OK, here’s a fun game: raise your hand if you trust the government.
Yeah, one guy raised his hand, but he was just stretching. No biggie — we’ve all done that.
What happened to us? Politics was a fine profession 250 years ago. Sure, everyone hated politicians back then too, but there were some amazing people in public office. Ever heard of William Wilberforce? John Jay? How about Patrick Henry? Scratch that last one -— everyone has heard of Patrick Henry.
The point is this: we’ve lost something over the last hundred years or so. It wasn’t our trust for any government in particular — we’ve never really had any — but I think we’ve lost our trust in the idea of government. It used to be something that, in theory, we could totally rock at (if we could just figure out how), but now it’s just something we do, because we have to, like babysitting a bratty 5-year-old kid sister who just discovered knock-knock jokes. It really sucks, but we’ve been doing it for a long time and we’d get in a lot of trouble if we stopped now.
Furthermore, if we hate it so much, why have we spent such huge amounts of money on recent elections? Each election cycle becomes increasingly expensive, and in inverse proportion to our joy. Even if you exclude the buckets of cash spent by the unquestionably-evil corporations and unquestionably-virtuous unions, there have been several kajillion dollars donated to various campaigns by suckers like you and me. If money is time, we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on things we don’t believe in. Why? Why are we losing our trust for government, and why are we responding the way we do?
Possibility No. 1: Government is an out-of-control weapon. First we had a government. Then we realized that we could use it to make people do what we want. After years of careful research and adjustment we have perfected a machine that knee-caps the “other side.” Every two years we get to vote on who controls it.
Possibility No. 2: We don’t know what we have. There were lots of amazing political leaders in the past. There are some in the present (don’t ask me to substantiate this statement). Where are the heroes? We can’t see the heroes because we know them too well. Let’s face it; everyone has warts — lots of them. Our high-definition, wart-oriented media are eager to feed us as much wart-themed coverage as we will pay for.
It takes 20 years for people to forget your faults, less if you get assassinated. The only reason we love Kennedy is because he got killed before we realized that we hated him. We know too much about the faults and flaws of today’s leaders and what we don’t know we’re happy to make up. History, on the other hand, is like a box of cereal; you only shake it until the toy comes up top. Everything’s already happened, so when you find a nice pretty hero you make sure not to look too closely at the rest of the junk.
Everyone hated the heroes back then, we just don’t remember it.
Possibility No. 3: We don’t know what we have, so we’re losing it. Here’s another fun question: Who’s enthusiastic about the gubernatorial race? Not me! In a state of about thirty-seven million, how did we end up with such boring candidates? I can’t vote for Brown, because I’m a Republican, and I can’t vote for Whitman, because I’m an American. So I am forced to become that reviled political creature, the Protest Voter. I didn’t become an idealist for this.
If we stop rewarding what we want, it tends to go away. Sure, there’s a lot of back-scratching and generic corruption, but in the end our votes and political involvement does matter. When we give politics a minimum of input we invite a race to the bottom. I never bothered to discover and support candidates I admired, so now I have the privilege of vacillating between two blanks. I got what I paid for, and so did you.
Oh, and whatever you do, please don’t make frivolous write-ins. It creates a lot of extra suffering for the volunteer vote-counters. Most of them are decent people.
Possibility No. 4: We can’t agree on anything. As the world becomes increasingly complicated we develop into increasingly distinct groups with distinct values. With less in common, we find more to dislike about everyone else’s policies and candidates.
Who knows? Maybe you’re really jazzed about the gubernatorial election. I can respect you, but I don’t understand you. Multiply that by more than 300 million people and we develop the potential for some fantastic dysfunction. Just saying.
Possibility No. 5: The educational system has betrayed us. This is an easy one. I finished reading “The Anti-Federalist Papers” (edited by Ralph Ketchum) over the summer. I read “The Federalist Papers” last summer. Both books opened my eyes to questions and concepts that no political science professor had ever hinted to me. Everything I had learned before was trivial in comparison. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this stuff? Oh you stupid educational system.
In fact, this is just another instance of losing what we don’t reward. It’s not like our instructors got together 50 years ago and formed a secret cabal of lameness. They’re too busy for that. We did this as a culture by electing not to participate in our own continuation. Neither education nor politics is a machine that can be turned on and then left to do its thing at top performance. Everything spins down and we need to keep cranking it.
These are all compelling and well-written justifications for why we distrust government, but they are all merely symptoms of the problem. If we don’t trust government, it’s because we don’t trust ourselves. But who’s going to do the heavy lifting for us? Hey, politics stinks. We can’t choose to like it, but we can choose to do it. Maybe it would become more palatable. How can that be worse than not trying at all?
Eric Baldwin is an electrical enginering senior and Mustang Daily libertarian columnist.