Do you remember when Gen. MacArthur called for dedication to ‘Duty, Honor, Country, and Local Government’?

Do you remember when Gen. MacArthur called for dedication to ‘Duty, Honor, Country, and Local Government’?

Neither do I.

He called, of course, for dedication to Duty, Honor, Country.

It wouldn’t have occured to him to exhort a commitment to municipal government. America speaks – when she speaks most movingly – in the language of broad, often universal concepts.

Therein lies the insurmountable problem of local government’s recent call to reach a supposed ‘silent majority’ (to “benefit the silent majority instead of the vocal few.”): (1) Whitewater doesn’t have a stable, silent majority, (2) the kind of majorities that might form would not look like most people in government (proving disappointing to those who wrongly seek demographic homogeneity), and (3) majorities that form will do so around big issues, and won’t involve blanket support for local government.

See, along these lines, The Search for a Majority in Whitewater and The Search for a Majority in Whitewater (Identity Politics Won’t Get You There).

This recent call is telling, however, as an honest admission that local government does not have such a majority, and that even now (after decades of insistence that Whitewater was something like One City, One Culture, One View™) local government and its cultural champions still seek the means even to discern a true majority.

(I’ve said before that it would be a bad bargain to trade an independent position for an alignment with most local insiders and their media boosters. Honest to goodness, this becomes more true each day.  Far from helping each other, the poor work of a few is simply pulling the others down.)

Majorities will form around deep convictions, but tens of millions for waste treatment upgrades, waste importation, or pricey street projects instead of simple repairs just won’t inspire (let alone uplift) this community. 

There’s the important point, however, to be made: the search for a majority will prove in vain if one does not present a worthy view, well and compellingly reasoned.

If one has such a view, then no number in initial opposition will prove insurmountable; if one lacks such a view, then no number in initial support will prove retainable.