Evaluating Politicians

When evaluating politicians, voters use many different criteria. I think the most common include the politician's stand on the issues of the day, as well as his or her character. Do I support the policies he is asserting, and do I trust and respect him? I add another factor to the equation. Is the politician moving forward on his growth path as shown in his astrological birth chart, or is he stuck in defensive mode? I assume that a stuck person, regardless of his conscious intentions or policies, will tend to get our country stuck (or whatever his constituency is if his role is not a national one). A person moving forward on his path will tend to move the country forward.

Archetypes

The people that serve in our administrations, legislatures and judiciaries, based on their own charts and psyches, emphasize particular archetypes while deemphasizing others. Their orientations move us collectively in one direction or another. If, for example, a politician has a strong Aries emphasis, he will tend to support aggressive and competitive ways of organizing society. We choose office holders based on our own archetypal preferences. There are, however, two distinct ways that an archetype can be emphasized, two distinct motivations for emphasizing it.

In the first case, the archetype is an integrated part of the individual's psyche. When expressed, it is connected to and balanced with all the other energies available to the whole being. In the second case, the archetype is expressed defensively, in an over-emphasized or rigid manner. The psyche, stuck in fear or desire, is fighting against some of its own archetypes. Its basic wholeness is overcome by struggle and conflict.

To some extent, at least, we are all in the second category. It is simply a matter of degree; we all have our own struggles. We tend to get caught up in Maya, reifying our personal struggle. We project the feared parts of our own psyche onto the external world, fighting a never-ending, impossible to win, and ultimately exhausting battle with continual attempts to drag everyone else into our personal drama. Some of us, however, have wholeness and integration as an ideal, and strive to own all of who we are. By becoming aware of and letting go of our fears and attachments, we can better see all the archetypal energies and their rightful place both within us and in our world.

Using Astrology

Politicians that value wholeness, either consciously or unconsciously, tend to affirm solutions to social problems that connect and integrate people, groups, ideas, archetypes. Politicians that are caught in attachment tend to see the problems of society as requiring battles to be won and enemies to be defeated. Both of these approaches have their place, but the latter, as we have seen, assuming the fundamental and ultimate reality of conflict, solves nothing in the long run. I much prefer the former approach.

The challenge, then, becomes distinguishing the integrators from the fighters, the whole psyches from the fragmented ones. I, of course, use astrology to focus and direct my intuition. I listen to what the politician says, and connect his or her words to the archetypes of the birth chart. In particular, I attend to expressions of Saturn (sign and house) that are either integrating or alienating, either strong and firm or rigid and punitive. And I look for either a balance of South and North Node archetypes or an over-emphasized South Node and a projected North Node.

My article in this section on George W. Bush is a case in point. Here I look deeply at George's Saturn in Cancer in the twelfth as well as his clearly over-emphasized South Node in Sagittarius. We see here a politician who can do nothing but lead us down a path of un-ending conflict and social self-destruction.