As someone who gets a great deal of political mail, I tend to find that there are a few moods that this mail tends to follow. In reality, those moods can be distilled down, with some oversimplification, into two basic moods: arrogance and despair. The arrogance comes from a firm belief that either party (and I get mail from both left-leaning and right-leaning activists, mostly for information-gathering purposes) has the support of the people, is ahead in the polls (or the polls that count) and has a political program that is going to resonate with the people and ultimately be successful. The despair comes from an insatiable demand for money [1] from supporters, money that is supposed to make a difference in tight contests from Iowa to North Carolina. Sometimes the mood can shift from arrogance to despair (and back again) within the course of a single message.
Why is this the case? When I look at the political views of many of my friends, I see a great deal of humorous comments about people being monarchists because their allegiance (and mine as well) is to the Kingdom of God. And yet in this world, there is the constant temptation for people to get caught up in political games, to believe that they alone are responsible for the well functioning of the world and that there are vast conspiracies of one variety or another who are devoted to evil. In reality, the struggle against devotion to evil cuts into every human spirit. We all find ourselves in the uncomfortable position where we seek to put our ideals into practice and yet where we fall short of those ideals that we preach, judging ourselves by our intentions and judging others by their flawed and fallen actions. We insist on being judges and yet we show ourselves to be unjust and partial in our judgments, lacking in mercy towards others like ourselves.
Why do we lack perspective? Why do we put ourselves at the center of the universe, and veer from the arrogance that the entire fate of the world depends on us and on our actions, and the despair that the world is doomed. In reality, the arrogance and despair both feed off of each other. We despair because we know that we cannot bear the weight of the world on our shoulders, not even the weight of our own personal burdens. Yet if we are conscientious, and we see the slack hands who seek to rule this earth, we can easily think that we can do a better job, in some small way, than the people who rule over this earth. Yet the problems of this earth are too great for we human beings alone to solve, and yet we think to turn our eyes above ourselves is a sign of surrender. And so it is. We will persist in refusing to recognize that our problems cannot be solved by ourselves until we have no other alternative but to surrender or be destroyed.
And yet God is willing to accept us when we realize we have no other options. To be sure, He would prefer us on better terms, and yet He is willing to accept us on those terms. How long will it take people to recognize His rightful authority over the earth, rather than to pretend that we can do as good a job as He can? To be sure, it can be flattering to believe that one is important in a human sense, and yet in this world such a belief is often a manipulation by those who are even more ambitious about power. If one cannot even watch music videos without listening to political candidates pander to their supposed middle class origins, and one cannot check one’s e-mail without having political parties and candidates and activists on both sides looking for money that will supposedly push them over the top, then clearly we have a problem. It appears to be a problem that only God can fix, as we show no inclination to fix the problem ourselves, for it is not merely a problem of democratic corruption, but a problem that exists in some fashion in every system that mankind has ever used to govern itself. And yet we fail to draw the obvious conclusions from that.
[1] See, for example:
Edge Induced Cohesion 
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