Years ago, before the Soviet Union collapsed, a friend of mine worked in Washington for his hometown newspaper. At a diplomatic reception he found himself standing in a corner with a reporter for the official Soviet press. My friend had taken a few extra drinks. Part of their conversation went roughly this way:
My friend: C'mon, Yuri, you've been in our country for a couple of years. Surely you have to admit that our system is better than yours.
Yuri: Noncommittal grunt.
My friend: You've seen our system up close. We have representative government. People can choose their leaders.
Yuri: Mildly irritable grunt.
My friend: C'mon Yuri, how can you possibly say you don't like our system?
Yuri, with a cold glare: If you were honest with yourself about "your system," you would admit that your elected leaders have far more in common with each other than with the people they supposedly represent.
Politicians of every kind have this ethic in common: They are willing to have power over the rest of us, and they are disposed to keep it to themselves and their fellow party members. Thus Yuri would not be surprised by the polarization of today's public affairs. While it rises from cultural and economic tensions that test the public's sense of well being, it is stoked by an ugly struggle for partisan tenure in the driver's seat.
The partisan ethic elevates the interests of political organizations above the interests of the public. And it creates a vocabulary -- an idiom -- that adulterates democratic process.
Idiom is useful in private and public conversation. It helps us make certain kinds of points economically. But with overdoses of the partisan ethic, idiom strays into caricature. Politicians on the right are painted as flint-hearted plutocrats who would gladly grind the faces of the poor. Politicians on the left are called addle-pated do-gooders who like to fund their good works with other people's tax money.
These images cross an important line. They invite disregard and distrust. In this way, electoral and public policy decisions come to be styled as good- guy/bad -guy contests: It is not necessary for us to do the work of making informed decisions. We need only give power to the folks in the white hats.
The notion that our nation's options can be so simple is silly on its face. Likewise the notion that this political party or that one has transcended the limits of human nature and can be relied upon, ipso facto, to Do The Right Thing.
The selfish temptations of power touch every ideology. In political parties they excite the institutional instinct for self-perpetuation. They can carry partisan careerists and true believers to destructive extremes, as in today's behavior by one hot-eyed faction of Congressional Republicans. (Adherents of honorable Republican traditions can only cringe, and shelter in the maxim that an idea is not responsible for everyone who claims to believe it.) Playing to one angry segment of the electorate, these toughs commandeer the people's legislature to make their own private war against a duly elected Democratic president. Abetted by a blinkered and inept Republican leadership, they have dragged the Congress of the United States into historic disrepute.
Extremists do not last in American public life. In due time, those now plaguing Congress will be curbed or replaced. Of greater concern for the long term is a chronic, cliche-driven inattention to the realities of our national affairs.
Partisans on the right inveigh against big, expensive, intrusive government. And wariness on this score is warranted.
But the favorite cliches of the right to not acknowledge that truly limited government is long gone. It would no longer be sufficient. The task of running this country is too complex. The dangers afoot in the world are too great. American government is big, and it's going to stay big no matter who's in charge -- witness the record of several Republican presidents who rank high among modern architects of huge government enterprise. The enduring question for our country is not whether government should be big or small. The question is, to what uses should big government be put?
In this connection, partisans on the left call upon us to do a better job with social equity. And well they should. The inequities that persist even yet in this prosperous country are not morally or politically tenable.
But the favorite cliches of the left do not forthrightly own one of their necessary methods: empowering government to take something that belongs to you and give it to me. Nor do they remind us that this power, once given, remains in place to be used in the discretion of the unknowns who will one day succeed the incumbents of the moment. Nor do they squarely face the truth of charges that government programs are inherently vulnerable to waste and corruption.
With rhetoric that advertises false choices and disguises real ones, politicians invite charges of cynicism. Clearly, some of them are guilty. They treat politics entirely as a game of appearances. They aim to succeed by glad-handing the electorate and tricking up new costumes for a single message: Trust me. You can't trust the others, but you can trust me.
If we rest with charges of cynicism, however, we merely join those who traffic in simplistic formulations. A conspiracy theory won't do. Not all politicians are cynical.. Other factors combine to fill our national affairs with partisan sloganeering -- language that is not meant to illuminate choices but only to persuade voters to take sides.
One factor is public indifference. Most people don't regularly vote. Among those who do, not a few vote out of ignorance or prejudice. Earnest politicians who might want to get beyond slogans face a huge obstacle: At any given moment, most of the electorate isn't listening.
I can't render public service if I can't get elected. I can't get elected if I can't get you to vote for the ideas I represent. I can't get you to vote for me if I can't get your attention. And to get your attention in today's America, I need the vivid phrase, the colorful image, the sound bite and the photo op. Nothing else reliably works. A sorry expedient becomes the norm.
The special tensions of the moment are circumstantial: an historic economic swoon; sea changes in the demographics of the population; the newly inescapable closeness of the world community.
These circumstances, and our experience of them, will settle. The chronic failure of better conversation about our national priorities is a deeper thing, and worrisome.
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