“Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.”
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Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.
Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible 'lifestyles' turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.
Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.