The best politics is no politics.
The danger of democracy has always been the danger of an electorate seized by passivity.
Iran does not have a cuoture of passive citizenship despite the best efforts of its rulers, past and present, to produce one.
The fundamentalist call has resonance because it invited men to participate… in contrast to a political culture that reduces citizens to spectators and asked them to leave things to their rulers.
Citizenship means every four years you put a mark somewhere and you go home and let other guys run the world. It's a very destructive ideology.
We have been deformed by educational and religious institutions that treat us as members of an audience instead of actors in a drama, so we become adults who treat democracy as a spectator sport.
It is unfortunate that Americans are no longer aware of what the constitution says and what their rights are. Because of that, we are often very passive about what happens when the government violates those rights.
