I’m read­ing Aristotle’s “The Politics” right now for a class on Democratic Theory. In Book 3, Chapter 4 he writes some­thing that I found to be quite applic­a­ble to cur­rent American pol­i­tics and specif­i­cally to the Democratic reac­tion to Barack Obama’s vic­tory in the elec­tions. In this chap­ter Aristotle writes that:

Hence this too has been rightly said–that it is not pos­si­ble to rule well with­out hav­ing been ruled. Virtue in [each of these] cases is dif­fer­ent, but the good cit­i­zen should know and have the capac­ity both to be ruled and to rule, and this very thing is the virtue of a citizen–knowledge of rule over free per­sons from both [points of view].

This spoke to me in real­tion to the esta­tic reac­tion among Democrats to Obama’s elec­tion. Suddenly a mass of peo­ple has decided that they need to be involved in pol­i­tics, com­mu­nity ser­vice, and day to day polit­i­cal news. Certainly part of this is due to the ever-worsening eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion, but it seems unde­ni­able that part of it is also a result of Democrats now being the “rulers” to use Aristotle’s lan­guage. What I won­der is where was all of this polit­i­cal activism dur­ing the past 8 years? There were cer­tainly just as impor­tant of deci­sions being made dur­ing this time, but instead of being involved in the process the mass of Democrats seemed to be largely apa­thetic to the daily actions of George Bush.

To me a dis­turb­ing num­ber of Democrats, per­haps epit­o­mized by some of those cur­rently serv­ing in Congress, are happy to extol the virtues of the American polit­i­cal sys­tem when they con­trol the pres­i­dency and both houses of Congress, but once the other party gains con­trol they revert right back to decry­ing how dis­as­trous that party is for America and how bro­ken the sys­tem is. This kind of hypocrisy just doesn’t sit well with me and is one of the main rea­sons why I largely abstained from vot­ing for can­di­dates in this past elec­tion: they’re all equally hyp­o­crit­i­cal and despicable.