IT BECOMES CLEARER EVERY DAY that it is impossible to separate spiritual issues from politics.
Take, for example, the spectacle of John McCain. He used to be the original "straight-talker", the guy with integrity, who was always willing to reach out across party lines.
How has he fallen to such incredible depths as to hire Steve Schmidt, Karl Rove's protege, as his senior campaign strategist, and to actually welcome the advice of Rove, himself—the guy behind many of the worst lies and manipulations of the Bush administration: the guy who smeared the old, straight-talk McCain when he ran against Bush?
Why has McCain made this deal with the devil, embracing dishonest tactics that used to be beneath him?
The traditional moral view would answer this question with platitudes about power—and the greed for power—corrupting an honorable man, or perhaps it would see it as a sort of weakness: McCain's inability to sustain the moral effort to overcome his lower nature in the midst of the pressures and temptations of a political campaign.
I'm not so sure.
I'm not so sure it's that simple, and I'm not so sure it's that disconnected.
I think this is simply an example, writ large, of the fundamental spiritual transition of our time. John McCain just happens to find himself on the wrong side.
I don't mean wrong morally—"Wrong" with a capital "W"—I mean wrong as in "mistaken", or as in "unwise", and also as in "the wrong side of history".
We are in a period of transition between two ways of viewing the world: the traditional world-view, which might frame McCain's apparent moral decline as I indicated above, and an emerging world-view which is more interested in understanding than blaming.
The traditional view is rooted in a world of kings and dictatorships. The emerging view is suited to a world of democracies.
Neither party—and no individual, including McCain—is completely rooted in either view, but there are definite, and powerful, tendencies in each. At this particular moment in history, the Democratic party is leaning toward the emerging, democratic, view, while the Republican party is clinging to the world-view of emperors and kings.
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Democracies are rooted in personal liberty; empires, in control.
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Democracies are rooted in distributed power; empires, in the power of the wealthy.
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Democracies are rooted in understanding; empires, in manipulation.
McCain has aligned himself with a party which still clings, sometimes openly and sometimes secretly, to the idea of an American Empire, built on a combination of dominant military and economic power.
He's aligned himself with a party that endorses emperor-like powers for the president—a party that would extend government control to marriage and medical decisions, to the most private parts of our lives.
He's aligned himself with a party that endorses tax policies designed to centralize the real power—the power of money—in the hands of the elite few, whom the rest of us will serve.
And he's aligned himself with a party that draws its power from the extreme religious right: from people who have been conditioned by their religion to understand the world through images of kings and kingdoms, who have been raised to give up their personal power to authorities, and to give knee-jerk responses to "moral issues" that are neither clearly rooted in their traditions or in common sense.
He's aligned himself with a party whose leadership has no true respect for individuals or communities, but only sees them as groups to be manipulated for the purposes of the elite: those who have money and power.
So it is not surprising that the practitioners of power—the Karl Roves and Steve Schmidts—of that party find it clever to manipulate the conservative masses by lying.
The entire world-view puts ends over means. If a policy serves the power elite, it serves the country, and it simply doesn't matter how it is sold.
If they have to lie about taxes—convincing the middle class that Obama's plan is the opposite of what it is, or hiding hefty handouts to the rich behind minimal middle-class cuts in their own plan—they'll do it.
If they have to lie about wars, about why we're going, or how well it's going, they'll do that.
If they have to twist the truth—making it sound like Palin turned down federal money for the "bridge to nowhere", when in fact she took the money and used it for pet projects instead of the bridge—they'll do that.
And they will be particularly willing to twist the truth if they can do it without telling a "literal" lie, because they have a legal model of morality, which allows them to believe that the literal is all that matters.
But why does McCain go along with it?
The answer lies in who he is. McCain is particularly vulnerable to a king-based world-view, in spite of his basic decency.
He began his career as a military man, in a field where force and deception are often accepted tactics, where subservience to power is a virtue, where loyalties to ones country and comrades and those in power override most other considerations.
All of these things are virtues within a military framework, but for a civilian they are suited to an empire, not a democracy.
So it was quite natural that as a civilian McCain would align himself with the party of the moneyed elite, the closest thing this country has to royalty.
McCain is ambitious. He has done everything he can to become part of that elite. He has been so successful that he cannot count his houses.
He, himself, has admitted:
I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in, or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. I was sixty-two years old when I made the decision, and I thought it was my one shot at the prize.
McCain was sixty-two in 1998, before the straight-talk express, before the carefully orchestrated press relations which positioned him nationally as a maverick, before the election of George Bush, and McCain's almost complete support of that administration.
There's no reason to suspect that everything that has happened since is not equally a product of the same ambition.
The difference between the maverick and the Rove-style politician is not that great. McCain has been a lot more consistent than people give him credit for.
He is not a "fallen man" who has recently embraced "dishonorable methods" that are contrary to his previous character.
He has consistently held a world-view which sees the goals of the powerful as legitimate in their own right, ambition as admirable for its own sake, and tactics, including dishonesty, as justified by the noble end.
He still acts on those values.
He believes his country, his class, and his career will be better off if he is president, and sees Obama as the enemy blocking that objective.
He's not going to question a strategic deception, if it gives him an advantage in the overall campaign.
