TROY SENIK
Staff Writer
Those who search for harbingers of what a new year brings in the events of its first few weeks may want to consider avoiding Washington, D.C. for most of 2006. The sight of confessed criminal and lobbyist (but, I repeat myself) Jack Abramoff leaving a Washington courtroom dressed like a distant Corleone cousin certainly doesn’t bode well for the 12 months ahead. Though to be fair, a year that is playing host to both the winter Olympics and the midterm elections does bring to mind the phrase “always a bridesmaid, never a bride.”
If 2006 is to become one giant banana peel for the federal government to slip upon, however, worse outcomes are certainly imaginable. Thus far, the major contribution of the 21st century to American political history has been to provide new insight into exactly how riven by hollow partisanship the nation can become. Note that the evil here is partisanship and not ideology, the latter being a favorite black-hatted villain (see Jack Abramoff) of John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004. Partisanship is, in its more uncouth forms, the fraternal twin of nationalism, a belief system that is essentially amorphous and relies exclusively on a common label for unity. It knows not what it is, but it certainly knows what it calls itself. The true partisan knows for certain that whether he is a lion, a wolf or a lamb, he is always a lion.
Ideology, on the other hand, though often demonized, at least indicates a groping towards a coherent system of thought. There have been times when partisanship and ideology seemed to intersect. Like them or not, the conservatism of Ronald Reagan and the Great Society liberalism of Lyndon Johnson at least pointed back to coherent intellectual roots. Today, however, no such focus is to be found. The Republican Party, which endured a quasi-Mosaic exile from the halls of power in the 20th century, regained the reigns in the mid- 1990s, only to reveal a few years later that Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were apparently the only two men in the party who knew what they believed. Meanwhile, Democrats continue to define themselves almost entirely by what they are not, a strategy that is equally as ineffective in the game charades as it is in the charade that the party is currently trying to hoist on the country.
Though we’re told that we inhabit an America of red and blue states, it’s instructive to note that one thing; 75 percent of the American population can agree upon (as per a recent poll) is dissatisfaction with Congress. And therein lies the seeds of our present evil.
Ask any statistician why, when congressional approval ratings are so consistently low, members of Congress are rarely forced from their seats, and they’ll provide you with this simple truth: polling numbers reflect Congress as a whole, not individual congressmen.
In reality, members of the legislative branch are consistently rewarded by their constituents for the same sorts of behavior that pockmark the body as a whole. Thus, the wasteful pork barrel spending on the national level becomes “taking care of the folks back home” in the provincial idiom. The same “we the people” often fêted in high school civics textbooks (with language that makes the scope of their dominion apparent) have decided that, though the average American has to work through mid-April just to cover their tax burden, the sacrifice is appropriate as long as we can continue to fund overseas dairy development and the National Wild Turkey Federation (both actual items from recent federal budgets).
If the nation’s capital is to become functional again within our lifetimes, two things must happen. First, ideology must reemerge. The traditional Republican belief in limited government is probably our best hope, for precisely the same reason that distinguishes it from virtually all other political belief systems: it demands restraint from those in power. Republicans need to learn that their responsibility is to ask not what they can do for their country but what they can keep from doing to it.
Second, the reckless trust in “the people” must end. The controlling idea behind American government was to create a republic in order that the opinions of the masses would be, in James Madison’s words, “refined and enlarged.” Perhaps we’ll never solve the problem of members of Congress dumping taxpayer checks into money pits in 435 congressional districts, but we can certainly prune in order to save the tree of liberty.
01-26-2006