Billmon: The Dao of American Politics

An excellent older post, well worth the time to read both parts and covering American political history from the beginning to 2003.--Dictynna

The Dao of American Politics, Part I

This the Dao, the ancient Chinese symbol for the duality of nature's forces -- life and death, darkness and light, male and female.

But it also symbolizes the timeless unity of those same forces -- the yin and the yang -- locked in an endless cycle, each holding within itself the seed of the other, represented by the two smaller circles. The universe in microcosm.

The West has its own version of the Dao, although being Western it's neither as simple nor as elegant. It's called the Dialectic.

That's not a new line of cell phones. It's a metaphysical concept -- first described by Aristotle, applied to the study of history by the German philosopher Hegel, and expropriated by Karl Marx to explain his theory of proletarian revolution.

That last bit of intellectual property theft has given dialectics something of a bad name in bourgeois society -- all the worse for the fact that so many of Marx's Leninist admirers came to rely on it to "prove" the historical inevitability of their various crimes.

But, dirty commies notwithstanding, the concept still has great analytical value. Marx got that much right. Dialectics is a powerful tool for understanding history -- political history in particular.

In fact, the entire history of American politics can be seen as a complex, continuous dialectical process, stretching out over more than two centuries. It's still in progress -- and will go on as long as the Republic does. Maybe even longer than that.

The Dao of American Politics, Part II