of politics and descend into the muck of psychology. Political parties are not the home of validated truth. They are homogeneous nurturers, emotion clubs, projection vehicles people join to feel justified at their psychic depth. In this way we are children. I am a loyal zealot for the OSU football team because . . . I live in central Ohio. He is nostalgic about his prison days because he could be a little boy who acted like a tough man and got respected for it. You are a Democrat because some recondite need is met when you want everyone to be in patchwork harmony, or to be forced to help the unprosperous. You are a Republican because of a need, in your adolescent years, to be above others, or because the notion of individual liberty is for you a Spartacus feeling, a weapon of self-assertion or of alienation from those who hurt you.

“Can you quit the club, the false nurturance, and just be a person? Can you set down your armor, your attitudes, and consider yourself? If people could do that, this would be a kinder and gentler country.”

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* The two descriptions are not, of course, diametrical opposites. But this is a political speech, not a statement of logic. Socialism, to old-school individuals like me, is a philosophy of Big Brother control over people’s lives, and therefore existential and psychological slavery, notwithstanding the current force in our society trying to paint it roseate. Capitalism, at its extreme, would mean the survival of the fittest, intolerable in a society, even though its core precept – I own my own life – is correct and necessary.