Ethics and Politcs

At the height of the recent turmoil in American life, a former mayor of New York announced that partisan domestic politics needs to be conducted like warfare. In the mayor's view, partisan conflict today is fueled not simply by mundane interests (which are negotiable) but by a deeper, nearly apocalyptic "culture war" where there can only be winners and losers. As one should realize, the mayor's view was not a merely isolated, private opinion but reflected a broader social creed according to which politics is nothing but a struggle for power. What was new in his pronouncement was the radical application of this creed to domestic affairs. In the past, the creed was one of the "truisms" of global or international politics, that is, of the interaction between nation-states whose inhabitants were said to be hostile to each other, thus making warfare nearly inevitable. On this level, one is sufficiently familiar with the opposition between America's friends and her enemies or (more broadly) between the "free world" and the "axis of evil."