It’s about time, I suppose. So here I go expounding further on my political ideology.
If you recall the first political post (it’s a few posts down, ‘k?), I spoke on some issues that, according to Mugs, were more moral than political. I think he’s right and wrong.
He’s right because questions of sexuality, religion, and life are generally only workable in the realm of morality, where the details of “right conduct” are argued.
He’s wrong, however, because in our country (and many others in the West, these days) morality and politics have become inextricable. The issues I discussed in Politics 1 are moral issues caught up in partisan debates in the halls of local, state, and federal institutions. How many citizens choose their candidate based on support or opposition for abortion? Homosexuality? The Ten Commandments in the court house?
I wrote about the “political” issues in Politics 1 because in our nation, such topics dominate the political landscape, often edging out such significant (but still politically peripheral) issues as the economy, health care, and immigration. So in this post, I’m going to explain why I feel the entire American political landscape is a steaming pile of bison excrement.
The first reason should be evident from the paragraphs above; the citizenry is grossly uninformed and misguided. I don’t mean that we have a nation full of stupid people (though we quite possibly do), rather, that the American political machine proffers plenty of information on issues that the major national actors have little power or interest to change. The moral issues above are still so hotly debated that the odds of a president even seeing a bill about gay marriage pass Congress are astronomical. We see political ad campaigns focus on “American jobs going overseas” and healthcare. Essentially, we have a nation focused on issues which most national politicians don’t really work on.
This leads me pretty easily into my second reason: Politicians at the national level rarely work on anything important. As much power as the citizenry attributes to the Commander in Chief, the real movers and shakers in Washington seem to be Congress. I know that in theory we have “checks and balances,” but Congress cranks out the law, and sets the political tenor of our government. Because members of congress have but 2 or 6 years to a term and face re-election challenges, we see our fair representatives and senators spending more time on satisfying this-or-that group of constituents (or special interests), so as to secure another term in office. Even on such rare occasions where a serios vote comes up, the voting lines are typically drawn along party lines or at least regional lines to further their time in office. How can a representative hope to acheive anything in office when half of the term is spent campaigning for re-election?
The final issue I’ll touch on today (though there are MANY more) is the close ties of our government to money. Yeah, I know, it costs money to run the government. But our political processes should not be driven by dollars. Somewhere along the road capitalism was confused with democracy, and so any attempt to reign in the flow of dollars from one American hand to another is regarded as heresy and a trip down Soviet lane. Consequently we have electoral and political processes driven by businesses and special interests rather than ideals, national, and international health. Thus we have countless international conflicts (some called wars, some not) under presidents from both sides of our marvelous two-party system, all under the guise of “protecting national interests.” And do we receive accurate information from our media about this - owned by the six companies it is? I’ll let you answer that one.
Phew. I need to cut this off. I’m getting too riled up. Anyway, the next installment of my “manifesto,” as Jake likes to call it, will also be political, and will talk about my feelings about the concept of government, and naturally, my elitest ideals on “how things should be.” 
Stay tuned.
Post a Comment