What we get wrong about politics today

Politics has become a term of contempt. In the American pluralist tradition, it has turned into a marketplace of special interests competing to capture the state for private gain. Elections become auctions, rights weapons of particular identity, governments tools for personal enrichment. The question is no longer what makes us better, but who gets what—and who decides.

The Greeks began with a different question: what is a good political order? Political science was inseparable from moral philosophy: an inquiry into the Good that a society can realise through common action.

1. THE WHOLE PRECEDES THE INDIVIDUAL. For Plato and Aristotle, the polis was no contract between atomistic individuals but an ethical association. Its constitution was more than allocation of offices: it embodied a way of life, an ethos shaping judgement and character. Democratic self-government required a community capable of sustaining its ethical life. We become moral agents within society, not before it.

2. THE GOOD PRECEDES CHOICE. Plato distinguished knowledge of the Good from gratifying personal appetites. For Aristotle, politics ordered the goods of our common life. Neither majorities nor markets can confer moral worth by choice or price. Votes measure preferences; they cannot determine whether those preferences are worthy.

3. JUSTICE PRECEDES LAW AND RIGHTS. If the Good is the standard, rules must answer to it. For Aquinas, law is an ordinance of reason for the common good, not merely the will of a legislator. The same is true for rights. As Jonathan Wolff observes, Mill rejected abstract natural rights yet, unconvincingly, grounds personal rights in abstract utility. Rights can express what justice demands; they cannot establish what justice is.

4. RESPONSIBILITY PRECEDES UNRESTRAINED LIBERTY. Freedom from interference cannot tell us what freedom is for, or what we owe the community sustaining it. Citizenship entails contribution to a common life, proportionate to capacity and power. As Pabst argues, liberty detached from positive goods and social obligations erodes the solidarity on which it depends.

5. PROCEDURES ARE NOT NEUTRAL. Refusing to judge politics by the Good does not make institutions neutral. It leaves prevailing interests to determine their ends. Property law distributes power; economic structures reward certain conduct; education shapes future citizens. Institutions shape character regardless.

Worse, proceduralism risks eroding the very moral foundations on which it depends. When we substitute legality for justice and compliance for conscience, shamelessness becomes respectable, injustice normal, and demagogues find fertile ground for tyranny.

We must return to judge politics not merely by electoral success but by the common good it realises. Otherwise, we may become wealthier, more powerful and more productive while losing the capacity to distinguish economic progress from moral decline.