Presidential and Political Thoughts

2024 – the election involving candidates that people supposedly don’t want. Yet somehow they both collected enough votes to be their party’s nominees, so someone must have wanted them.

There’s been a debate, an attempted assassination, criminal conviction of one candidate, calls for the other candidate to step aside, the promotion of a plan that seems really focused on efficiency and imposing a set of beliefs on everyone for their own good, and now the party conventions.

In the midst of all of this, I remember what my supervisor from my college internship told me. She was a district manager for a Member of Congress. She told me on day one of my internship – “You’ll quickly discover that it’s a miracle that our system of government works at all.” No truer words have ever been spoken about American government.

I haven’t read Project 2025 but have certainly seen enough about it. Here’s what I know – I think the very foundation of it is flawed. I’m not even referring to the policy ideas. So much of Project 2025 is based on an assumption that government can be made to run efficiently. I’m not sorry to tell the authors of the project that their very foundation is flawed. Even if they succeed in changing all the people in government like they plan on, American government is not designed to be efficient. The founders, who the authors of Project 2025 supposedly revere, didn’t trust government to be efficient because efficient government is oppressive government. Everything about our system of government is inefficient on purpose. The folks who are interested in advancing Project 2025 will face all sorts of obstacles and be frustrated more often than not. And to that, I say great!

When I think about the two old men vying for a second term as President, I’m struck by something that no one is talking about. There’s plenty of talk about candidates being too old to be President. But here’s what I find interesting in all of this – there’s a positive to having two old men running. The notion of us struggling with the idea of having an old person in charge bumps up our notion that the presidency is like a superhero or god-like position. Regardless of who wins this election, what we’ll end up with is a fallible, and aging person who is going to get things wrong, who is going to mess up words and names, who is going to have to rely on others for so many things. We’ll end up with a president that is human, not god-like. Sure, there are people who are going to keep on believing that a candidate is ordained by God or can’t make an error, but that cognitive dissonance only goes so far. And regardless, I’m not even talking about those folks. I’m talking about the average person in the country who isn’t all that attached to it all.

Most presidents are mediocre at best. And that’s ok. I wonder if we’ve had more terrible presidents than really good ones. Somehow the country survived. Maybe because it recognized that our salvation wasn’t in the person in the office of president. I wonder if our American ancestors were content with mediocre presidents. Mediocre is realistic, human, humbling. In a way, it shows that not only is the person who occupies the office normal, but that the country is too – not exceptional.

It’s a miracle that our system of government works at all. If you look at a map of the world prior to WWI, you would see some vast differences – countries that don’t exist any longer, borders that are different, etc. I heard somewhere that 90% of the nations that exist today didn’t exist prior to WWI. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the point is that things change. And that rule applies to the US as well.

Every nation comes and goes at some point. Which is why as a Christian, my faith is not in a nation, or political party, or ideology, or a flag, or a person in elected office. I don’t wish for the nation’s demise by any means – That sounds like it would be destructive in so many ways. It’s to say that this experiment in self-governance is a human made thing, just like all the rest of politics. None of it is divine, and therefore will not last forever. While it lasts, we have a responsibility to support systems that benefit the people living here, that help us to be good stewards of the land, that move us to be good citizens.

America is a miracle in the sense that self-governance hasn’t had a long history (compared to human history). It’s a miracle in the sense that it exported this experiment to others who have also given it a try.

I hope that it lasts longer and that we improve upon it. And I hope that we do that in a realistic fashion – starting with remembering that the person who holds the highest office in the land is still only human and is limited.