Politician bashing is a favorite American pastime: “Don’t vote—it only encourages them!”  “If God wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates!”  “A politician is someone who answers every question with an open mouth!”

But thank goodness Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy, Reagan and Obama were all masterful and professional politicians.  Our American experiment in constitutional democracy depends on political discussion and on the hard work of bargaining and mediating agreements that make it possible for us to live together in a civilized way.

In our democracy, there is a continuing tension between competing truths, between cherished values and conflicting American Dreams. That’s part of free speech and liberty.   It is the job of politicians to help us reconcile and balance these contending aspirations—freedom and equality, individualism and community, idealism and pragmatism, capitalism and communitarian compassion.

Not giving up on politics means being willing to confront the paradoxes that are inherent in our system. We need to be able to recognize these paradoxes, to see various sides and understand how there are competing claims to the American Dream, and conflicting expectations for presidential leadership.  To face these paradoxes is to recognize that the competition of ideas and opinions—what we call politics—is a good thing.

Sure, in our system of elections, politicians need to be ambitious and calculating—calculating how they might win, as well as how they can advance the public good. Candidates have to have enormous self-confidence to get up on the public stage and try to get our attention. Of course, some of what they do in a campaign is stagecraft and posturing. Our process essentially demands this.  Representative politics is always an admixture of personal striving and substantive policy differences.

U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to say, “elections are not our finest hour.”  What he meant is that the claims and counterclaims in a campaign are too often oversimplifications of complex political choices. He knew that serious policy answers seldom fit on a bumper sticker, that charges and counter-charges escalate, and how going negative becomes an irresistible temptation in campaigns.

But you can’t have a representational republic without politics. Politics means politicians and voters debating contending ideas, forming coalitions, expressing their opinions in campaigns and voting in elections.  Yet the policies and programs that are enacted after an election are still only an imperfect attempt to solve the contradictions and paradoxes of our democracy.

Too many of us get too pious when politicians change their positions. We often charge them with flip-flopping and calculating their positions based solely on political expediency.

Candidates sometimes change their minds because circumstances have changed.  Sometimes, too, they change because they have learned new facts or understand new realities.  Sure, they sometimes change because of calculating political expediency.  But it is only the stubborn, rigid, overly self-confident and politically deaf leader who is unwilling to compromise and change course where this is sensible.

Consistency can be good; yet creative, adaptive compromising is sometimes appropriate.  Lincoln thankfully changed his mind about deporting slaves to Africa and emancipation.  F.D.R. changed his mind on neutrality in World War II.  Nixon changed his mind about dealing with China.  Reagan evolved on how best to relate to the Soviets.  In short, politicians occasionally flip-flop or evolve because it makes sense or perhaps because we the people have evolved too.

Giving up on politics often means being unwilling to see the other side.  How many of us can’t stand to listen to a politician with whom we disagree? But politics is a two-way street—abdicating from politics simply gives others more control over your life.

The best democratic leaders are teachers, reminding us about the promise and mission of America, encouraging the best in us.  As Franklin Roosevelt once said, the presidency is “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”  What he meant was that presidents should use their office to appeal to our better instincts, and lead democratically.  It was through politics and government that the nation’s progressive social movements helped move us toward greater racial and gender equality, devised policies to expand education and opportunities to a wider segment of the population, attempted to protect and expand the rights of citizens.  These battles are far from over.  As a nation, we have a long way to go before we can truly grant the blessings of liberty and prosperity to all citizens, yet it is through politics—and primarily through politics—that we can achieve these goals.

If we want the blessing of liberty and prosperity, we need to be willing to confront the paradoxes of our system, to debate conflicting values, to acknowledge competing claims about what our nation should be, and to try to recognize not only what our leaders can offer but what we must contribute as well.

Giving up on politics is not an option—not for presidents, not for citizens. Politics is the indispensible heart of a representative republic. It is to democracy what the experimental method is to physics, what melody is to music, what imagination is to poetry.