The Debate We Should Be Having
21st July 2012
Ordinarily a pseudo-conservative and a quasi-liberal pretending to be Sage Commentators on the Current Scene would not attract my attention, but it’s 3:42 a.m. and I can’t sleep so I’m desperately trying to bore myself into being able to resume snoozing; this looked like the best candidate. (Reading most newspaper columns is like watching a guy carve a statue of Dale Earnhardt out of butter … I’m thinking: He’s actually getting paid to do that. But I digress.)
One statement by Brooks, however, struck me as a Blind Pig Moment:
Obama’s ad is cynicism on stilts. Companies that outsource jobs become more competitive. They grow faster and then end up hiring more people at home. Outsourcing increases employment levels. Outsourcing increases productivity. It also decreases the prices consumers pay for stuff. Obama knows all this. He’s just paying the economic nationalism card for his own gain.
I was struck by how much that encapsulates modern American politics.
Some politician knows, or ought to know, the truth about Situation X, but ignores it and pretends that some specious falsehood about Situation X is instead the truth because he knows that a lot of people with only a casual interest in the subject — too casual to actually ferret out the facts — will believe his version of the truth because he’s an important politician and we’ve been trained to feel that important politicians are smarter than we are. And the reason the politician does this is because by doing so he can gin up some controversy or outrage or other kerfuffle that he hopes to be able to ride to re-election/increased name-recognition/greater status in the political landscape. ‘Screw what’s right for the country, I’m doing what’s right for ME.’ The people I immediately think of in this context are mostly Democrats (Chuck Schumer! Bill Clinton! I’m lookin’ at YOU!), but there are enough Republicans with the same disease (Lisa Murkowski appears to be a hereditary case) that the notion of the political class being more united by cynical self-serving greed than it’s divided by party identity is one that most people accept without a lot of argument.
The problem is, of course, as I’ve long said, that our political system is so arranged that the incentives are all aligned to promote this sort of behavior. The way one gets power and influence is by attracting votes. Lying will get you more votes than telling the truth. Spending tax money on specific constituencies, whether corporations or the proletariat, will get you more votes than being a careful steward of the public purse. Doing favors for special interest groups, be they the National Association of Tobacco Growers or the Sierra Club, gets you more money (and eventually more money gets you more votes) than doing what’s best for the public generally. Spending 24/7 campaigning for office and getting your face on the evening news gets you more votes than buckling down and doing the job for you were nominally elected. Pandering to the mob gets you more votes than doing the right thing, almost by definition. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to; the political market is rigged to reward bad behavior over good, and while (as with an actual market) you can go counter to entropy for a while, eventually you’re going to lose out to someone who moves with the flow rather than against it.
That’s the problem. So what’s the solution? Dunno. Wish I did. I think it’s a defect inherent in the democratic form of government, and the only sure way to get rid of it is to get rid of democracy itself — and, however bad the disease might be, that ‘cure’ is worse.
Mind you, at times it’s very attractive. One of my abiding interests is the history of the British upper classes, and on more than one occasion — I’m thinking specifically of the 1832 Reform Act and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 — a government controlled by a landowning ‘aristocracy’ took actions that they could not have been forced to take and that were directly contrary to their own interests. The closest modern examples I can think of are tax reform under Reagan and welfare reform under Clinton, where Democrats went along with programs that were directly contrary to their historical and avowed political positions — and they’ve been walking back from those ever since, something that the British upper classes never tried to do. (There’s our pathological political system doing its thing again.)
The practical problem with discarding democracy for some other system is that any alternative would be run by the same people that are running the current system — and, not coincidentally, levering the country into the toilet. No joy there. History teaches us that ‘enlightened government’ eventually winds up in the hands of dim bulbs, and you don’t even get the satisfaction of being able to say, ‘Well, we gave it our best shot.’
So there it is. We’re stuck with a defective system, and appear likely to remain so. Our only available course of action seems to be to try to pick the best possible people for political office in the hope that they will be able to resist the longest being corrupted by the system. ‘Eventually I will betray you’, they will say, if honest, and our only available response is ‘We know that, but we hope to get as much value out of you as we can before you screw us.
July 21st, 2012 at 10:10
Hear, hear.