I was watching TV the past few days watching reruns of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. One show was from 1982 and the other was 1980. One of them was on Super Tuesday, so on both shows, Carson did a monologue about politics! What was interesting was that during all of it, there was nothing cruel, hateful, decisive or mean spirited. Everything said was in GOOD TASTE meant just to be funny, good spirited, and harmless. There was absolutely nothing that would offend any viewers or suggest he was taking one side over the other. OR ANY SIDE AT ALL.
During the 1982 show, he discussed the Democratic Convention the day before and asked the audience if anyone watched it? And the room was SILENT. As Carson talked about the various candidates, there was nothing PROMOTING them, just well-intended ribbing, with jokes that were obviously pure humor not actually reflecting on their actual lives, and everyone howled.
During the 1980 show, when Carson asked if anyone had watched the GOP convention, the entire room lit up in applause! As Johnny discussed various people, Walter Mondale, Ron Reagan, ect., all the jokes were obviously not taking any real shots, the jokes were based on obvious fiction for the sake of comedy only, and they were all RESPECTFUL OF THE PEOPLE on BOTH sides, with good intentions and no one in the audience yelled out anything divisive, crass, crude, ignorant, hateful or vulgar. Everyone there was there for a good time.
The two parties were treated as a bunch of folks in a room, some with red balloons and the other with blue. The two parties were like a married couple, the GOP arguing for taking the left turn ahead to take the shortest route to the motel while the Dem arguing to take the right turn and see the scenic route. BOTH parties were after the SAME goal, just two different ways of getting there! They sat in the same room, talked, shared ideas and agreed on some things, disagreed on others.
My question is:
Whatever happened to that world? A world where Hollywood actually applauded Republicans and could be lukewarm about democrats?
A world where people could talk politics without being divisive, monopolar, hateful, mean, cruel, viscous and crude? But actually respect both sides?
A world where BOTH parties were seen as the same passengers on the same bus, just sitting in one isle or the other, going to the same destination rather than two groups a million miles apart, one going to Venus, the other Neptune where each saw the other as anti-American, dangerous to the country, and always trying to throw landmines under the other? And none of the candidates were embroiled in heinous scandal.
At what point, when and how did we ever lose a functioning country like that? And whose fault is it, the voters, or the candidates?
You may find these documents helpful in arriving at an answer to your questions:
Whatever happened to that world?
Existential Cultural and Technological Drivers
In short, the Internet, cellphones and other communication technologies catalyzed the current primacy of popular rather than professional decision making [1], thereby fomenting and encouraging
anti-social individualism and majoritarian tyranny [2] among a polity that, by and large, isn't even aware that is what's happening. It's not that anyone denies the importance of direct public input, it's that in the quest to "win," the other side of the equation -- intermediation by professionals, experts, and institutions -- has been neglected and demonized. [3] Too many reformers and intellectuals, and for that matter the broad public, have overlooked the indispensable role that parties and political machines and professionals play in organizing politics and “
assembling power in the formal government,” as James Q. Wilson so elegantly put it.
The other thing that happened is computing/computers. In the realm of politics, computers and sophisticated computer software allowed political strategist to discover that it's possible to win elections without intermediation, that is, candidates can win on a partisan basis. Like it or not, political strategists/consultants are paid to win elections, not to win elections by building coalitions, and, quite frankly, they're good their jobs. The consequence that is that American politics have come to neglect non-participatory models of decisionmaking such as the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve Board, which not only do their jobs effectively but enjoy comparatively high standing in public esteem. They have reduced the space and scope of expert information-gathering and decisionmaking bodies such as congressional committees and subcommittees and transformed them into little other than pseudo-prosecutors [4] and partisan finger-pointers. [5]
Political Drivers
The modern political process and system is replete with missed opportunities to strengthen intermediation, collaboration. The nominating system affords too little opportunity for input and influence by party professionals and career politicians. Campaign-finance regulations disadvantage political parties relative to individual candidates and outside actors. Reforms that pushed congressional decisionmaking both up to the very top and down to the very bottom have hollowed out the Congressional committee system. Tools that political brokers and leaders rely on to build coalitions and lubricate transactions -- earmarks, pork, control of money and nominations, and more -- have been eroded or even abolished. [6] Private spaces for dealmaking and brokering have shrunk, and the use of secrecy has been systematically delegitimized and abused.
Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but C-SPAN is not, yet we have asked an entire branch of government to conduct operations in a fishbowl, and the narcissists who make up that branch have readily agreed. The arrangement is congenial for the reformers and the narcissists, but it is too often dysfunctional. Meanwhile, Congress has dumbed itself down by shedding staff and expert advisers. The fishbowl is not merely a bad operating environment,
it is one impoverished of expertise and capacity. [7]
It is important to see that intermediation by parties and professionals is not necessarily undemocratic or exclusive. To the contrary, when intermediaries do their jobs well, they consult a wide range of constituencies and build broad coalitions in search of candidates and policies that can unite the party, win a general election, and sustain power in office. Often, they will seek to mobilize latent constituencies, appealing beyond the relatively narrow confines of interest groups and activists who turn out in primaries and lobby most aggressively. Party and professional input is especially important in candidate selection, because it is often more inclusive, as well as more deliberative, than is a primary electorate. Although vetting by party elders and sitting elected officials may at times limit voters’ options, it can also expand and improve those options by recruiting and supporting talent. And it provides an important measure of quality control, which is not something to be embarrassed about. Voters, like all consumers, make better choices when they have better options.
In hindsight, much of the populist criticism of “smoke-filled rooms” looks misguided, or at least exaggerated. Far from shutting the public out, party hacks in their heyday provided forms of political outreach that are sorely missed today -- acting as “
a veritable school of politics for working-class and minority voters.
Party workers and leaders [had] incentives to get out the vote, be present in neighborhoods, contact voters, and be responsive to voters’ contacts. The result was, comparatively speaking, a highly participatory form of local politics."
Political professionals, like voters, are imperfect. But they need not do their job perfectly so long as they do it accountably. To succeed, they need to present voters with candidates who can win on election day and govern once in office, and so they have powerful incentives to anticipate public sentiment and understand the needs of government -- thereby contributing layers of insight and knowledge that voters themselves cannot provide.
Who, then, should be in charge: the voters, or the professionals? The answer, of course, is both. In a hybrid system, they are forced to consult each other, providing distinct but complimentary screens. One might have hoped that this point would be obvious. Alas, the vast bulk of reform energy today is focused on cutting professionals out of the picture
Social studies textbooks used in elementary and secondary schools are mostly a disgrace that fail to give an honest account of American history. [8]
-- Dianne Ravitch
Notes:
- When people watch a magic performance, their eyes inform them, for example, the prestidigitator performed a feat that defies the laws of nature, and audience members will attest to that being what happened. The reality is that s/he did not defy any laws of nature. The audience knows as much, and they don't bother to investigate to find out how the feat was in fact performed. Now insofar as a magic show is entertainment, it's no matter that they don't. The problem is that populism is a mindset whereof its adherents treat the world in which we live as though it's a magic show. That is, populists either (1) believe the BS, or (2) they don't believe the BS, and also make no effort to discern what makes things appear as they are, preferring instead to concoct and ascribe to "conspiracy theories" about how and why they appear as they are.
In short, populists have appetites only for simple answers. Well, the world in which we live is no longer simple. It never was, but never before did we have so many tools that allow us to understand the ways and means in which it is not. Now we have many more than before, and too few people avail themselves of them.
- Click the link and ask yourself how many people in your life, including yourself, were able to earn a passing grade in high school American history class without reading and understanding the document found at the link. I can't speak for "everyone," but I can say that where I went to school, where my kids went to school, and where my teenage peers went, no one could.
- Anecdote: I wonder if I'd need more than five fingers to count the quantity of people here whose reading activities lead them to seek, much less read, rigorously original research and analysis into "whatever." In contrast, I long ago ran out of fingers and toes to count the incidences of individuals here presenting "axe grinding" distillations of selected bits of decontextualized facts.
- I suppose that's not surprising given the quantitative dominance of attorneys in Congress.
- To wit, it didn't take eight Benghazi hearings to discern what material mistakes happened in Libya, but all eight of them were very useful in making Hillary Clinton look bad. People make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are costly to others. That mistakes happen and sometimes hurt others does not make the persons foibles anything other than unfortunate foibles that resulted from having had to take risks. Most leaders do the best they can with the info and tools they have at the time. Sometimes things don't work out; other times they do. Leader do not deserve to be "hung" because "it" didn't work out as hoped for. They deserve to be "hung" for not bringing to bear the reasonably apt resources at their disposal.
Take Trump. I lambaste that man all the time. I don't deride him because he's a novice or because he gets things wrong. I do so because he gets things wrong that he need not get wrong and that he need not is plain as day. For instance, there is no need to say "X is/was when the fact is that X is/was not." I criticized Trump for his frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago and his other resorts. I didn't do so because he was "getting away" for the weekend. I did so because we American taxpayers have provided the president with a very nice weekend getaway resort he has exclusive use of and use that costs the country pennies on the dollar in comparison to what it costs us for him to go to Mar-a-Lago. Of late, Trump's been going to Camp David, and I haven't had a thing to say about his doing so. Trump's behavior needs to be that of a president who happens to be a billionaire, not that of a billionaire who happens to be president. His trips to his resorts were far more the latter than the former.
- Political "pork" and the like are, like the foodstuff, are okay in moderation. There's nothing wrong with a little give-and-take and a little bump-and-grind.
- The linked article points the finger at the GOP. I could not care less who caused it. For my purposes in this essay, who made it happen is irrelevant; what matters is that it has happened.
- For some examples see:
At what point, when and how did we ever lose a functioning country like that? And whose fault is it, the voters, or the candidates?
Oh, without question, the blame lies with voters. Candidates are going to do what they must to garner voters' approbation. The more BS voters forebear, the more BS candidates deliver. One can "blame" a candidate for trying to "bamboozle 'em with BS," but only the most naive among us would think candidates, at least some of them, would eschew such attempts. That they are indeed bamboozled is the voters' fault and no one else's.
People need as much information as possible to make good decisions, especially when it comes to government.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe their minds must be improved to a certain degree.
-- Thomas Jefferson, "
Epilogue: Securing the Republic "
Like Jefferson, Ronald Reagan also understood that firsthand knowledge is the most accurate, putting the matter far more succinctly, "Trust but verify. What distinguishes Reagan, Jefferson and myriad others, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, is the will and deed of their unrelenting commitment to gathering information, not opinions.
"The people," as used by Jefferson and his contemporaries, is not today construed as the Founders meant that term. "The people" of whom Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and the rest spoke were people like them: well educated and learned, intellectually curious, traveled, innovative and inventive, proactive men of the world. Unsurprisingly, those qualities are the ones that then as now beget private and public success and good governance.
Now, unlike then, people bereft of those qualities have loud voices in the execution of governance. Quite simply, governance "of, by and for the people" did not to the Founders mean that all the people should play a central role in each of those capacities. The ones who should are the ones who, by their consistent manifestation of the aforementioned qualities, have, as the Founders intended, earned the privilege of playing a role in the "of and by" the people. That should be so today, and yet it is not.
It's worth noting too that today, unlike in the Age of Enlightenment, we could dwell in an America were the overwhelming majority of Americans have indeed earned the privilege to serve in "of and by" execution of governance, but the fact remains that we do not. The Information Superhighway has all the waypoints one needs to do just that, yet most folks seem inclined mostly to visit pretty much every Internet destination except the ones that can legitimately advance their ascendance into the realm of mind in which the Founders and other great minds dwell.
Note:
- If one thinks for a minute the Founding Fathers had any notions of allowing themselves to be governed by the will of people markedly dissimilar to them, think again. Hell, just ask yourself, were you a Founder, would you subsume your interests in and desire for a stable and growing nation to the whims of a largely illiterate populace? I damn sure wouldn't. See the following:
