A fourth source of our current dismal political condition is a media which has gone native so badly it makes obsequiousness look like a virtue. For someone who came of political age in the Watergate era, the last few years have been a jaw-dropping astonishment. Today’s mainstream media is virtually unrecognizable from just a generation earlier, and it often wasn’t so very great back then. Two anecdotal stories say all that needs to be said on this subject. The first is the near complete absence of coverage in the mainstream media of the Downing Street Memos when they emerged, a bombshell which I have argued is almost without question the second biggest news story since the Berlin Wall came down (9/11 being number one, and there is much to suggest that that one has also been treated to somewhat less than sufficient investigative attention). The New York Times actually did better than other outlets, just by virtue of mentioning it at all. They covered these leaked memos from the angle of the British election of the time, however. Confronted by an angry blogosphere about why these documents that reveal the lies of the Iraq war weren’t translated into screaming four-inch headlines on the front page, their editors mumbled something about how the foreign desk and the national desk never quite connected with each other. Uh-huh. Sure, I believe that. As I said, this was one of the better bits of coverage. Elsewhere it was never mentioned at all.
Then there was more or less the entirety of ‘news’ ‘coverage’ leading up to the war, and during most of it. The stories of media failures to question assumptions about the administration’s propaganda are already legion. What is becoming increasingly apparent is the degree to which the media was complicit in creating the ‘news’ – and not just Fox or the Washington Times, either. I heard Josh Rushing, former Marine Corps media liaison officer, on the radio this week discussing his new book. He described how ‘war correspondents’ would come to him during ‘briefings’, and quite literally ask, "What points do you want us to get across today?" (And apparently he names names in the book.) Could there be a bigger sell-out than that, a bigger abdication of fundamental responsibility? Even in the absence of the other factors enumerated here, it is difficult to imagine anything approaching a robust democracy in any polity where the conduits of information are owned and maintained by supplicants rather than scrutinizers. Heads-up news media hacks: Thomas Jefferson has plans for your blood.
I would certainly also add to the list of what ails American politics both an educational system and a political culture that consistently fail to build an army of the sort of keepers-of-the-flame necessary to anything which is meant to remotely resemble rule by the people. I don’t know if there was conspiratorial project to dumb down the American educational system to the point where its products are incapable of thinking critically about politics (after all, arrogant and insular Americans have long been notorious for their ignorance of history, other cultures, and even geography), but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was. Certainly that has happened, and intentionally, in the public sphere, where one corrosively inane idea after another has been successfully marketed by the vast right-wing conspiracy upon a gullible public. It’s hard to know where to start, but two of the most sinister and malefic of these are the laughably absurd notion of a liberal-biased media (you know, the ones covering the Iraq war), and the even more damaging Reagan mantra that "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem."
Of course, lurking behind many of the items on this laundry list is one in particular, the endlessly voracious gluttony of the crapulent class, the pathological pursuit of superfluous wealth by elites already drowning in shamefully obscene piles of lucre. What massive insecurities can drive those already owning two yachts to favor killing a school lunches program in order to buy a third? What can push them even to the point of destroying the infrastructural goose laying the golden eggs, to save a couple of nickels on taxes? Will they be able to buy enough air conditioners to mollify their children who inherit from them not only great riches, but a one-and-only planet careering toward inhabitability? Better hope the kids aren’t quite as selfish as Mom and Dad, or the latter might have to use that small army of Blackwater pinkertons to protect them from more than just the surly hoi polloi assembled beyond the walls of the estate. Of course, being the Me Children of the Me Generation (these things escalate geometrically), more likely is that the kids will be even more poorly disposed than the parents, who may find themselves one day personally mourning the loss of the munificent state they dismantled in the name of short-term greed. Good luck putting that large, egg-like creature back together.
So, if the question is "What’s eating American politics"?, the answer is manifold. Is it possible to have cancer of the heart? It would seem so, given the predators now running American government. Their mission, of course, is simply to bleed the state dry of every valuable they can get their hands on and deliver those items to their rightful owners, the already fantastically privileged. They have coopted everything and nearly everyone who might serve as a barrier to their plundering, including the media, the political opposition, the educational system, the institutions of government and the very culture itself. The cards have been dramatically stacked in their favor, but we haven’t even gotten yet to the single factor most responsible for our predicament.
A garden left untended will grow weeds. A child left to his or her own devices will become the human equivalent. What ever possessed Americans to allow themselves to believe a political system is any different? Not only is public indifference to politics the single most consequential factor of all of those which ail this political system, its inverse is probably the only possible remedy. Sure, it would be nice to have a Congress, or a Democratic Party, or a media that singularly or collectively decided to actually do their job. But the likelihood of that happening is remote in the absence of an engaged public. Moreover, the likelihood of it mattering under such conditions is also quite slim. There’s just no avoiding it. Public participation in politics is the sine qua non of democracy and good governance, the requisite that both trumps and enables all the other significant factors.
But we’re pretty far from that today. The American people are essentially phoning it in. The signs are everywhere, and they are grim. It’s not just that we barely vote at the fifty percent turnout level for presidential election years (and more like one-third for mid-term congressional elections). That’s a depressing measure of participation for any democracy, to be sure, but what is most troubling is the degree to which the public simply pays less than minimal attention to politics and government. Even those who are bothering to vote are often doing so with a level of engagement that could subject them to a lawsuit for negligence in other contexts. This is drive-thru politics. Pay at the first window, get your cheeseburger at the second, move on down the road.
It’s not that we’re intellectually incapable, either. Americans keep exhaustive amounts of data in their heads about sports, celebrities, frighteningly banal television shows and all manner of other distractions. There’s plenty of storage capacity on their human hard drives, though a purge of all that useless information wouldn’t hurt, nor would running a subsequent defrag to unclutter all that messy space be such a bad idea. But the point is that we could all become quite expert and sophisticated consumers of political information if we chose to.
But, of course, that is the worst nightmare of the political class, especially the rabid right, whose level of support is altogether inversely related to the degree of information and sophistication a voter possesses. If you’re dumb, a phrase like "We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here" sounds plausible. If you don’t pay attention, you wouldn’t realize that there are different kinds of Muslims (and they don’t necessarily all get along), and thus that attacking just any old Middle East country in response to 9/11 isn’t necessarily a great idea. If you’re all wrapped up in baseball box scores instead of knowing a bit about public policy, you’ll believe that the pathetic little tax cut George Bush threw in your direction to buy you off was a good thing for both you and the country. If you’re devoting a lot of time to following Paris Hilton’s travails, you’ll be uneducated enough to believe that global warming is a fraud.
I will give the American public some credit. They now loathe George W. Bush, and that is crucial. Which is why it pains me so much that it took them six years to figure out what was transparently obvious all along. More importantly, though, I am quite convinced that they despise Bush for – if not the wrong reasons – then at least not the most significant reasons one should. That is, they seem to have him figured for a bungler, a village idiot, and somebody who is less than truthful on minor issues like war, civil liberties and the Constitution. The depravity of the Bush administration runs far deeper, however. It is essentially an invading force which twice seized office illegally, has arrogated to itself monarchical authorities while in power, and uses all these for the purpose of bilking the public of its possessions. I doubt that many Americans – even among the seventy percent who think he’s a lousy president – fully understand this.
I think it also needs to be said that, at some level, there is much that is off-putting about politics, particularly the way it has come to be practiced in America in recent decades. Who can blame the public for thinking that politicians are a sleazy bunch in general? They are! Who can blame people for thinking that far too many politicians are more interested in advancing their careers or lining their pockets than in being good stewards of the American polity during their tenure? Who can blame them for tuning out insipid thirty-second television ads that fairly scream out their disdain for anyone dumb enough to listen to them? And who could blame the public for wondering whether there’s any substantial difference between the party of Tweedledee and the party of Tweedledum?
But which of these are the chicken, and which the egg? Would any of this occur if the titular owners of American government were more vigilant about maintaining their property? I doubt it. The last thing a politician facing a discriminating voting public would want would be to demean them with insultingly insipid campaign tactics. It’s a worn-out maxim but nevertheless true: People get the government they deserve. If we require more and better political discourse, no politician could afford to deliver anything less and hope to be successful.
People ask all the time, "What can we do?" At the risk of offering a too vague response, the simple answer – I would say fundamentally the only viable answer – is for us to be more responsible owners of our government, to actively encourage everyone we know to do the same, and to seek to establish such behavior as a moral norm in the society. Any parent who allowed their child to play in a busy street would be subjected to the worst kind of opprobrium (not to mention probably losing custody of the child) – and rightly so. Why then should we be allowed to let our government to play in the street? Especially if the reason for doing so is our simple laziness. Awful things will happen. Awful things are already happening.
The great irony of this is that the cost of not paying attention is almost always infinitely higher than it would be to do the thing the right way in the first place. Too much for comfort, we’re like the child who in fighting to avoid doing his homework expends ten times more energy than the homework itself would require. If Americans had any idea of the costs the Bush administration has saddled upon them, for the worst of reasons, they’d go ballistic. They’d be enraged at a thief stealing their money, and yet he’s done just that while they were sitting on the couch. They’d flip out at someone wrecking their living space, and yet Bush had done precisely that while they were watching that Seinfeld rerun for the fourth time – you know, the one about masturbation. They’d get red in the face at somebody wrecking their reputation, and yet Bush shredded theirs before halftime was even over.
The truth is that we are essentially political adolescents in America. It’s not entirely clear that giving us our participatory driver’s licenses is such a good idea. We really don’t seem very responsible, and it’s not like the ship of state we’re driving is some national moped that wouldn’t do much damage to anyone besides the rider and the odd pedestrian in the wrong place at the wrong time. The United States is the QEII of vehicular metaphors. It’s the Saturn V, man. It’s the freakin’ Death Star. It’s capable of enormous damage if piloted by a bunch of "Party on, Garth!" teenagers with an attention span barely suited for playing Doom II, and all the gravitas of a Cheech and Chong movie. This is not a theoretical proposition. Probably a million completely innocent Iraqi civilians are dead now, while the tweener called the American public was busy rocking out to Korn instead of watching the road.
Americans have, I fear, grown intellectually lazy and fearful (which itself can often be another form of lazy). Just like we want a bunch of illegal immigrants to wash our car or bus our restaurant tables, so we want a government on the cheap and easy (which will also sometimes make lots of silly noises about illegal immigrants). We wouldn’t dream of having somebody else choose our dinner for us, and yet we have delegated our futures – often our very lives – to some of the lowliest critters walking the planet, without much more than the slightest oversight. In fact, we don’t even seem to care much when the folks we’ve hired to do the oversight don’t bother to do that.
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