Backbones, Teeth, and Reason
by: Matthew MacFarland ‘11, Editor-in-ChiefWe must look to history to save our political discourse from its current crisis
Weeks after the 2008 presidential election ended with Barack Obama the victor, many pundits and politicos rushed to declare the end of the Republican Party and the end of conservatism as a force in the American political landscape. It does seem that with the prospect of government-provided health insurance coupled with the reassuring presence of our Nobel Prize-equipped presidents has created an unassailable progressive majority. The appearance and subsequent volume of far-right voices and actors upon our political stage—the crackling air of irrational, fearful anger at town hall meetings, the tea party marches seeking absolute fiscal accountability, the rise of fear-mongering Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as central mouthpieces for the party—has alienated and discouraged right-leaning, clear-headed moderates. Indeed, the Republican Party, or at least, its extreme elements, has become louder and more obnoxious even as its measurable political population has shrunk. Joe Wilson’s much-discussed and much-reproved outburst during the president’s September 9th healthcare speech provides a perfect example of what the Republican Party has become: a platform for tactless sophistry and disrespect not only for its political opponents but also for that sanctity of rational political discourse upon which this very nation was founded.
Yet the Democratic Party, too, has not managed to create a national sense of unity and purpose which it was mandated to construct with Obama’s election last November. Not for the first time, Democrats, with a comfortable majority in both houses, a Democratic president, and an American people ready to approve a liberal agenda, are failing to transform that latent power into the kinetic political energy needed to substantially fulfill any of their proposed reforms. The confident, passionate rhetoric that so often characterizes Republican politicians is missing from the vast majority of Democrats (Obama’s presidential campaign excluded) in Congress; despite their numerical superiority, Democrats, as they have been in the past, continue to be overpowered by their counterparts. The situation is reflected on the popular front, where the conservative vocals of local yokels would have drowned out any moderate or left-leaning discourse on the issues at hand—if any such discourse were pursued by Democrats at all. The hot-blooded, aggressive words that Republicans have mastered appear to have been erased from the Democrats’ dictionary; as a result, we have a spineless Democratic Party pursuing potentially beneficial policies—unfortunately, those policies require a backbone, a hereditary trait that seems to be missing from our invertebrate species of Democrats.
Apart from fanatic rhetoric missing from the left and over-powerful on the right, clearheaded and rational discourse has been eschewed by political commentators on both sides in favor of the emotional fallacy, which garners high television ratings but ultimately obscures the pursuit of truth. The responsibility for the degeneration of our national discourse by the likes of Glenn Beck and Keith Obermann, who routinely resort to emotional outbursts that muddy the issues (Beck via temper tantrums and clown-like silliness, Olbermann via antics reminiscent of the lower-lip-quivering pleadings of a five-year old denied his candy in line at the grocery store) belongs to both left and right.
The time has come to forge a new political consciousness that honors neither misleading emotion nor television ratings over discussion, one with the ability to pursue intelligent decision-making uninhibited by the all-encompassing desire or psychological dependency to steal the public limelight, one with calm determination and total belief in the pursuit of progress, one with both backbone and teeth.
The precedent for such politics exists, though we may have to turn to our history textbooks to find it—our own hallowed founding fathers were men of such integrity. By placing their trust in careful consideration of all possible alternatives they arrived at the greatest political experiment the world had ever witnessed: the creation of a truly mixed government bound with the fabric of a living, supreme document, which still exists today as the (supposed) highest law in the land. Emotion was not an alien notion to these men; anyone reading Patrick Henry’s immortal “Give me liberty or give me death!” cannot help but be struck by the pathos of his words. Yet it was not emotion that gave birth to the ideology lying behind this rhetoric; indeed, it was the opposite. Enlightenment thought—rationality—that constructed the foundation and scaffolding for the American Revolution in Governance.
How have we strayed so far from the genius of our then-newborn nation’s leaders? What has happened to the reverence of careful consideration, of intelligent debate, of rational thought, of respectful dialogue, of putting country before tongue? There is of course room for emotion; no one would expect passionless robot-voices to be effective government representatives (though a visit to C-SPAN suggests such robots have already infiltrated our government). And this is not to suggest that every politician be perfect, for even our founding fathers had their faults. But in this we can discern the single greatest difference between those who built our government from scratch and from those who now attempt to maintain it: those who came before held themselves to the standard of perfection despite those faults and never tired from their pursuit of that perfection, whereas the politicians of this time seek only to attach their names to some bill and work towards reelection the moment their feet step into the Capitol.
This disease is widespread in both parties, and both are guilty of the state of our political landscape. It may even be too late for our two venerable parties, though it is almost impossible to envision another party entering the mainstream realm—gone are the days in the 19th century when the major parties were eliminated by public support, or when powerful third parties existed and exerted actual political power.
Our two parties have failed us, and one can only hope that the next generation of politically active, intelligent-minded citizens—like those being educated in schools like our own that value respectful and rational dialogue–will be able to turn the tide of willing senselessness and enact a political consciousness governed, like the early days of this country, not by political gain and hallow, emotional rhetoric, but by holding reason and cogent thought as the highest standard of measure.
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