Only weeks away, this mid-term election is a shared mirage far more extreme than one would usually encounter without having spent serious time lost in the desert. More than being born out of political ideology, party politics, or sense of national destiny, it is constructed from an ever-expanding series of fictions that have lost even their already slim basis in reality.
It would be hard to convey how little I wanted to write this column and how hard I tried to not do it. Any topic other than politics seemed more relevant, timely, and reasonable. There is no clear need for it; the opinions presented are neither new nor unique. By no means do I boast the conceit to think that anything said here is going to change anyone’s mind or have an impact on someone’s vote. The snapshots of the election regularly presented by media, though by no means consistent, are harmonious. All are clear on a significant change in party political power as the Republicans are expected to make great gains, while the Democrats suffer, at the very least, significant losses.
Why, after only two years, are so many ready to embrace the Republicans again? What are the goals and meanings of the tea party? Why have the Democrats lost so much favor in such short a time?
The hazy snapshots feature confused, bleeding colors; faded objects; and out-of-focus details, while the general accuracy of what is being presented has much to do with analytic dithering, pundit uncertainty (always presented as beyond certainty), and excessive partisan spin.
Somewhat convinced of the likely overall electoral outcome without all that much conviction as to why, prognosticators’ shared characteristic is obscurity. Tap-dancing words shoot out, full of buzz but lacking meaning, in a kind of empty media pontification, conveying the weariest of worldviews – designed to illuminate nothing but seeming in retrospect as though any consequence or cause was fully understood and anticipated.
The greatest cause of my hesitation in writing this was that there actually seems to be a distinct clarity about what is happening. Unfortunately, clarity, as anyone who has even occasionally read this column is well aware, is not my forte.
It is a time when widespread public fears and voters’ hysteria really seem to have originated out of dreams rather than the real world, with the current national mood of vast apocalypse-heralding being about and of itself.
There are many who currently believe that the serious problems facing this country are not actually complex economic, political, and social issues but rather are caused by malevolent people out to do evil. The idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain rights is too often considered to be a narrowly focused endowment of individual empowerment rather than a way to enable everyone’s participation in a shared universal franchise.
Universal suffrage would seem to guarantee only that each and every citizen has an equal right to be heard in any public discussion. However, when the government fails to act in a way some citizens would like it to or passes legislation that some oppose, they do not accept that this time they are in the minority. Instead of understanding that an open dialogue has led to conclusions different from their own, they feel as though their rights have been denied; they maintain that the actions of the government are not a consequence of democratic discussion but elitist manipulation, government corruption, and malfeasance triumphing over the will of the people.
Theirs is a myopic and solipsistic view: If one is enfranchised, the government should be responsive to that person. When desires are ignored, it is not because others’ desires have triumphed but because the government is not listening as it aggressively ignores them.
As voting citizens in a democratic constitutional republic, we can be certain that our voices will be heard but not that all or any of our views will prevail.
Add to this widely shared but substantially distorted views of not just the roles and responsibilities of government but a common, willful ignorance of any of government’s achievements – positions grounded in personalized versions of history tailored to individual belief or forgone conclusions rather than being based on actual events and achievements.
The greatest disservice being done to the body politic by its citizens is the constant framing of political discussions as heroic conflicts of the well-intentioned good against the consciously, malevolently evil. In that two-dimensional view, the sole arbiters of what is meant by “good” and what is meant by “evil” are the beliefs of the speaker.
This glorification of one’s own view and simultaneous discrediting of all others does simplify the discussion. It also largely undermines any hope for the kind of compromise-driven legislation that the U.S. Constitution was specifically designed to facilitate. Although many become obsessed with some affectation or another of the Constitution, its main idea is to prevent a single ideology from overwhelmingly dominating the government. The careful system of checks and balances is most conducive to an ever-moving, gradually swinging political pendulum that prevents any single ideological point of view coming to dominate the federal government.
When one listens carefully to groups like hard-right Republicans, hard-left Democrats, conspiracy theorists, Marxists, members of the tea party, self-sanctified liberals, and champions of American exceptionalism, the very clear but unspoken agenda is a quest for the very kind of government dominated by a single ideology that the Constitution was designed to thwart.
Many (most) Americans feel as though they are being unreasonably taxed. Worse, they believe, most of what they pay is being siphoned off by corruption, misspent on waste and pork, or used to support others who are not contributing their full or fair share, from the happily unemployed to welfare cheats to undocumented immigrants. This is largely a myth, as most Americans pay a disproportionately small share of the costs of the government that serves them.
The Bush administration inherited a budget surplus. Taking advantage of this, the Republicans pushed through an incredible amount of legislation faithful to the core ideas of their platform, ones that were “realistically” designed to encourage and support business. As opposed to the social utopian fantasies of the Democrats, these tough Republicans’ legislative objective was to serve the health, growth, and curtailment of interference in the economy. What is good for business is good for the USA, in their view, and the free market solves all problems.
The Republicans thus passed many of the policies they had long argued were pro-business, pro-economic growth, and thus pro-USA. Unfortunately, the proof is in the pudding. The massive tax cuts for the very rich, the lack of oversight and regulation for businesses and financial institutions, the privileging of the corporation over the citizen didn’t work. After six years of Republicans plying the economy with wonder drugs guaranteed to keep it going strong, it collapsed, and it did so spectacularly.
Despite this collapse, a clear indication that the Republicans’ policies were toxic and not nurturing, they’ve rejected any proactive solutions, including many that originated within their party. They are insisting that the policies needed to restart the economy are the very ones that so completely flooded its engine. The clear consequence of disproportionate tax cuts for the richest Americans that were supposed to fuel economic growth has been staggering budget deficits.
Yet they have no solutions. They take no responsibility. Instead, they blame the Democrats.
In fact, the two most outstanding current political trends are central to their strategy or lack thereof. Take no responsibility for anything. Some in the tea party may have supported the Bush administration’s two unwise wars as well as championed the absurd tax cuts, but they ignore that both of those helped fuel the deficit. Forget the many years of a federal government completely under Republican control that refused to deal legislatively with any of the long-term potential economic crises facing this country, while both driving federal funds to and cutting taxes for the most wealthy Americans. “Hey, it wasn’t us!” they insist. Accordingly, they did not in any way facilitate the terrific budget deficit despite the many ways we actually did facilitate it. “Nope! It was the bad guys, the mysterious others – corrupt politicians, undocumented immigrants, and anyone who feels that the government of all the people actually does bear some responsibility for social equity.”
The Republicans who authored so much of the damaging legislation and espouse so many harmful federal policies have demonstrated a rare genius that somehow seems to be working. They’ve accepted no responsibility for their legislative successes that led to devastating economic failures.
Better, instead of trying to fix all those many things they broke or champion new ideas to improve things, they simply sat on their hands and voted against everything. By doing this, in one of the great political magic acts of all time, they’ve ignored their responsibility for creating problems and blocked anyone else from solving them, all the while positioning themselves as representing the anti-government crowd because, you see, they just haven’t been governing.
The other currently prominent, though not new, idea is that career politicians and those who have devoted their lives to public service are a huge part of the problem. Let’s instead elect amateurs or at least those veteran politicians who claim to not be veterans but outsiders.
It is foolish to get into any discussion on the quality of that idea, as we’ll soon have the scientific results from watching how these folks actually govern. Expect it
to be fun, if neither very productive
nor helpful.
Making things complete, we find that much of the left and the liberal-leaning middle is lamenting the Obama administration’s impotence and lack of action. They are openly condemning it for a lack of aggressive legislation, a disappointing record of following through on campaign promises, and not shifting the government from the course set by the Bush administration radically and dramatically enough.
The only real suggestion I have to offer is that the elections should be moved a few days ahead of their traditional November date, because finally the harmony between Halloween and American politics is nearly complete.
This article appears in October 22 • 2010.