JFK’s prescient description of modern politics

This weekend I picked up a copy of JFK’s Profiles in Courage and I was struck by this particularly prescient passage. If it was true then, it is even truer today, almost 60 years later.

“Today the challenge of political courage looms larger than ever before. For our everyday life is becoming so saturated with the tremendous power of mass communications that any unpopular or unorthodox course arouses a storm of protests…Our political life is becoming so expensive, so mechanized and so dominated by professional politicians and public relations men that the idealist who dreams of independent statesmanship is rudely awakened by the necessities of election and accomplishment.” — Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy 1955

Our political system is broken, and though governing by crisis is currently in intermission, its time we took collective action to fix it. Our government, our democracy, is too important.