Introduction to Visions in Political Mirrors

Proverbs 29:18--"Where there is no vision the people perish." This could easily be the slogan for all political theorists and thinkers in the Western tradition and beyond. Politics is about the struggle for power, but to what end. One "end" (goal) or another can be found in the thoughts and actions of rulers since the beginning of human life. The use of power was given an ethical framework in mirrors-for-princes literature.
The mirrors-for-princes genre preceded Christianity but it became a Christian form with St. Augustine. It was clearly the form used by Disiderius Erasmus, author of The Education of a Christian Prince, which was written to educate a Christian prince on the arts of statecraft but in such a way that he would not lose his own soul. Erasmus' near contemporary Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince in a bid for power, but with the ethical end of gaining and keeping power for its own sake. The soul was not apparently a worry.
Modern American political life is much more Machiavellian than Christian. Current events for decades suggest that the quest for power by ideologues or businesses that are guided by self center ethical visions are destroying the United States. This is a political condition that call for the quest for a true vision of the state as the gift it was intended to be.
That quest for the vision of the good state--that the people may not perish--is the goal of this blog.