Tao Te Ching, 17 on True Leaders, Ursula K. Leguin's translation of Lao Tzu's words

[ananda]

7. Steinbeck on politics when asked about McCarthyism

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/28/1132163845/an-unearthed-john-steinbeck-column-probes-the-strength-of-u-s-democracy

The future Nobel Laureate wrote that the practice embodied by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was "simply a new name for something that has existed from the moment when popular government emerged."

"It is the attempt to substitute government by men for government by law," Steinbeck continued in a 1954 column for Le Figaro that had rarely been seen until it was reprinted this week in the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine. "We have always had this latent thing. All democracies have it. It cannot be wiped out because, by destroying it, democracy would destroy itself."
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"He stated in the 1960s that the role of an artist was to critique his country," says Susan Shillinglaw, who directs the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

Steinbeck believed that the United States was a force for good and fortunate in its ability to correct itself. He advocated a version of tough love hard to defend now, likening democracy to a child who "must be hurt constantly" to endure and regarding McCarthyism as a passing threat that would strengthen the country in the long run.

"In resisting, we keep our democracy hard and tough and alive, its machinery intact. An organism untested soon goes flabby and weak," he wrote.