WhoWhatWhy - Politics is no longer politics. The traditional basis of politics in the West, in which ideologies compete over policy, has been replaced by vapid Team Politics. Power is no longer a means to the goal of passing legislation and enacting regulations that change society, but an end in and of itself. Parties no longer promote platforms; the Republican Party didn’t even bother to have one in 2020. Democrats and Republicans promulgate their respective cultural vibes.
Party officials and politicians used to dream of securing a place in our historical pantheon, the afterlife of the republic — statues, their face on a stamp, school children forced to memorize their names and deeds. Not any more. If Ron DeSantis and Mitch McConnell and Kamala Harris are driven by a set of ideals and a vision for the future of the republic, there is little visible evidence. This generation of politicians appears to crave power as a conduit to the ephemeral, present-day pleasures of careerism and financial remuneration.
The political class is in it for themselves, not for us. And we know it. A February 5 ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that seven out of ten of Americans have little or no confidence in the president or either party in Congress to make the right decisions for the country’s future.
1 comment:
Sam,
I know you know this -- the primary underlying reason our politics is so toxic is that we set it up as a winner-take-all game of finite duration where the winners in one round get to twist the rules to give themselves unearned advantage in the next rounds, to the point where we don't even have functioning multiparty democracies in many states.
Winner-take-all games are zero sum -- meaning that the parties cannot produce a net benefit to both through cooperation, and that anything that I gain is at your expense, and vice versa.
So the cliche is really true: Every election is the most important in your lifetime because each election under such rules means that one party could have the opportunity to twist the rules and lock themselves into power and render elections polite fictions (as they so often are in intensively gerrymandered districts).
So, zero sum, super high stakes --- oh, yes, and the determination of those with wealth to ensure that only those with wealth have any meaningful chance of influencing the selection of candidates at the critical pre-filing stage. All US elections are the result of "wealth primaries" where the wealthy get to determine which candidates the rest will be allowed to consider. Nobody at the top of our hyperunequal society wants public funding of campaigns because that would mean closing the market that they control, a market that gives them astronomically high returns on investments.
So, zero sum, super high stakes, and completely privatized control by wealth, which soon applies all the tools of mass media and propaganda (and now, lately, microtargeting to deliver each individual voter a specially selected set of messages so that we don't even share a country any more when considering the same set of candidates .... two neighbors can see two totally different sets of ads with completely different and fictional descriptions of the candidates, their positions, etc. and no one is able to know what voters are being served). Mass media and propaganda work better through fear than love. Fear works. If you want to control people, make them afraid. So you have every reason to make your opponents into your enemies, you have every incentive not to pull your punches, you have access to extraordinarily capable digital tools that let you create completely different information environments for each possible voter, and you have a system that ensures that only the tiny few of wealth can do any of the above.
A perfect recipe for toxic politics. But it all starts with a politics of winner take all. If we can move to proportional representation systems, where cooperation beats confrontation instead of winner take all, there is a chance we can survive. But continuing to do politics on the model developed in 17th C Britain is going to end us if we don't.
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