If the so-called upset in Massachusetts, in which Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, teaches us anything, it is this: just as youth is wasted on the young and wealth is wasted on the wealthy, voting is wasted on voters.
Ostensibly, the idea was to punish Democrats in general and, perhaps, President Obama in particular, over what may generously be called governmental policy on the economy. Target: Wall Street. That’s certainly the perspective percolating throughout op-ed pieces at the Huffington Post, A.P., and other sources of commentary, and it obviously makes a certain kind of sense. When the status quo is a problem, voters turn against incumbents. But Democrats and Republicans rely on this predictable flip-flopping behaviour, which encourages a staggering amount of intellectual laziness. Just block your opponents’ agenda and watch as it implodes and leads to voter dissatisfaction. Presto! The incumbents fall and the cycle repeats itself, all without needing to provide new ideas and forward-looking alternatives. Republicans have been having a grand ol’ time stymieing Democrats, and with the filibuster now the default stance in the Senate instead of a straight up-or-down vote, we have a political status quo in which the politics of doing nothing yield greater rewards than the politics of achievement. President Obama is fond of the quote in which doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the very definition of insanity. By that measure, American voters are enablers whose sanity is very much in question.
Cataloguing Democratic failures is an easy enough task; just ask the disappointed progressive base. But before becoming so disillusioned with Democrats that a vote for Republicans becomes an appealing prospect, it’s worth remembering that while Democrats may be the worst kind of spineless enablers, Republicans are the ones who got the country into this current mess. Iraq; Republicans. Financial deregulation; Republicans. Surplus turned deficit? Republicans. The current economic crisis has its roots in President Bush’s presidency. Sept. 11? That happened under a Republican President’s watch. Our collective memory failure in regards to the Republican party is just the topic of a discussion between Bill Moyers and author Thomas Frank. (http://www.alternet.org/story/) It’s worth reading the entire interview, but here’s a good excerpt: BILL MOYERS: Okay, they [Republicans] compiled the worst track record on jobs in decades. And they ended up with the worst stock market in decades. I mean, it was a decade of conservative failure. And yet, Obama's their villain?
THOMAS FRANK: Think of all the crises and the disasters that you've described. And I would add to them things like the, what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And the Madoff scandal on Wall Street. And, you know, on and on and on. The Jack Abramoff scandal. The whole sordid career of Tom DeLay. All of these things that we remember from the last decade. I mean, some of them that we're forgetting. Like who remembers all the scandals over earmarking, anymore? And who remembers all the scandals over Iraq reconstruction? All that, you know, disastrous, when we would hand it off to a private contractor to rebuild Iraq. And it would, you know, of course, it would fail.
Those things have all sort of been dwarfed by the economic disaster and the wreckage on Wall Street. But I would say to you that all of these things that we're describing here are of a piece. And that they all flow from the same ideas. And those ideas are the sort of conservative attitude towards government. And conservative attitudes towards governance. Okay? BILL MOYERS: That government is a perversion.”
And there it is again, the curious paradox that people who don’t believe in governance, let alone good governance, are voted into government. (See http://www.thefrontpageonline.com/new/ariticle) So how can the GOP provide an alternative to an ineffective Democratic Party that keeps moving to the so-called “center-right?” With options open to voters like supporting third parties such as the Greens or the Libertarians, there’s really not much of an excuse for following a script that benefits the powers-that-be.
A part of the problem is philosophical; ideology routinely trumps pragmatism. While principles are necessary in evaluating how good or bad a policy’s outcomes are, we forget that a policy that works, that actually solves the problem, is the end goal. What good is an ideologically pure lump of policy that just sits there? But the moral of the Massachusetts story merely shows that voters continually fall into a stupid game of ping-pong – to their own detriment. The problem with being the ball is that the only thing you get from playing the game is whacked. Repeatedly.
Frederik invites you to discuss this week’s column at his blog (frederik-sisa.blogspot.com)
