Embracing the Compromises of Political Giants
A giant dies and the world left behind feels a bit more tawdry and mundane and uninspiring and small. A melancholy descends, filled with insecurity about the present and seductive nostalgia for the certainty of the past. Where have the great leaders gone, one wonders—the great causes and morality, the clarity and vision? The death of the Nobel Prize–winning Irish politician John Hume is such a moment.
Hume’s death today, at age 83, marks the passing of not only a titan of politics, but arguably the most towering of a generation of giants in Northern Irish politics, who did great and terrible things in the pursuit of a cause over which there was, and remains, a great and terrible divide: the future of Northern Ireland. Hume’s legacy is that he mostly did the great things (while
