"Our most serious concern, however, is not with those in Washington; it is with the American people. What has alarmed me throughout this episode has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President's behavior even after they suspected, and later knew, that he was lying."
--James Dobson, September 1998
Let's not be suckers.
We know that, for all their high-minded talk, most of our elected representatives care about the welfare of their constituents only up to a point. If you're in position to do something to help them in their career, they will listen to you. If you are in position to enrich them, they will listen to you.
Sure, if they can help you out without contravening the wishes of their privileged clientele--the elite class of entities, human and corporate--who pay for campaigns and sponsor legislation in this country, they might throw you a bone. And you do, presumably, vote and maybe even talk a little politics on social media.
Even though they're making war on ordinary people, it's just business. They might find you distasteful and alarmingly unsophisticated, but they don't have anything against you. Some of them might even remember what it was like to be a naive normal who assumed governance, while an inexact science, was about trying to make the lives of the governed better.
I'm sure there are exceptions. But I don't think many of them would disagree with the idea that promoting the general welfare falls far down the to-do list of most of their colleagues. For most politicians, the first priority is winning the next election by any means necessary.
So if those of us who aren't part of the privileged clientele want to get the attention of elected officials, we have to make them insecure about their prospects of winning that next election. We have to convince them that if they don't contravene the wishes of their moneyed masters, they might be out of what amounts to a fairly cushy job. (Though they'd likely be insulated from any real pain by their sponsors.)
So what power the people have is extremely limited.
This power is further diluted by a two-party system that effectively divides us against each other and encourages us to see politics as a form of entertainment, a sport where the winners and losers are identified by their jersey colors. So if you identify with red or blue, you get some psychic dividend whenever your team scores points, regardless of whether your real life is made better by the policy implemented or the law enacted. The idea is to get you more invested in the fortunes of your side than in your own self-interest.
While there are alleged philosophical and ideological differences between our two main parties, these are unimportant compared to whatever strategic goals the party leaders decide are important. Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" get thrown around, but they're less useful as descriptors than as general terms of opprobrium or approbation. More often the most important feature of any national candidate is potential electability--which is how a few cycles after one party was bleating on about how "character matters" we have in the White House a reality TV star with all the moral fortitude of a Bangkok boy pimp.
Now, despite a shocking amount of evidence that he and his surrogates colluded with a foreign government to win an American election, the team that holds a temporary advantage doesn't want to investigate this guy--a guy who, as a private citizen, none of them would trust with their wallet or teenage daughter and whom they'd never have over for drinks unless he was bringing his checkbook--simply because he ran for president under their banner.
This is OK with us because we didn't like the shrill woman the other team offered. We still don't.
Someone once said politics was show business for ugly people. I'm tempted to say it's show business for ugly souls. The lingua franca of the game is kayfabe--outrageous overstatement that is believed neither by the actors who recite it or by the audience that pretends to be moved by it. Big-time politics in this country is mostly professional wrestling, and most of us who pay attention to it are complicit.
And those of us who don't pay attention do so at our own peril. It used to be that one of the benefits of living in a representative democracy in a big diverse country was that you could safely ignore politics because enough of your fellow citizens were engaged and informed enough to stave off potential disasters.
Now people consider themselves informed if they watch 30 minutes of Fox & Friends at the gym in the morning and can Google "Saturday night massacre." Our problem is too few of us even perceive there's a problem. Too many of us just want to watch the world burn. Let's not pretend otherwise.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 05/14/2017