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For decades many voters have felt that no matter how they
vote things hardly change.
Many feel that big changes are needed, and they only
want to support aggressive voices who promise drastic improvement.
Moreover,
they want those who have caused the current problems to feel punished--so voters
gravitate toward hard-talking candidates.
This isn't likely to change any time soon.
Many voters are
deeply frustrated and genuinely angry with numerous government policies that
hurt the economy, and while they don't really want violence they don't feel
understood or supported by moderate words, restrained plans, or relaxed
rhetoric.
They want angry words, their candidates to win, and those they blame
for all our problems to lose and lose painfully.
Many voters in both parties
literally want the losers from the other party to feel humiliated.
Few would
say this directly, and the educated class looks down on those who say such
things openly, but this is the way the majority votes.
Madison foresaw such challenges when he called elections
"peaceful revolutions"--not actually violent, but passionate and extreme like
all true revolutions.[i]
The founders knew that in elections passions run deep, and they knew that
lasting freedom depends on the wisdom of the people.
Madison wrote in Federalist Paper 1:
"[W]e, upon many
occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong side of questions of the first
magnitude to society. This circumstance...furnish[es] a lesson of moderation to
those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any
controversy."
And even those who are right, Madison continues, aren't
always motivated for the right reasons:
"Ambition, avarice, personal animosity,
party opposition, and many other motives...are apt to operate as well upon those
who support as those who oppose the right side of a question."
Madison says
that in every major national discussion,
"A torrent of angry and malignant
passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposing parties,
we shall be led to conclude that that they will [promote the justness of their
argument and] increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their
declarations and the bitterness of their invectives."
The only lasting solution, Madison says, is for the citizens
to calmly and closely examine the details and apply their "sound and
well-informed judgment."[ii]
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Social Leader Daily by Oliver DeMille
