We have experienced a serious economic collapse. Life is becoming harder and harder for most people and the prospects for the future are not good. More jobs will be exported. Almost everyone knows that the rich will become richer and the little people will suffer more and more.
This is a year when the irrationality of the electorate is on full display. David Gerson, one of the three wisest Republican pundits, excoriates Democrats for indirectly addressing this irrationality and for complaining about the party of "No." Nowhere does he prove that they are wrong. He just notes that between 20 and 33% of the electorate are Tea Baggers. Does it follow, then, that they cannot be irrational and deluded?
Recently, there was an unsuccessful effort to strip away legislation that encouraged the exporting of jobs. It failed, and there was little public reaction.
Many of the same people who were so angry with the bankers who nearly destroyed our financial system did nothing to help those who tried to reform the financial system. Instead, the Tea Baggers backed Representatives and senators who tried to block financial reform.
Unless something dramatically changes, the Tea Baggers will restore control of Congress to the same people whose policies brought about the great Bush recession.
In the last century, before scholars decided that deliberative republics and democracies depended upon open public marketplaces of opinion where reason and pragmatic opinions would prevail. In the last 60 years, scholars have been carefully developing rules for civil discourse, in an effort to improve democracy.
Thomas Jefferson came close to that view much earlier when he talked about "elementary republic," where farmers made the basic decisions for their neighborhoods and assumed such burdens as road work or taking a turn as a hog reeve. Of course, the New England town meeting institutionalized this approach. He was writing in the age of print, when people could easily communicate in meetings or in print.
In 1939, John Dewey noted that the problems of that time required a far more informed and electorate than existed in the time of the Founders. He believed that guarantees of expression, assembly, and press were wonderful but that they can be greatly discounted when there is an atmosphere "of mutual suspicion...fear, and hatred."
In the age of mass communications, it is all about dominating the marketplace of ideas. Advertising and cognitive scientists are all important. Antonio Gramsci, rotting away in one of Mussolini’s prisons saw this and realized that " hegemony," dominance of the market place of ideas was all-important and that this was best done in the United States of America. A weak stat has soldiers on every corner. Capitalist enjoy most control where there is the myth of free communications and where they control the context in which ideas are framed and what is thinkable. Grover Norquist, a major rightist, has read and understood Gramsci, and it is possible that more rightist thinkers understand the Italian sage than progressives. However, the rightists are not 100% sure Gramsci was right. They have enacted the Patriot Acts and supported an elaborate system for monitoring opinion and even rounding opponents, just in case economic pain becomes so great that ordinary people will try to think for themselves.
Today public problems are far more complex; the political arena is nationwide, and communication is filtered and mediated by mainstream media. Reason, a fully informed electorate, and civility are still prerequisites of a deliberative democracy, but the lingua franca of political discourse has been reduced to emotionalism, smears, information screened and framed through techniques first used abroad by our practitioners of psy ops. In Ronald Reagan’s day, these approaches were turned against the American citizenry under the rubric of "public diplomacy."
Today, deliberative discussion has been nearly choked off by constant rhetorical excesses of right-wing pundits and politicians. These people began to purge civility from public discourse in the days of Richard Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew, and they greatly accelerated this effort with the advent of the New Right. Guided by cognitive scientists in the GOP think tanks, they began rewiring the memories many Americans so that they learned to think in catch phrases and respond emotionally when properly stimulated.
It is what is called cognitive framing theory. Unfortunately it works best for the right because atavism is so easily manipulated and stimulated. The terrible events of 9/11 provoked deep fear and made it even easier for the Right to demonize its opponents and question their patriotism.
Politics is much more about perceptions than reason, and progressives still believe in the ability of ordinary folks to sort out their best interests and act pragmatically. Al Gore, in The Assault on Reason, discussed this but stopped short of admitting how successful the advertising and psy-ops people have been in serving the GOP’s special interests. The nation could be approaching an economic melt down, but even senior citizens who have lost a huge chunk of their savings and workers who have lost their jobs cling to silly theories about how Democrats cause this down turn and the high energy prices. Al Gore, the epitome of a thoughtful candidate could not win in an America addicted to fear and hatred of the "Other." Edmund Burke, thought he had discovered and, rightly, denounced this "silver bullet" of politics.
The ancients knew about it and the academics in the Republican think tanks perfected it. Karl Rove was not quite a genius, he just knew how to apply the principle and training others in doing so. It all comes down to how much contempt a political operative has for democracy and the people.
Deliberative democracy may not be dead, but the events of 2009 and 2010 suggest that it may need to go on lifve support.