I’ve been working up to my latest “America is in political shambles” rant for awhile now. I’m not sure what made me decide to throw this out tonight other than I’ve got plenty of time to write and I need to do something to stay awake.
As I’ve written time and again in this blog, You Should Already Know that America is in a political shambles that appears to be getting worse with each successive year and each successive election. The question is, why? Certainly America in the past has had its share of polarizing topics and polarizing political figures. Witness the leadup to the Civil War, the way JFK butted heads with his top generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or essentially Nixon’s entire presidency.
The thing is, we’ve HAD consensus builders in the past. We’ve had politicians who understood the need for compromise and for getting actual legislative work done. Why have we gotten to the point where the only people that get elected seem to be the ones at the polar end of their political spectrum?
From a certain perspective, one could certainly argue that (as I’ve pointed out in the past) the 15-second sound-bite has brought us all these far left or far right politicos. Certainly the people who are spouting things like “Bomb Iran before they get nuclear power” or “The government should replace every car in America with a hybrid to save the environment” are getting air time because, in the modern media circus their views are easily represented in 15 seconds and they spark enough debate to bump up news ratings.
Is the problem with moderate candidates that, because they’re trying to address real, solvable issues rather than calling for constitutional amendments about hot button topics like gay marriage and flag burning, their view take too much time to explain? I’m certainly inclined to think that in our fast food, everything gets solved in a one-hour TV show, “oooh…look at the pony” society the moderates are losing out because they’re too intellectual.
Now, you’re no doubt going to say that there are plenty of intellectuals on Fox News or CNN that are doing “talking head” pieces. While I grant you those talking heads are probably better educated than I will ever be, I’m still inclined to class them as “psedo-intellectuals” because, while they’re no doubt highly intelligent, they’ve opted to spend their time arguing about whether gay marriage is going to destroy the fabric of American families or whether the government should step in with “No Child Left Behind” and make teachers tell our children WHAT to think rather than teaching them HOW to think.
Our country is getting into more and more serious trouble because people have become too enamored of watching a bunch of people talk over each other on the news rather than honestly debate real issues. Certainly it’s more entertaining to watch two pundits go for each other’s throat discussing Roe v. Wade. The problem is that those entertaining political dogfights on the idiot box aren’t doing anything to solve real problems.
Certainly everyone can agree that health care is broken, social security is broken, the education system is broken, and border security is a joke. The problem is, all those issues don’t have clear-cut, easy answers that can be addressed in a 15-second soundbite, and so the majority of our politicians shy away from them in favor of easy hot-button topics like stem cell research and flag burning.
On the rare occassion that politicians DO address some of the tough issues, it’s almost exclusively to throw out an entirely unworkable solution that is sensational enough to get some press coverage and show the potential voters how “tough” the candidate is on the issues.
A great example is the ongoing debate on whether to spend billions of dollars to build a wall on the U.S./Mexico border to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing. The immigrant wall is a great example because, whichever side you’re on, it’s entirely unrealistic as well as being financially unfeasible, but it makes for juicy debate. (Folks, there’s a little country in the eastern hemisphere called China that built a great big wall to keep out the badguys and, while it’s a pretty nifty tourist attraction, it didn’t work. Samey same Rome and Hadrian’s Wall.)
To stay on the illegal immigration topic for a bit, the problem isn’t going to go away just by throwing a wall at it. People will find ways to dig under, fly over, sneak through, or go around as long as the benefits of getting to America outweigh the benefits of staying where they are. That being said, I certainly don’t have the answer, but it would appear that if we want people to stay in Mexico, something’s going to have to happen in Mexico to entice people to stay. How do we make that happen? Unfortunately I have no clue.
Back to the point at hand, though. It seems to me that what America is desperately in need of right now (other than a giant mental enema) is a batch of actual honest-to-God moderate politicians who recognize that there are issues that CAN be addressed and that can work toward enacting some meaningful legislation to address them. We need people who recognize that education doesn’t mean, “Give kids the answers so they can pass a standardized test” but that it means, “Teach kids to think so that they can go out and find the answers for themselves.” Standardized tests prove that you can pass a test…they don’t prove that you’ve been given the skills to pass in life.
What about the hot button issues? What about pro-life vs. pro-choice? What about gay marriage? What about flag burning? What about a whole bunch of other polarizing, emotional issues that seem to be the platform of virtually every political candidate in the ring? The only thing I’ve got that approximates an “easy” answer is, If you really think these are the issues that need to be solved, put them up on an honest to god national referendum. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a right to bitch about the outcome. Once you’ve done the actual referendum, that’s it, the issue is solved one way or the other for say, 10 years. That means if a national referendum says that burning a flag is constitutional, that issue goes away for at least a decade.
What I’d rather see happen, however, is, on a national level at least, allow the states to “agree to disagree”. I urge you to actually read the Constitution. Right now, I call your attention to the 10th Amendment, namely:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Quick translation, “If the Constitution doesn’t specifically say it’s the Federal government’s bag, it’s up to the states or the people to decide.”
In the case of abortion, for instance, fire off a referendum and let the people decide whether the Constitution should be amended to say it’s illegal everywhere. If they say no, but certain states decide to outlaw it, then let those certain states outlaw it. I’m using abortion as a case, which, if there’s anyone left who actually reads this blog, will probably get me loads of nasty comments, but the issue could just as well be whether or not to outlaw chocolate milkshakes. The premise remains the same…let the people decide…then if the individual states want to get stricter, let them.
Again, I apologize for digressing off my initial question about consensus builders, but there are some issues that are too volatile or emotional to ever have a true consensus built, so in my humble opinion they don’t have any place in an honest debate. Start with the issues that virtually everyone agrees on, like the need to improve healthcare. There’s virtually no one out there who’s going to tell you that the healthcare system in America doesn’t need to be fixed. There is, of course, debate on how to fix it. THIS, finally, is where our elusive moderates, our consensus builders, can finally be of some service.
We’ve had decades of polarizing politicians who don’t really do anything but tell people what they want to hear in order to win elections, then either renege on the promises in favor of rich special interest lobbies or find that their campaign promises were so wild that there’s no way to ever implement their ideas in the real world.
We need to start putting realistic men and women on the scene in Washington and then we need to hold them accountable. Don’t let elections (be they local, state, or national) be a “fire and forget” proposition. Let’s start taking politicians to task. When a candidate makes UNREALISTIC campaign promises, DON’T ELECT THEM! When an elected official turns out to be violating the campaign promises they made, call a referendum and throw their ass out on the street.
Think of it this way…say I interview for a job fixing cars. The manager hires me because of my vast experience with fixing cars, only to find out a week later that I’ve never touched a car in my life and don’t know the first thing about fixing them. Is he going to keep paying me to sit around and screw things up? HELL NO! He’s going to fire my ass and put me out on the street.
What are elections but an interview process? When a politician gets elected and then fails to keep any of his or her campaign promises, why the hell do we, as the American voters, sit back and let that politician keep collecting an exhorbitant paycheck? What’s wrong with taking them to task and, if necessary, firing them?
To me, at least, that prospect has a lot of real upsides. First, if politicians know that they’re going to have to live up to their campaign promises or get booted out immediately, in which case they lose all pay and benefits, maybe they won’t be so quick to make all these grandiose and wholly unrealistic promises. Second, by getting rid of idiots who are getting elected solely on the basis of their unworkable campaign promises, maybe we can give rise to a rebirth of the kind of politics on which America was founded.
Anyway, it’s something to dream about.
Gundy sends.
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