One of the most sacred rights we have as Americans is the right to vote. Yet citizens are opting out of the political system and not exercising this right in alarming numbers. In the last presidential election 42.5 percent didn’t bother.
THE OPT OUT SYNDROME
One of the most sacred rights we have as Americans is the right to vote. Yet citizens are opting out of the political system and not exercising this right in alarming numbers. In the last presidential election 42.5 percent didn’t bother.
No one expects a midterm turnout to approach that of a presidential year. For decades, turnout rates in midterms have been ten or more percentage points below those of presidential elections. Democratic focus group interviews show that of those not planning to vote this year, two-thirds don’t even know that an election is being held.
And yet the GOP state controlled legislatures, now numbering thirty, continue to pass restrictive voting laws primarily aimed at demographics that vote Democratic. The reasons they cite are voter fraud. Take a look at Texas with over 600,000 registered voters without a photo ID. Yet the number of alleged cases, allegations not convictions, of voter fraud in the last two general elections numbers, wait for it… four. And this chimera serves as justification for the oppressive voter restrictions in many red states,
aimed at repressing minorities and the poor who primarily vote for Democratic candidates
Currently, only thirteen percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. In previous polls, while many gave a low confidence rating to Congress they indicated strong approval of their own congressman. Current polls rate both lower than warm spit.
I cannot begin to recount the number of times I have heard someone say “Why vote, they are all the same?” Well they are not all the same but telling this to a disillusioned individual is like saying to someone who is severely depressed – cheer-up. Politics has become a dirty word.
There are two distinct views being offered for this sorry state of affairs. According to Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and Professor at Berkeley, Americans are simply sick of the partisan, internecine warfare that our politics has become. George Will, of the Washington Post, believes that many are contemptuous and disillusioned because politicians are “bereft of restraint and disoriented by delusions of grandeur”. Putting in my two-cents I see it as the crazies on the extremes of the Republican Party have turned our elections into a circus, a slapstick comedy.
Let’s take a look at Mr. Will’s theory first. He recently wrote: “The collapse of confidence in government is not primarily because many conspicuous leaders are conspicuously dimwitted. Americans understand that their increasingly ludicrous government lacks adult supervision. What they might not understand is that [many major leaders] come to government so bereft of restraint and so disoriented by delusions of grandeur” that they engender contempt and disillusionment.
Will posits that this contempt and disillusionment is brought about by over reaching legs and regs (a paternalistic attitude where government intrudes into the minutia of every day life) and the almost complete lack of commonsense among bureaucrats. An example that Mr. Will cites to support his point, and that underlies his article, is the menace of bake sales, or the Cupcake Postulate.
Since the federal government subsidizes school lunches, it must control the lunches’ contents (i.e. health foods under the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act), which validates regulation of what it calls “competitive foods,” such as vending machine snacks. Hence the need to close the bake sale loophole, through which sugar in the form of cupcakes might sneak: Foods sold at fundraising bake sales must, with some exceptions, conform to federal standards.
Congress had good reason to pass such a law. Of children ages 6 thru 11 in 2012, 18% were obese. That is up from 7% in 1980. In adolescents obesity has more than quadrupled in the past 30 years.
These stats are horrendous but no reason to over step into the sacred realm of bake sales. To Mr. Will the Cupcake Postulate explains everything (from Ferguson Missouri to our inability to secure our borders), concerning Americans’ withdrawal of confidence in government at all levels.
According to Mr. Will, the collapse of confidence in government is not primarily because many leaders are conspicuously dimwitted, but because Americans have come “to understand that their…government lacks adult supervision”.
The next view is that of Robert Reich who puts his hypothesis simply - most Americans feel powerless, and assume the political game is fixed. So why bother? And, in point of fact, it is fixed and will continue to be fixed unless, and until, we end partisan gerrymandering.
Reich cites a new study that analyzed 1,799 policy issues, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups and average citizens. Lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and monied business interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. Hello Citizens United! The conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
But did the average citizen ever have much power? Walter Lippman argued in his 1922 book “Public Opinion” that the broad public didn’t know or care about public policy. Its consent was “manufactured” by an elite that manipulated it. “It is no longer possible … to believe in the original dogma of democracy,” Lippman concluded.
What’s more, the political power of big corporations and Wall Street was, at one time, offset by the power of labor unions, farm cooperatives, retailers and mutual banks and insurance companies.
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith labeled it “countervailing power.” These alternative power centers ensured that America’s middle and working classes received a significant share of the gains from economic growth. But today corporation’s out-spend unions by a very wide margin, some have estimated it to be 66:1, farm co-ops are now big agribusiness and retailers are now corporate megaliths.
Meanwhile, political parties stopped representing the views of constituents. As the costs of campaigns escalated, parties morphed from state and local membership organizations into national fund-raising machines. Presidential candidates in 2012 spent in excess of one billion dollars each. And it is now commonplace for House races to far exceed a million dollars per candidate. Hello Citizens United!
We are in the early stages of a vicious cycle in which political power becomes more concentrated in monied interests. And they are using that power to feathering their own nests getting tax cuts, expanding tax loopholes, benefiting from corporate welfare and free-trade agreements, disemboweling safety nets, enacting anti-union legislation and reducing public investments.
All the above is exacerbated by gerrymandering. In the last five House elections at least 90 percent of incumbents running for another term were reelected. In all but one of the last five Senate elections at least 80 percent of the incumbents were returned to office.
For the 435 House seats, 364, or almost 84%, are viewed as “safe” meaning that one party is sure to win. Of the remaining 71 seats, only 16 are considered truly competitive, 23 are sort of competitive and in 32 there is only a slight chance of not returning the incumbent.
Frank Bruni of the NY Times says, “What dominates our politics is a war to gain or maintain turf, not a battle for a better America”… “But what are all these politicians running toward? [We] know more about what they want to destroy than about what they yearn to create”… “How a country so rightly anxious about the days ahead stays fixed in the days behind is the great paradox of the 2014 elections”.
And now for my theory of our opt-out movement: As the extreme elements of the far right gained traction, politics in many instances turned into a slapstick comedy, a Bevis and Butthead redux.
Think I am overstating the case: in North Carolina a state senate hopeful and former town councilman, submitted his resignation written in Klingon. In Ohio a Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio's 9th District, and a Tea Party favorite, donned a German Waffen SS uniform and participated in Nazi re-enactments. And morons like Todd Akin, a GOP Senate nominee in Missouri, stated that women who are raped could not get pregnant.
These candidates, and there are many, many others, constitute a political miscalculation on the part of the Tea Party. By putting ideology over electability, and selecting pugnacious and misoneistic candidates, they arguably lost the Senate for the Republican Party in 2012.
All of the above further concentrated political power among the elite, while leaving out most of the rest of America. But if we give up on politics, we’re done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The only way back toward a democracy and economy that works for the majority is for the masses to get politically active once again and establish a new countervailing power.
The corporations and Wall Street are doing what they do best – making money, often at our expense. The rest of us need to do what we can do best – use our voices, our energy and zeal, and our votes. Most of all our votes, for it is at the ballot box that we can truly enact change.
Max Weber defined leadership as being comprised of passion, responsibility and judgment. Well we have a president who, no matter what his other virtues, seems passionless. Republicans who have eschewed all responsibility for governing in favor of power, and bureaucrats so bereft of judgment and commonsense that they attack bake sales.
Now I get it, that’s how we should utilize all that military hardware given to our police departments. I cannot believe that any ten year old manning a bake sale table at their elementary school, will not say “hands up don’t shoot” then drop to the ground and cower in fear when confronted with an assault vehicle and a police swat team. Screw fines and wrist slaps, this is the way to eliminate cupcakes from our schools.