How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market

First, credit to whom credit is due. In the face of a presidential candidate of the obscenely privileged one percent, and a VP candidate known best for a budget plan to dismantle the humanitarian safety net for the poor, America's minorities, women, and the young rose to the challenge. They marched to the polls in great number to let their choice of a “politics of kindness”* be known.

In the words of Carl Sandburg, “The People, Yes!”
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Henry Fairlie was an English journalist and author who chose to become an American. In Bite The Hand That Feeds You,  he argued that the realm of the patriot is the political realm, and that the political realm constitutes the public, not the private, sector. “Is it really necessary to reject civic consciousness, of which compassion for one's less fortunate fellow citizens is the ultimate binding cement,” he asked, “in order to be a conservative or neoconservative?”

The Romans insisted, he noted, “on the three great civic virtues: dignitas, gravitas, pietas.” … Otherwise “the idea of citizenship** [is] all but submerged in appeals to private pursuits, private satisfactions, the private sector.”
 
For those who glorify “the market,” he continued, “the purpose is always the same, to leave the economic realm in command over all others, to explain all human impulse, as it is expressed in the political process, in terms of nothing more than the ‘acquisitive instinct.’ ... they are in bondage to an economic view of human aspiration against which they have no defense once the supremacy of the political realm has been surrendered.”

As for the Romney candidacy, his gracious concession speech deserves tribute in the spirit of Shakespeare’s “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” Nevertheless, I fear that his ascension to the presidency would have represented the triumph of the “economic view,” of the valorization of private gain at the expense of the public good, over the political realm. There is the sense of a narrow escape from a crisis of the republic.
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Best line of the day: 
Atlantic columnist Molly Ball cites “a smart [GOP] party strategist” who wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” [Emphasis added.]
 
(*) “Democratic politics is the politics of kindness”: Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat
(**) For the power of citizenship in Roman justice, note how Paul (born Saul of Tarsus), as recounted in the King James Bible, responds to a provincial ecclesiastical court in Acts 25:11 - 12: “For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal unto Caesar.
Then Festus, when he had conferred with the council, answered, Hast thou appealed unto Caesar? unto Caesar shalt thou go.” [Emphasis added. In Acts 22, Paul is recorded as stating that, in contrast to those who paid a large sum of money to acquire citizenship, he was a Roman by birth.]