I was walking in my local grocery store parking lot this week when I saw the following bumper sticker: “Re-elect no one!” Now, this being the parking lot of that progressive enclave known as Whole Foods, it might be tempting to dismiss this expression of political disenchantment as little more than liberal whinging. But pace the cherished caricature of whiny effete leftists which enables us to get on with the masculine business of getting our hands bloody, kvetching about the United States’ Congress spans the entire political spectrum. Gallup polls indicate that “In 2014, an average of 15% of Americans approved of Congress,” and, more importantly, that “The same percentage (15%) of Republicans and Democrats approved.” (http://www.gallup.com/poll/180113/2014-approval-congress-remains-near-time-low.aspx) Gallup does note that congressional approval percentages are lower when the chambers of Congress are split between the parties, as they were in 2014, but even when Congress was undivided, as it was most recently in 2009, approval still maxed out at a mere 30%. So, depending on the year, anywhere from 70 to 85% of Americans are kvetching en masse.
If Congress is getting consistent F’s from we the people, it is clear that we expect more from our representative body. The dynamic is one of “You work for us, but this isn’t working for us.” With this as our unstated or implicit consensus, it then becomes a matter of uncovering just why Congress isn’t getting the job done. So, for example, we might look at the gerrymandering of congressional districts: “If a substantial number of districts are designed to be polarized, then those districts' representation will also likely act in a heavily partisan manner, which can create and perpetuate partisan gridlock.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering) But if gerrymandering dates back to at least 1812, when the word was first coined in honor of gerrymandering Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, then how do we make sense of the fact that “over the past four years, Congress' approval ratings have been among the lowest Gallup has measured”? (http://www.gallup.com/poll/180113/2014-approval-congress-remains-near-time-low.aspx) I would suggest that things begin to make sense when we accept the fact that Congress is getting the job done, it’s just that they don’t work for us anymore.
Support for this suggestion comes from a recent research article authored by Princeton University’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin I. Page. Gilens, in an interview with Sahil Kapur, describes their methodology thusly:
“What we did was to collect survey questions that asked whether respondents would favor or oppose some particular change in federal government policy. These were questions asked across the decades from 1981 to 2002. And so from each of those questions we know what citizens of average income level prefer and we know what people at the top of the income distribution say they want. For each of the 2,000 possible policy changes we determined whether in fact they've been adopted or not.” (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview)
Survey says!:
“Contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests.” (ibid)
But a few factors make the obvious handwriting on the wall into more of one of those doctor’s office eye test Snellen charts. In addition to the aforementioned “decades of political science research,” there is the intense emotional investment that Americans have in our small-d democratic self-image; asking an American whether they live in a real democracy has, since 1776 (or since the Civil Rights movement, if you don’t happen to be white), been the equivalent of asking if the Pope’s Catholic or if bears shit in the woods. Add to this the fact that the voting polls are still open, and that elections are still fiercely contested between two seemingly opposed political parties (only seemingly, given that they both dance to the same twin tunes “of economic elites and of organized interests”), and the idea that the United States is no longer a democracy begins to shrink down to the illegible font size at the bottom of the Snellen chart.
All that to say that the American public is likely to express its discontent with Congress by kicking Democrats and Republicans out of congressional majorities on a rotating basis for the foreseeable future. And it is almost certain that they will maintain record low approval ratings for Congress regardless of which party holds the majority. The former behavior is invested almost entirely in maintaining the illusion of democracy, i.e. it is a blatant form of that primitive defense mechanism, denial (“acting as if a painful event, thought or feeling did not exist” (http://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-defense-mechanisms/0001251)), while the latter behavior ventilates the rage of our unacknowledged loss. In other words, having lost our democracy, we are stuck in the first two stages of grief, denial and anger.
Since we need our democracy back, lest civilization devolve into hell on earth over the next few decades (time is of the essence!), I would also suggest that we don’t proceed out of anger and denial through the other three stages of grief: bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Instead, we need to cut the denial, and, necessarily but at great risk, work with our anger. The risk is that our anger will burn out of control, taking the form of what is known in America as domestic terrorism, and that the repression of this violence will be more violent still, and that our nascent police state will emerge from the other side of all this, enabled by previously unthinkable invasive technologies, in a position of total and implacable domination. Even given this risk, anger at the loss of our democracy is the only possible catalyst for resistance. But that anger must be yoked to the recognition that while war may very well be the continuation of politics by other means (politics having thus far been our saccharin substitute for democracy), peace is the actualization of an authentic democracy-yet-to-come. All of which makes me wonder if our late poet-prophet rock star, Kurt Cobain, was thinking of democracy when he wrote these lines:
“Come as you are, as you were,
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend,
As an old enemy.”
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