Wisdom
Garry Wills Politics	What has crippled our political discourse is a long-indurated habit of demanding from government qualities that should be sought, primarily, in other aspects of our social life. Government plays a limited role in human activity.... It cannot be the family, the church, the local club, the private intellectual circle.... When government does not show all the human virtues, it is rejected as contributing to none of them. That asks too much of government, as a preliminary to expecting nothing of it. This...is a tradition that belittles America, that asks us to love our country by hating our government, that turns our founding fathers into unfounders, that glamorizes frontier settlers in order to demean what they settled, that obliges us to despise the very people we vote for. Our country, our founders, our representatives deserve better. So do we, who sustain them all.
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