Two quotations from Proust that speak to our current political impasse...
On why Republicans cannot stomach anything supported by President Obama and will not find the votes even to raise the debt ceiling -- precisely because he is asking them to:
"...thus it is that egoists have always the last word; having posited at the start that their resolution is unshakable, the more susceptible the feeling to which one appeals in them to make them abandon their resolution, the more reprehensible they find, not themselves who resist that appeal, but those who put them under the necessity of resisting it, so that their own harshness may be carried to the utmost degree of cruelty without having any effect in their eyes but to aggravate the culpability of the person who is so indelicate as to be hurt, to be in the right, and to cause them thus treacherously the pain of acting against their natural instinct of pity" (GW, 380).
And on why we are all so dunder-headed, Fox viewers and MSNBC viewers alike:
"[The proprietor of the restaurant on the island] was, indeed, in the habit of always comparing what he heard or read with an already familiar canon, and felt his admiration quicken if he could detect no difference. This state of mind is by no means to be ignored, for, applied to political conversations, to the reading of newspapers, it forms public opinion and thereby makes possible the greatest events in history... Historians, if they have not been wrong to abandon the practice of attributing the actions of peoples to the will of kings, ought to substitute for the latter the psychology of the individual, the inferior individual at that" (GW, 556).
Yet the democratic process somehow gets it right in the end, doesn't it? We can hope.
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