Last Call…

So, I was chastised earlier this week by a Facebook friend for posting too darn many political pieces on my wall. Lighten up, already, was her message. Then, while riding with a friend this glorious morning, he turned the conversation to politics, asking for my thoughts and insights on various maladies in today’s political arena. So there you have it. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who come from wildly varying perspectives – some of whom feel I’m way too political and some lamenting that I’m not nearly as politically active as in the past. The reality is that both perspectives are true, but my inclination is to side with the former.

My family and I have paid a high price for my political involvement over the years. It has cost me a company and a bankruptcy, put incredible strains on my marriage, deprived my children of the attention I should have been paying at critical junctures in their lives. The fact is that I involved myself with the best of intentions, accomplished a good deal at times that will have lasting effect, and don’t really regret as much as I probably should the sacrifice I willingly made. I do regret dragging them along on my crusade, and apologize to them for the steep price they’ve paid.

But enough is enough. While I expect to continue playing the political provocateur on Facebook, this is entertainment for me. I am not a lighthearted fellow – am actually an emotional recluse and rather well known for my lack of humor. This is a condition I am doggedly working on remedying through counseling, study, meditation, and so forth, so if I find a harmless pastime that brings a little levity into my life, I hope my friends will be inclined to humor me. But I truly intend for this post to be the last politically oriented piece in this forum – am now off on another more personal path. So, as a going away present to those interested, a quick trek through my views on the current landscape of American politics…

Political Parties
My riding buddy asked why we can’t just do away with political parties entirely, and I for one would love it. Unfortunately, our Constitution protects freedom of association under the First Amendment, so the parties cannot be outlawed. Fact of the matter is that the parties can be and are heavily regulated, while individual citizens and unregistered groups are not regulated at all. I believe these are as much or more of a threat to our society than the parties at this point, particularly following the recent Citizens United v. FEC SCOTUS decision. I have no idea how it will all play out, but the situation doesn’t make me hopeful.

The Founders anticipated the formation of political parties, but they didn’t anticipate that these might assume the permanent nature now exhibited, nor the level of influence they would have across the entire spectrum of governmental activities. Unconfirmed executive branch officers, the incredible electoral/political influence on every single piece of legislation, the perpetual logjam in the legislative process – none of these would please any of the Federalists who saw the Constitution through ratification in 1789.

Of all the existing political parties, the one the Founders with their 1789 world view would most readily identify with is the Libertarians, whose sole focus is on limiting the scope of government to constitutionally enumerated activities. Before all the Libertarians and Tea Partiers out there get excited, please note my caveat regarding world view. We are no longer an isolated thirteen colonies of relatively homogeneous Englishmen on the eastern seaboard, comprised overwhelmingly of agricultural workers and land owners, with the merchant/industrialist class running a distant second and all others fractional participants. Neither are we slave holding plantation owners, which were the primary cause of the adherence to the Federal model which has proved as vexing as it has contributory to our national well being. Indeed, few are the Founders would take pride in what the nation has become in its sprawling urbanism, internationalism, multi-culturalism, economic complexity, and crass materialism. And while they would lament what we’ve become, once they understood the true nature of modern America, they wouldn’t advocate for a return to a political philosophy that has been outmoded for at least a century…

The problem with the Democrats is that they have lost touch with the only thing that ever mattered – being the representatives of working Americans and true small businesses. The family farmer (dwindling though they may be), sole proprietors, tradesmen, butchers, bakers, candle-stick makers, common laborers and blue-collar workers – these were the lifeblood of the Democratic Party. These folks now feel for the most part that they have nobody representing their interests. An unfathomable portion have wandered hopefully to the Republicans, while most have found themselves abandoned in the mushy middle with no party and no seeming reason to participate in the political process. My personal view is that the party no longer really stands for anything definable as a result of trying to fit more factions into its political tent than any tent can hold. I don’t see a solution to this problem coming any time in the foreseeable future…

The Republicans, on the other hand, have their own can of worms to deal with. They are what they have always been – the party of the moneyed interests. Their message was originally much a libertarian one, buttressed with more than a hint of fascism. Historically, the American voter recognized that they weren’t rich, and at least since the New Deal, that government could in fact make a positive difference in their lives – realities that didn’t bode well with the masses for the Republican’s electoral chances. In their creativity and efficiency, and in response to LBJ’s brave but dangerous push for civil rights for African Americans, they have expanded their message to attract enough voters to win elections, but at a fearful price. They invited in social conservatives concerned with creating a religious utopia (for themselves), along with racists and isolationist xenophobes, and have managed to achieve political parity where none should rightfully exist. The result is that pragmatic moderates and centrists as well as liberals are fearful of the Republican vision, which is why they stand at record low approval ratings today. I also don’t see this dynamic easing anytime soon, and in fact expect it to worsen with the advent of the Tea Party activists, the alienation of Hispanics, the fastest growing minority in the nation, and an increasingly strident anger against all things not wealthy WASP.

Political Reform
So, recognizing that nobody wants any of them, it should be a simple thing to fix the system, right? Not so, unfortunately. Remember, the Founders didn’t anticipate permanent parties with unlimited power, so they didn’t see the need to protect us from such a development. In fact, they allowed each house of Congress to write its own rules, and they allowed the states to handle apportionment and redistricting. The result is that the two major parties have a solid lock on the entire governmental process, a bare majority in either house allows the dominant party to control the flow of legislation and a sizable minority to block it, and more than 90 percent of House districts (at both state and federal level) are gerrymandered to protect incumbent office holders and their parties from any effort to bring about change.

To make matters worse, the flow of money into the process – always debilitating, is now a full-blown metastasizing cancer, made worse, as mentioned above, by the Citizens United ruling which grants corporations legal personhood and the right to spend limitless amounts of money toward electing their preferred water carrier. And we, the voters, are stuck between a sizeable rock and very solid hard place, with no recourse to change outside of armed revolt. (See note)

But wait…

The American Voter
The vast majority of American voters, including those who vote as well as those who don’t, are intellectually lazy and dangerously incurious. While this is somewhat truer on the right than the left, in my view, it is most prevalent in the apathetic middle. We read less, think less, ask less and demand less of our officials than any generation in modern history, and this is a trend that is increasing at a disturbing rate. Talking head radio entertainers belittle vacuous Hollywood entertainers for their political utterances and activism, when the country would be best served if all of them were ignored. Our education system is collapsing at exactly the time when citizens need better than ever to understand history, economics, trade and tax and geopolitical realities and the policies and politics that affect them. The media is so moribund and compromised it scarcely warrants the Constitutional protection the Founders granted it as an indispensable necessity for national survival. And the entire planet is held hostage, in this country as elsewhere, by the incessant battle between two Dark Age religions that fitfully coexist with nuclear fission, quantum physics and the fully mapped human genome.

And herein lays the crux of our political problems. As I told my cycling buddy this morning, have said often before and will no doubt repeat in the future – we have exactly the government we deserve. We are, in the end, a republic, if we can hang onto it, as Franklin is reported to have said. Ill-informed voters, apathetic voters, irrational voters, and non-voters all bear responsibility for where we find ourselves today. It is our country and it is our political system and our trying to lay the blame anywhere but squarely at our own feet is a cowardly and disingenuous cop out.

Manifesto for Change
It was this realization, belated on my part, that I could not in fact do much to affect the well-being of the country which convinced me that I needed to focus more on myself and my family and my future, and less on trying to save America from itself. I will continue to educate myself on the issues and the candidates and races, to vote, to support in an individual way the candidates from whichever party I think are most likely to best serve the constituency I find myself part of at that point. Finances allowing, I might even still write a check from time to time. Just doing these simple things will put me in the top 10 percent of voters in this country, and that’s good enough for me.

Now, if I should get wind of a viable candidate or promising party committed to actually fixing things, I might come out of hibernation and get involved in a more active way. What would real change consist of?

1. Eliminate all private money from political campaigns
2. Eliminate legislator participation in the redistricting process
3. Provide equal ballot access to independents and third party candidates
4. Establish reasonable term limits

It would require all of these at a minimum, and either in whole all at once or in this particular order, for me to believe we might salvage this noble experiment we call America. Do I believe it could happen? Absolutely! Do I believe it will? Not a snowball’s chance in hell. Americans are too fat and too lazy, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon either…

C'est la vie!

Note - While the depictions above refer primarily to the federal picture, it is not substantially different in most places at the state level.