JOHN P. DIGGINS
249
response of either reader or voter. Ludwig Wittgenstein once hoped that
philosophy would rescue thought from the "bewitchment" of language.
Who will rescue politics, the arena in which words also lose significance
since their meaning is no longer determined by the objects they refer to
but by the emotions they arouse? One hardly looks to a politician to
observe a mind compelling its thought to correspond to the ways things
are. In a world of representations, the real is wrought by the mind, and
the politician's ambition is to say not what is demonstrably true but what
is viscerally convincing - a task perhaps best performed by those who lack
convictions.
Today, the campaign manager is the political equivalent of the literary
deconstructionist. Once it is granted that all is representation, that there is
only persuasion without proof, then politics becomes all cunning without
conscience. With the political consultant, Madison Avenue meets
Machiavelli, who advised that politics has nothing to do with morality
except as a veil of appearance, that truth resides in power and therefore
the end justifies the means, and that the candidate is not to be but to seem
to be whatever the situation calls for. Political victory requires a campaign
of evasion, adaptation, compromise ("the art of the possible"), and, above
ail, accusation, the art of annihilation by aspersion.
Political thinkers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt be–
lieved that politics ought to be concerned more with virtue than victory.
To the extent that politics occupies a "public space," Arendt held, justice,
virtue, and the public good may be approximated through speech, per–
suasion, and common action. Tocqueville assumed that a virtuous citi–
zenry might overcome private vice if politics were conducted openly in
the public sphere; deceit would be more difficult to hide and selfishness
would become "ashamed of itself." American politics has never been as
much of a public affair as it is in our era, a strategy of speech performances
involving image projection and impression management. Yet one detects
no shame in electoral politics and campaigns, which have come to domi–
nate America's political culture at the expense of government - specifi–
cally the responsibilities oflegislation and administration, as well as of citi–
zen education through reflective dialogue and debate. In recent years it
seems that government, defined by Edmund Burke as "a contrivance of
human wisdom to provide for human wants," exists solely for politics,
"the systematic organization of hatreds" in Henry Adams's view. With
the body politic lacking a common will, government splits into its
constituent parts, and politicians can no longer rule, not to say lead.
Who is to blame for the squalid state of contemporary politics? Many
commentators point the finger at the media, specifically television. There
is no doubt that television commercials require huge expenditures, and
electronic communication leads to the staging of pseudo-events and to
