Writing this piece I feel almost a sense of deja vu; my first article on Odyssey was on not dancing over the grave of justice Antonin Scalia. Now, with John McCain’s brain cancer, I find myself revisiting the sordid topic of people celebrating the deaths of people, or in this case hoping for the death of a certain person.

I will not repeat myself; those who want to see my thoughts on Scalia’s death ought to read that article. That being said, I focused on the notion of being a better person. Sure, you might not like Scalia nor what he stood for, but for the sake of civil discourse and mutual understanding, as well as principle, one ought not to dance over graves. Hoping for someone’s death is even worse, given that it convey the desire to see someone no longer walk this Earth.

An old friend of mine once dispensed to me a very important truth regarding political discussion, especially on the internet: said debates never have the purpose of persuading the other side, but have the very important purpose of persuading those who are on the sidelines of debate to pick which side they are on. Therefore, one must be civil and generally a decent human being when in political debates as to not portray one’s own side as a bunch of raving lunatics and angry puritans. That image problem can be fatal (as we have seen with the Democratic Party in the past year).

It goes to show how isolated from each other the left and the right are nowadays that this has become an issue. With ideological spheres that are so distant from each other, there has been less discourse and more energetic preaching towards choirs, with each choirboy and choirgirl taking a turn at giving the day’s sermon. So often we forget that we are in the presence of people who disagree, and as such we represent our own ideological spheres. If we represent said spheres as frothing-at-the-mouth basket-cases, we turn off our potential allies.

We think of politics as a war, with one side pitted against another. What it actually is is a match of two sides fighting each other in an arena, with the audience the ultimate decider of how the match goes. All too often we forget that audience, and forget our place within this game. It is not merely a game of adversaries; it is a game of persuasion and propaganda, and woe unto ye who neglects the role of propaganda in any political endeavor.

Those who attempt to circumvent this fundamental political truth are guilty of a particular form of aristocratic thinking; they say “it’s the people are wrong, and I ought to rule because I am right and that is inherently so.” That is the mindset that brings down parties and condemns them to irrelevance. It is little more than the divine right of kings given a new coat of paint, the thought that one’s convictions need not be justified, and antithetical to life in a democracy.