I just reread a personal essay on politics I wrote around April 2010, a little while after reading Christopher Hitchens' memoir. What struck me was not the specifics of the ideas I advanced, but the emotional intensity I attached to them, shades of Hitchens himself. That state of emotional elevation in relation to politics is error, I think, especially if one is a politician oneself.
I'm very good with politics, and with my own small place in it, especially at this moment after a successful and hard-fought campaign for the school board in which my running mates and I won over three dedicated opponents. But I and others who are politicians need to separate our political roles from what we hold to be sacred. For nonpoliticians to worship politics as something outside themselves is one thing. For politicians to do so is to engage in narcissism. Politicians need a faith outside of politics, whether that faith is traditional religion or something more unorthodox.
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