But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only "message" which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man's freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est--"that a beginning be made, man was created" said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
As someone who occasionally claims the label 'political scientist,' I long ago learned to be cynical about politics--and not merely cynical, but to see cynicism as the correct outcome of political observation. Voting is a technically futile exercise; the most important policies are made by bureaucrats whose power will never be noticed or limited; politicians only care about being re-elected, but are happy to sell you whatever snake oil necessary to do so (hence our good friends, Hope and Change); and one might worry about the politicians, but one should more more about the citizens and voters, most of whom couldn't explain key political distinctions to save their lives. Michigan taught me well that way.
As a conservative, this is a bad night: I have severely curtailed my tv and internet wanderings, but I know nothing good will come out of this election. My only real hope is that unified government produces the kind of massive policy breakthroughs it did in the 1992-1994 period: that is to say, none at all (or, more correctly, only those that are acceptable to the moderate end of my politics). However, I have been well aware this would be the outcome for some time, and have more than emotionally disconnected myself from the result. I also, for the record, think my fellow conservatives who believe this to be good for the Republican Party are, to be polite, not of sound mind. Liberals did not improve their electoral fortunes by going off and hammering out a New Unified Theory of Liberalism: they found better candidates and won elections. Not surprisingly, winning some elections begat the expectation of winning more: unity comes in politics with the desire to be on the bandwagon, not because the principles of all parties involved have finally been hashed out.
As an academic, my default modes are to irony and sarcasm, both marks of world-weary experience: I sometimes have difficulty taking the earnest person seriously--though I should note that my disagreement with the Postmodern Conservative movement comes in part from a dislike of how in love they are with their own irony or affectation. I sometimes wonder if there's anything at the core of it, or whether it's the political equivalent of a ball of cotton candy.
It happens that a friend of mine was coordinating a kids vote at one of the local precincts. Since I like this friend, I agreed to help out, and got to direct several kids on the voting process (while their sometimes very proud parents looked on). We were the first thing people saw when they came in, so I had to direct most of the people who came in to the actual polling station in the school's gym. One man in particular stood out: he came towards my table, and I pointed him to the gym. He got to the door, looked in, then came back to me looking anxious. "This is my first time voting," he told me. "What am I supposed to do?" I said he should go to the first table inside the gym and they would help him with everything; reassured, he went off to vote.
He was not, if I had to guess, very much older than me. He'd never voted before, and it was clear that he took it seriously, because he wanted to do it well. I've seen this before, and experienced it myself, in the way certain people approach a new church for the first time: where do I go? What do I do? What will they expect of me? And he wondered, no doubt, because it seemed like everyone else already knew: I was certainly blasé when I voted a few weeks ago--just another routine activity in a day full of them. Now all the facts I know are still true: his vote won't matter any more than mine does (we probably cancelled each other out), and policies will be adopted and laws passed regardless of whether they help either of us. If I were a responsible social scientist, I should have informed him of these things, the better to let the scales fall from his eyes.
I have always found the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism to be odd: Arendt has finished discussing totalitarianism as a form of government, and says, now that it has come into the world, it is and will remain always a threat. We can know something of the conditions under which a good form of government will lapse into a bad, and must be on the watch for that. But she ends, in her way, by prophesying the end of totalitarianism: no system of control can ever be total: man is born free, and can never be permanently chained: men begin things, and in that beginning is at least part of what is (or can be) good about them. And so: to make a beginning is good. What does it mean for that man who voted for the first time? I don't know, but I can hope it will mean a number of things. That beginning is good (good for him, good for the people in his community) whether my theories of democracy say so or not, and I think that's very important for the cynical observer of politics to remember.
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