I'm an extremely competitive person, about things that matter, and about a lot of things that don't. It's part of the reason I love football so much, and part of the reason my Twitter feed gets so amusing on Sunday afternoons, or so I'm told. My competitive nature drives me to complain about poor fantasy football performance from some of my starters, even when I'm beating my beloved twelve-year-old daughter by 30 points. When I taught my sweet, but brilliantly competitive in her own right, younger daughter how to play backgammon, I pulled my punches with her on the first game. After that, she was on her own. (To her credit, she beat me two out of five games.) Recently, my husband and I were playing a trivia game on PS3 against each other, and I kept the game going until 5 a.m. because he is a formidable trivia opponent, and I just really wanted to win once or twice. Competition brings out my Mr. Hyde, turning me from the kind and compassionate person I generally am to, honestly, kind of a jerk. Hey, knowing is half the battle.
There is one area of American life about which many people feel competitive, and I simply do not, and that would be the realm of American politics. Election Day this past Tuesday highlighted this in such a conspicuous way. Let me preface everything that I'm about to say by stating this, clearly and simply. I am not a Democrat. I am not a Republican. I don't care if you are a Democrat or a Republican. I don't care if you have political ideals that you hold particularly dear. I don't. And, when I say I don't care, I don't mean that in a derisive or confrontational way. I mean that it literally is of no consequence or concern to me. If you read this, and decide you want to comment to fiercely defend your particular views, you're welcome to do so, but know that you're not going to change my mind, and I really don't care to try to change yours, because, and I'm not sure if I've made this clear or not, I don't care.
However, as a keen observer of the sociological impact American politics has on citizens on the whole in our modern age, I feel that the whole experience is worthy of some truly objective commentary, and truly objective commentary is nearly impossible to come by these days.
Many people (most people, actually) are still vilifying George W. Bush for the way he ran the U.S. into the ground during his eight years in the White House. While I think he was well-intentioned (in the sense that he wasn't an evil genius making bad decisions just to ruin the United States), and acknowledge that he faced some really difficult situations during his two terms, I have to agree that he was a terrible president. The situation he left behind for Barack Obama to resolve is untenable, and the election results that rolled in two years ago weren't really a surprise to anyone. Everyone was ready for some hope and some change, and few were willing to be realistic about what it was going to take to effect that hope and change.
The dire economic situation coupled with the media-savvy nature of the 2008 campaigns, I believe, made people more invested in the political process in general, and the immediate accessibility of information via the internet in all its various forms facilitated and propelled this level of investment.
We heard a lot of talk about "working together" and "bi-partisanship" and "mutual compromise" and "the good of the country" over the past two years, but if you look objectively at the inner workings of our federal legislative branch, what occurred was the Democrats refusing the Republicans a seat at the table while working out the details of health care reform and other pertinent legislation, and Republicans, instead of working in a mature, professional, conciliatory way, were petulant and juvenile about how they wouldn't cooperate anyway. The Democrats responded by using questionable modes of pushing legislation through to approval, bypassing the need to have any Republican support, which, in my mind, is a slap in the face to the voters who elected those men and women to represent their interests on Capitol Hill.
Civility has disappeared from public discourse, and our elected representatives are chief among the offenders. Truth in the campaign process is definitely viewed as optional. One of my favorite web sites, PolitiFact, does an excellent job of fact-checking statements made in and about the political arena. Recently, the reviewed the respective campaigns of Nathan Deal and Roy Barnes, who were running against each other for governor in Georgia. They rated their campaign efforts as a whole "Half-True." I think that decent human beings with any level of integrity will be honest and truthful and respectful. I'm not seeing many decent human beings with any level of integrity running for public office, and this bothers me. The fact that it bothers few others bothers me even more.
The absence of civility isn't limited to official political communication, though. It extends all the way down to normal citizens like you and me. Social media has made everyone a pundit, and it turns out that everyone knows everything, and if you don't agree with them point for point, you're an incurable idiot. The anonymity of the internet is empowering to those who are convinced they are right with no regard for facts and no consideration for perspectives that might differ. I find that the people who "yell" the loudest on the internet about their political beliefs are consistent in demanding cooperation and compromise from the other side while being completely unwilling to compromise their perspective. It's a microcosm of what happens consistently on Capitol Hill.
In the realm of politics, opinion has become indistinguishable from fact at every level of society, it seems. A major cause of this is the evolution of news into entertainment. I can't watch any major news channel--CNN, Fox News, MSNBC--without being told exactly what I should think about what's happening in Washington D.C. I'm intelligent enough and confident enough in my own opinions to develop them without input from news producers or anchors. I resent the transition of a free press to a press that's driven by sponsors and ratings rather than truth. The Glenn Becks and Rachel Maddows of the world consistently sacrifice truth for ratings.
The truth has been marginalized to the point that nobody knows what it is anymore. I was waiting at the chiropractor's office a couple of weeks ago and a sweet older lady was telling me how she was there to tell the chiropractor she could no longer afford to visit his office, because, and I quote, "Obama made all of my bills go up." Numerous people have referred to the fact that the tragedy of the recent suicides of homosexual teens is directly to blame on the GOP as a whole, rather than a result of cruelty from peers and irresponsibility of parents who don't teach their children that kindness and compassion to everyone is fundamentally necessary and not negotiable.
The marginalizing of truth is not the only thing I resent about the contemporary political climate. I resent the patronizing attitudes from people when I say I'm not a Democrat, or I'm not a Republican. If I tell a Democrat that I'm not a Democrat, they immediately decide that I'm a racist and a homophobe and that I probably think waterboarding is awesome. If I tell a Republican that I'm not a Republican they immediately assume that I am going directly to hell. (As a Christian, I have some gigantic theological problems with the Republican/"Christian" connection but it's too extensive to try to incorporate here, so I'll save that for another post.)
I resent that the priorities for politicians have become so skewed. Their commitment is to party first, re-election second, special interests third, and their constituents and the common good barely make the list, if included at all. I resent that our current culture of news as entertainment has elevated politicians to the highest levels of celebrity. They aren't movie stars (although John Boehner looks like he may have been a supporting cast member in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)--they're supposed to be public servants--but the media plays out the day-to-day in D.C. like it's a serial network drama as opposed to real-life decisions that impact the daily lives of those of us who vote to choose people to represent our interests.
Campaign finance is probably the thing I hate the most about our current political situation. Reform is needed, and now. It makes me physically ill to know how much is spent each election cycle. In this most recent midterm election cycle, the total spent was $4 billion. Let me just say that again. $4 billion. About $300 million of this amount was contributed by outside groups, but the bulk of these funds came from each candidate's own money that they spent for their own mudslinging ads and yard signs that they put in my yard without permission. Part of the problem we currently face is that normal people can't run for office and win. It renders the idea of a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" completely impossible. Does anyone really think that a multi-millionaire or multi-billionaire understands the experience of normal people, who have to work for a living, who have to tighten their budgets because of the current economic climate, who have to try to figure out how to get by on unemployment when they lose their jobs, and have to try to figure out how to get by when unemployment runs out eventually? Yet our elected congressmen keep voting to give themselves pay raises, and hold fast to their federally-funded (which means we pay for it through our taxes) health care benefits, which far exceed the minimum benefits they established in the recent health care legislation.
The reality is, regardless of which party is in power at any given time, not that much changes. I have actually really enjoyed, in a rueful way, seeing all of my Democrat friends and acquaintances freak out over the Republicans taking the majority in the House, because it's identical to the freaking out my Republican friends and acquaintances did when the Democrats took the House four years ago. Since that time, nothing has really changed. Abortion laws have stayed the same. Gay marriage still isn't legal. Tax rates have, by and large, stayed the same for all but the highest income brackets. The Second Amendment is still in full effect. Health care reform has been enacted into law but no major changes have yet been implemented. So, now the Republicans have the House majority, and mark my words--not much will change over the next two years. Or for the two years after that. Or the two years after that. Let me clue you in on a little secret--and I'll apologize in advance if this blows your right- or left-leaning mind. The Republicans are never going to make real efforts to criminalize abortion, and the Democrats are never going to take real action to legalize gay marriage. Each party needs their respective controversy to propel their voters to the polls, and they need the promise of eventually addressing these issues on behalf of their constituents to maintain consistent voter support.
Maybe now that the Republicans will have the majority in the House both sides will learn to play nice and work together a little more effectively. Maybe we'll all see that the balance of power at the highest levels of government as prescribed by the Constitution is a good thing. Maybe in a crazy, unprecedented lapse of selfishness and pride, our elected representatives will decide that, hey, maybe we shouldn't keep giving ourselves raises in the worst economy in decades, and maybe we should try to actually do what's best for our constituents and our shared future instead of just towing our respective party lines, and maybe we should pass the DISCLOSE Act, and the Fair Elections Now act!
Oh well, a girl can dream, right?
