Perhaps, a Flicker of Light

Al Sikes

Reflections on the 2008 U.S. Primaries

As I work though these thoughts, glances out the window reveal little but fog. On this Wednesday, the day after the Potomac primaries, the Chesapeake Bay is fog-bound.

One of The Trinity Forum’s essential explorations is to find flickers of light in a fog-bound world. We look for glimpses of God that reveal transcendence at work.

Occasionally we find those moments in public leadership. Washington and Lincoln and Wilberforce—exemplars all—drew on otherworldly forces to transcend earthly limitations. Each found divine power on their knees.

Washington and Lincoln found themselves leading at crucial moments; moments which evoked a level of humility few leaders ever truly experience. Humility, then strength, and finally a transcendent force, caused the earth to shudder.

Political campaigns are not usually momentous moments. We select a President every four years and most candidates behave in less than inspiring ways. The campaigns themselves often tell us more about the voters than the candidates. Only service in the Oval Office eventually betrays the real strengths and weaknesses of those elected. If we voters were more prescient, our list of great presidents would not be so short.

At the risk of seeming an innocent at an advanced age, I think the voters are reflecting a flicker of light on themselves. By now we have endured months of political maneuvering, intrigue and, in the last month, winnowing. As the wind begins to clear away the fog, the voters seem in an especially elevated mood.

On one side the voters are poised to select a national hero whose transcendent moments (and earthly ones as well) are well documented. They have been told endlessly and loudly that he does not fit his chosen party’s political orthodoxy. His delegate count, however, continues to grow and virtually everybody now concedes he will be nominated. The voters seem to be saying that, notwithstanding his heterodoxy, he is worthy of belief.

About his likely opponent those in the know had said “no way.” “He,” they said, “lacks experience and is wrong demographically.” Yet there he was last night speaking to a rapt crowd of prospective voters at the University of Wisconsin, going beyond political policies to talk across all demographic groups about being “my brother’s keeper, . . . my sister’s keeper,” and urging parents to turn off the TV and video games so their children can struggle, because without struggle success is elusive.

Culture-shaping is upstream of politics and sociologists and historians are often humbled by their own meanderings as they opine on what forces shape the culture. Being neither, I am fearless.

Recent decades have revealed a Darwinian individualism, a strain nowhere more pronounced than in politics. A “survival of the fittest” mentality has been pushed by political handlers and operatives and too often embraced, or at least accepted, by would-be leaders. Perhaps politics has been informed by similar patterns in the mass arts, many businesses, and even in what are said to be religious pursuits.

Perhaps, just perhaps, we are seeing the emergence of a countervailing force. Perhaps, just reaching a tipping point, is a force that is saying, in the words of Howard Beale, the anchor in the movie Network, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Maybe, just maybe, as product and political cycles have shortened and as consumers and voters have been treated ever less respectfully, an emerging force is beginning to push back—a force defined less by the material and more by the spiritual.

Certainly the presidential campaign will feature sharp differences and there will be uncivil moments. But by my measure the campaigns to date have had to measure up to the standards of the voters, and those seem increasingly to reject the Darwinian approach.

Fog is an interesting phenomenon; it obscures and then it is gone. Political fog is abrupt neither in its arrival nor its departure. And certainly, significant cultural shifts are exceedingly difficult to sense in the early days of emerging change. Almost nine long months remain in this quadrennial contest; I hope that as it unfolds encouraging patterns can be discerned, and not just by the winning side.  

Al Sikes is Chairman of The Trinity Forum.

4 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Leadership, Society, Wed 13 Feb 2008