The 2012 campaign is kicking into high gear, and it is already rife with stories of doom and gloom. The poetry, hope and change of four years ago – the first election most Millennials voted in – are already distant memories, buried under years of the dissonant prose of governing and politicking in the modern age.
Even then, when it looked like the world could tip into another full-on Depression at any moment, we at least accessed something special in our politics. My generation dared to hope that our first vote would mark the change of something new; now, politics is not about to take our minds off of the slow-motion train wreck of the Euro crisis. The domestic scene isn’t much brighter: super-PACs reign, 50 percent of Americans are in or near poverty, schools are failing, bargains (grand and not) fall through, left and right are gearing up for a holy war over “religious freedom,” and the Greek chorus of cable news is singing the siren song of “declinism.” Yes we can?
It’s understandably difficult to see through that death spiral of negativity to the underlying problem. But the problem is there, and it already has this election in the bag. Namely, the trouble is that the most critical victim of globalization and “hyper-partisanship” has been basic agreement on the form, means and end of our political system.
That’s a big claim, but I’ll highlight a few trends as potential evidence.
For one thing, look at the way the electorate has split itself into groups that no longer correspond neatly with the parties. The Democrats are torn between the Occupiers and their establishment (popularly regarded as standing for not much of anything); on the Republican side, the Tea Party cart is careening away with the establishment horse, which in turn staked its hopes on the über-establishment Mitt Romney to set things straight. Meanwhile, both parties are chasing the ever-growing and all-important independent cohort. What we’ve ended up with is the schizophrenia of a left and a right both split between pro-establishment “haves” and anti-establishment “have-nots” – and both appealing to the not-so-silent majority of those who can’t stand either party.
Second, let’s critically examine the anti-establishment movements on each side of the aisle. On the left, the Democratic Party is toying with whether and how much “Occupy” rhetoric it should adopt. The problems are obvious: the Democratic superstructure isn’t much more popular than its Republican counterpart, and Occupy is more of an awareness campaign than a political movement. Like the internet, it is a fad of the 90th-95th percent that has over-interpreted its mandate and under-realized its potential. It has not a leader or message per se, but a status update: “we’re in debt and disgruntled.” Occupy pretty much got what it asked for: fifteen minutes of fame and a trending hashtag, but not much hope or change.
On the right, the Republican Party has cried havoc and let steep the bags of tea. As with Occupy, the new emperor’s logical garments have left something to be desired. The Tea Party continues whacking the country over the head with pocket copies of a Constitution conceived in treason, created in response to the underwhelming results of a states’ rights regime, enacted by compromise and larded with 27 amendments – all with the intention of telling us that government is the problem. Again, they have got their wish: the federal government is a shambles, and the Republican primary season featured a host of flavor-of-the-month “candidates” so dismal even the Democrats worried whether the GOP could be “saved.”
Finally, we’re starting to reap the whirlwind of our non-existent civics education. Shocking numbers of Americans have no idea how Supreme Court justices are selected or for how long; meanwhile, the court is busily legalizing the purchasing of politicians. Congress is about as compromise-friendly as the half of us who bothered to vote asked it to be. And once again, all hopes have been hysterically placed on the election of our not-so-omnipotent chief executive. Like this essay so far, everyone speaks about the election as if we were only electing a savior-president and not the hundreds of state and federal legislators and the judicial nominations that will also come with this election.
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With an activist and arch-conservative Court legislating from the bench and Congress refusing to legislate whatsoever, let’s take a closer look at what the executive has become, too. The most telegenic branch of government, the presidency has taken on much of the power that the Constitution was designed to prevent it from having. We have acquiesced – it’s easier to rally around one Leader of the Free World than 435 crank lawmakers.
At the same time, the tele-world has quietly conspired to take a large measure of power away from the presidency. Every four years, we gear up for a transformative “One Hundred Days.” And each time, we get 100 days’ worth of stories about how frustratingly powerless the office is. The Obama team peddled change we could believe in; they struggled to make the change from campaigning on Apples to governing with Dells. Meanwhile, what President Obama calls his “day job” has become the de facto global governor the UN has never delivered. Whether or not we think of him this way – and whether or not the rest of the world likes him – the U.S. president is unquestionably the most powerful politician in the global imagination.
The cognitive dissonance represented in all this is staggering in scope. And this is to say very little of the process that actually produces the president every four years. Suffice to say that Comedy Central is onto something with its “INdecision” tagline: about half of Americans, many of whom would not have been enfranchised under the Founders’ Constitution, vote for the man the world tacitly expects to lead a globe that is proving less and less amenable to such control.
Domestically, we have the system we’ve wished for ourselves. We want mediocrity and get it. We enable money in politics and end up with increasingly narrow choices – INdecisions – between men of money and roughly identical socio-economical and educational pedigrees. We use Congress (Article One) to express our anger and ignore the court (Article Two), then put all our hopes in the chief law-enforcement officer (Article Three) to create the republic we want.
Therein lies the real rub: faced with a do-nothing/know-nothing legislature and near-universal contempt for “the system,” we demand a savior who will just do something. And we get it, in the form of a presidency that independently declares wars, indefinitely detains and tortures “enemy combatants,” panders to the Wall Street tycoons who fund elections, and legislates by fiat (executive order) for lack of a better option.
To be clear this is not “a” presidency as in the previous one or the current one, but an office that has far exceeded its appointed limits by popular demand. The last two administrations have between them provided more brazen examples of this phenomenon than usual, from not-declaring (or funding!) two land wars to opening up a whole bunch of new ones by drone, but this is really epiphenomenal of the big conversation we have not sat down as a country to have: what, exactly, do we want a 21st-century U.S. government to look like?
The old trope that messiness and delay is built in is true, but it’s increasingly being deployed for lack of a better idea or a real explanation for a legislature that is empirically the most intractable in recent history, if not all history. The unstoppable force of globalization has not yet reached the immovable object of the U.S. Capitol. How long can that last? The judiciary is likewise a shambles, and empirically the most conservative ever. The presidency has used the commerce clause and executive orders to pick up everyone else’s slack, but – as we just saw with President Obama’s decision to stop deporting young undocumented immigrants – gets slammed for going it alone. Assuming he still stands by it next week, Romney’s critique is not wrong, but instead of starting a real conversation, it simply brings us back to square one: the 112th Congress.
Declinism has always proven to be unfounded hysteria before. It may still be – we are not exactly the only ones struggling right now – but it is logical to assume that even “exceptional” inertia can’t sustain us forever. We practically invented modern capitalistic competition and are probably still the best practitioners of the system, but there is nothing to say we can’t be beaten at our own game at some point. Everyone slows down with age; refusal to keep training and re-inventing oneself only hastens the decline.
Changing a government – not to mention the form of a government – is always a delicate and dangerous undertaking. But the Constitution is neither infallible nor immutable: we have amended it 27 times before and might profitably consider doing so again. This is a job for cooler heads than those of the 112th Congress, but we cannot, should not, and must not go on living with the same gap between our desired inputs and outputs in our politics as we do in our economics.
Whether we want an empowered executive, real global governance, a legislature that can adapt at the speed of dial-up or some combination of fixes, we perpetuate the governance deficit at our peril.
