Governing the French.
Pompidou's first sentence in
The Gordian Knot
removes any risk of demagoguery:
“To govern is to constrain.
»
He developed this idea in an interview on the 8 p.m. television news on January 20, 1967.
“The goal is to define a policy, an action, to have it approved by the country and then to apply it or try to implement it. apply to government.
However,
to govern is to decide, to decide is to choose
, and it is to choose between solutions which always have advantages and disadvantages… We do not govern with “buts”.
I would even say that
governing is the art of eliminating the “buts”
.
Dialogue, discussion, deliberation, comes before the decision.
When it's decided, it's over.
There is no political action beyond that.
»
The lesson is obviously useful for our times and we can only approve of it.
This is the very reason for universal suffrage: to choose leaders who have the legitimacy to…
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