Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on Elections as ‘A Moral Horror’)

“An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.” —Anglo-Irish playwright and Nobel Literature laureate George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Back to Methuselah (1921)

So it was, again, this year, a century after Shaw wrote these words. And it wasn’t even a midterm election, let alone a Presidential one.

Shaw was correct about the shamelessness and self-abasement displayed by those running for office. But he could not conceive that, by the time he died nearly 30 years later, a worse kind of “moral horror” would be triggered in vast stretches of Europe, by Fascists and Communists—intimidation of candidates and interference with the right to vote—or that now, similar blights on democracy would crop up on both sides of the Atlantic.