I’m not sure if democracy is dead (or was alive to begin with) in this country, but one thing I do know is that spirited, reasoned political discourse has been rotting for decades now. And regrettably for us, the stench is now sufficient to stifle any reasonable steps towards solving any of the multitude of problems society faces today.
The latest wave of decay from the corpse of elegant discourse emanates from the health care debate. The public option will force massive insurance companies out of business! Introducing the public option will lead this country down the slippery slope to a socialist, single-payer system! The health reformers want to kill your grandparents by taking away their insurance!
May I inquire as to what mental institution these idiots escaped from? Essentially, political discourse consists of yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre to incite a panic, thus creating more chaos than there was before. It shows in the length of what television news generally shows of any politician’s speech: as several political scientists pointed out to me during the election season, the average sound bite has decreased in length since the 1950s to the point where most clips from speeches and debates focus on a sentence or phrase usually no longer than 15 seconds.
The best examples, of course, are the sound bites that seemingly define presidencies: Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” Ronald Reagan’s “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and any of George W. Bush’s inane “Bushisms” that many an office desk calendar use as a source of entertainment. While these statements tend to be pithy in most people’s minds, they completely ignore the grander context of the various actions politicians took during their time in office.
By focusing on Nixon’s denials of Watergate, we forget that he DID get the country out of the quagmire that was Vietnam and started the country towards declaring a war on drugs. By fixating on Reagan’s denunciations of the government, we ignore his massive defense budgets (including the ludicrous “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative) and the fact that he was the sitting president when the drinking age went up to 21. And by obsessing over Clinton’s risqué liaisons in the Oval Office, we miss the fact that he left office with the federal government running a budgetary surplus and strong intelligence to the incoming Bush administration that terrorists might be planning a major strike on America.
The death of discourse and debate dominates local news as well. Various interest groups bring up all sorts of clever slogans designed to spur people to make a hasty, uninformed decision. As a resident of Cary, I’ve been witness to signs against the town expanding and annexing certain areas into its tax base, usually with terse statements about “stopping Cary now!” And of course, on campus, we have some screaming that democracy is dead on campus after the Student Senate ignored the referendum regarding a certain indebtedness fee.
Sadly these rallying causes do little more than get people angry and drown out any attempt to have a reasonable discussion about actual solutions to real issues.
After all, such simple yet inflammatory statements have led us to conflict, crisis and sometimes war “Remember the Maine!” “Fifty-four Forty or Bust!” “Mission Accomplished.”
Do these ring any bells?
