Almost all the commonsense adages about politics are pragmatic. Like, “Politics is about addition, not subtraction,” or “All politics is local,” “or “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” In other words, it’s a very human business where success is achieved by calculation, crowd pleasing and a strong stomach.
Yet, we’re experiencing an increasing refusal to compromise, even if you can’t get to 51% without it. This is either pigheadedness or idealism, depending on which side of the argument you’re on. It may make you feel superior, but it doesn’t allow you to achieve your ends.
Republicans, after years of being the minority “Party of No,” apparently can’t break the habit. Now they are saying “No” to each other. Though in charge, they have shown a very limited ability to agree among themselves, and certainly no interest in meeting anyone in the middle, even their own moderate members.
Democrats would seem to have every reason to present a unified front in order to regain a majority and accomplish their goals, but are so riven by disagreements over those goals that they are divided into a number of minorities of the minority.
Thus, both sides risk squandering the ability to govern a big country. To do so they need to win several hundred races. To do that requires two contradictory achievements —crafting a unifying message or agenda with broad appeal, yet winning a majority of votes in many diverse, local constituencies. “Is a puzzlement,” as the King of Siam sings.
You’d think there would be a few bedrock progressive things to which every bickering Democratic candidate could subscribe. Even though we are told America is fundamentally a conservative country, you’d think, after the Great Recession, that the need for robust regulation of the financial industry would be a no-brainer. Yet regulation has been so thoroughly turned into a dirty word that oversight of financial institutions is a 50-50 toss-up among voters.
Still, polls do find that there are some areas of agreement. A large majority of people want to keep Medicare and Medicaid. even 57% of Republicans agree to that. Two-thirds of those polled favor government loans for college, as do even 50% of Tea Party voters.
About 63% of Americans think more needs to be done on climate change. If you change the question, by asking if they are in favor of both adapting to climate change and protecting jobs, 73% approve. Over eighty percent favor more use of renewable energy, yet only 53% favor government regulation to promote it.
This is part of a pattern produced by decades of unanswered anti-government propaganda, largely funded by those likely to profit from a Darwinian society where no one prevents the big dogs from eating the small.
The generations who did not live through the Great Depression and World War II (or listen to their parents’ stories of the experience) take for granted many government programs that have improved life. They have forgotten where their relative comfort comes from. They are like the woman at the McCain rally who demanded that he keep the government’s filthy hands off her Social Security.
Large parts of the electorate seem to have a kind of historical amnesia. They do not quite grasp what America was like before the social safety net. Life was often poor, nasty, brutish and short for the old or disabled, education impossible for many before student loans, jobs dangerous before workplace safety requirements, everyday life risky before regulations to make cars, air travel, food, drugs, water, and air safe. They don’t appreciate that government programs provide these and many there other essentials, as well as guard our national security and economic well-being.
Democrats have seemed to assume this is obvious therefore they have failed to make the case in a personal, particular way that shows how each of their constituent’s lives are better, compared to those of earlier generations with their sweat shops, breadlines, charity wards, orphanages, and ten hour days with no minimum wage. As long as the ayes for government are tongue-tied, the nays have it.
Unfortunately, even if the Democrats get their act together, the hopes for an active, competent representative government aren’t bright. Being on the majority side in issue after issue doesn’t add up to victory. Majorities elected Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. Occasionally, courts have done the right thing, but they too are appointed by politicians, not by a majority vote.
Majorities favor equal justice under law, but never got a vote on issues where it was at stake — same sex marriage, equal pay or any number of other majority issues. Even on a polarizing issues like guns, a majority now favors universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines. Will they get a vote? Not bloody likely.
You get to a majority district by district, and to the White House by way of an electoral college based on the same state by state arithmetic. Districts are drawn by state legislatures to favor the party in power. The same bodies also get to control who is eligible to vote, and when and where. Special interests with their own agenda are often behind efforts to subvert majority rule, by means of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and litmus test court appointments.
Why do politicians do the biding of special interests, often casting votes inimical to their constituents’ interests? Because they are elected by means of money from donors (or their opponents are defeated thanks to non-stop smears in ads supplied by the same source).
And now we have a president who gained power, in part, due to the efforts of an anti-democratic donor who manipulated the election and used the Internet to cloud men’s minds, KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. This is not the system Madison, Hamilton, and Jay argued for in “The Federalist.”
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