It's been less than a month since the gods decreed that, due to the election results, American political life henceforth must be all about something called "values." And I gave it my best. Honest. But I'm sick of talking about values, sick of pretending I have them or care more about them than I really do. Sick of bending and twisting the political causes I do care about to make them qualify as "values."After enjoying the political dominance of his own values for the past few decades, Kinsley can't stand to see opposing values get any traction. He insists that a politician's "values" should not matter as long as he or she is "competent" -- but you just know that Kinsley will judge a pol's competence by his or her fealty to the values that are important to him. And that makes him no different from the people for which he expresses such derision in his essay.
Granted, Kinsley does make the good point that pols typically connive to repackage their pet issues in terms of values, but he seems to jump from this fact to the conclusion that no issue can or should be debated in the context of values. Not true.
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