The Gospel According to the Politicians
Partisan politics continues to be sold as the answer in our war to preserve democracy as we soldier on toward a more perfect union. It is not the answer, and we are not soldiering on.
“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” —John Adams, some guy with bad teeth
Dear Americans,
It’s election season, and all of Sainthood is a flutter at the news that the future of this American democracy is at stake, as the television commercials and politicians say. And I must say, I would want an American democracy to exist in the future almost as much as I wish an American democracy existed right now.
Until money is out of politics and the poison of partisanship is drawn from the body politic – which would then be free to demand deeper conversations in lieu of vapid electioneering – we merely have the shiny veneer of democracy; it looks and functions just okay enough to pass as adequate to the masses too easily drunk on rhetoric and wedge issues designed to keep us bickering, lest we notice the wanton corruption of both major political parties, neither of which deserve your vote, no matter how desperately they tell you they do.
We all know we deserve so much better than a doddering fool well past his visionless prime and a gold-plated carnival barker, but we let this disastrous presidential choice seem somehow normal two years ago, and now we’re having a referendum on the remnants of this false dichotomy of lunacy.
We choose to fool ourselves it’s okay that no one can win the presidency unless they raise $2 billion. We seem perfectly fine with letting ill-equipped powder-headed pundits and so-called political journalism experts tell us who is “electable” and who isn’t, leaving us with an uninspiring pool of dunderheaded party hacks.
We’ve decided it’s normal for our so-called representatives to spend more than half their time raising money for re-election, and that it’s okay for anyone – let alone spineless partisans – to spend their entire careers in so-called public service, wherein they get a pension and free healthcare for life as they deny these benefits to their constituents, who ironically hand over their money to re-elect their preferred candidates, who in turn spend said money on messaging to make sure you hate their opponents, who we are told would treat us even worse. What sort of sorcery is this? What sort of dark age do we live in?
We’ve decided it’s okay for lobbyists to have the ears of our so-called representatives whenever they want, while regular citizens are shut out. We seem perfectly fine with a media paid for by pharmaceutical companies. We like to complain Twitter is now run by an evil genius while the Washington Post is owned by a different evil genius, and since time immemorial news organizations have been owned by various people and nefarious asset management firms – as is the case for the New York Times – few of which are interested in holding true monied power to account.
The entire system is so astonishingly undemocratic that, for example, only when a celebrity like Jon Stewart articulately, passionately, and publicly shames congress will our elected officials transcend their normal intransigence to take care of sick September 11 first responders. If our elected officials need their arms twisted to take care of 9-11 heroes and veterans of stupid wars, then how can we trust them to lead on complicated issues or do what’s right in the face of, say for instance, the health insurance industry and pharmaceutical industry whose stated priority number one is to make cash, some of which they feed into a broken system they desperately want to keep afloat so their board members can buy yachts.
And of course, each party is committed to the exclusion of smaller political parties from the so-called democratic processes, including debates, which they themselves are designed to keep our public conversations as shallow as possible.
Debate moderator: “the American health system is broken. What would you do to fix it, Candidate X, if you became president? You have two minutes.” And then Candidate Y has 90 seconds to respond. This is embarrassing and absurd and, to my point, antithetical to real democracy. It is, though, made-for-tv pro wrestling-style theatrics to entertain the masses and Twitter blue checks, who are also in it for the money.
Each party is committed to lockstep partisan unity on issues as important as maintaining the populace’s general ignorance toward our government’s treachery around the world, not to mention ensuring we all goose-step along with warmongering against an old Cold War nuclear nemesis, unaware that in war, unintended consequences are the norm. Shut up, we’re told, and put the right flag in your Twitter bio, as if trying to understand geopolitics must and should be left only to the Ivy League graduates we put in charge of national security. Fuck. That.
On things of war and public health and everything in between, neither party is all that interested in presenting issues of real concern to the public in a way that would allow us to make actual progress. For instance, we all know no one should go bankrupt because they get sick with cancer or their body gets ruined in a car crash. Yet, we rarely start our conversations on common ground; we instead allow our conversations to start from our ideological corners, where each political party feeds us platters of platitudes with sides of blame of “the other.” This is not how democracy was designed to function.
And yet we accept it, I guess, because we’ve picked sides. We believe rhetoric and select truths from our side, and we know the other side is telling lies. We don’t really want democracy as much as we want our team to win, no matter what and no holds barred. And by “holds” I mean corruption, hypocrisy, bad ideas, short-sighted plans, gerrymandering, a refusal to codify universal election protocols, and a bizarre desire to trample universal principles we once thought foundational to democracy.
What Americans seem to want is not democracy, but a beneficent dictatorship seemingly on their side. And I understand why. People consider the threats from the other side incredibly real and scary. But the reason I’m not naming these threats is because both sides claim threats and both sides claim answers and both sides are desperate for you to believe them.
I know what you must be thinking: “But my side is obviously correct. Here are the reasons. So, the threat to democracy is REAL!!” I invite you to ponder the fact that the other side says the exact same thing, maybe for different reasons, which is a very interesting phenomenon we ought to explore because it means we are talking about different things while speaking in different languages. This should be concerning.
It’s not like neither side has a point. It’s that both sides have a point. They have many points. They are also ideologically home to lecherous extremists, the loudest assholes in a room already fuming with odious ideologues. But the general points of contention from each side would be excellent fodder for adults to consult on. Yet, we don’t seem able, presumably because the adults have already rolled their eyes and took the kids to get pizza.
We’ve allowed – or have been taken hostage by – partisan parties that beneficent adults do not lead. So many Americans know this, which is why unaffiliated voters are on the rise and in some states outnumber party-affiliated voters.
Perhaps these unaffiliated voters should coalesce around foundational principles of investigating the root causes of problems and common ground on issues of broad concern instead of partisan power grabbing. [I’m aware I’ve not mentioned problems inherent in the permanent state, the military industrial complex, globalism, and imperialist policies of hypocrisy. But first things first.]
As you root for your candidates to win, go ahead and feel good if they win. Feel like you participated in the great American experiment. But please do not fool yourself into thinking the righteous side has won or lost. Do not feel that your issues of concern will be addressed properly or torn to pieces as democracy survives or fails. For every issue you are concerned about, there are ten others you should care about but don’t, because no one talks about them, I guess because they are boring even though millions of lives are at stake.
Here's one of a thousand: sugar and corn have no nutritional value and are, in fact, two of several causes of our epidemic of unhealthy Americans. Yet both are subsidized by the federal government to the tune of billions of dollars each year. If you took an interest in this as a new member of Congress, and you got past the façade of sugar as a necessary preservative or the country’s need to keep food costs low, you would lose your next election because your party would make you lose. This is the opposite of democracy, even though millions of lives are at stake, thanks to said subsidies and the fact our food system is based on nearly toxic foodstuffs.
And so, after Election Day, as sad as it makes me to be the naysaying voice of reason, your candidate will only have won or lost a chance to caucus with a corrupt partisan party primed and ready to do little but ask you to support them again with time and money in two years because, obviously, the barbarians are at the gate.
As always, good luck, Americans.
Your Friend,
Mark, of Bethlehem.