Cynicism is not a winning strategy for democracy
It has now been more than four decades since Newt Gingrich went to Congress with an on-the-record agenda of destroying comity between the parties and Americans’ trust in Washington.
In times of upheaval, humans look for comfort. We look for stability, for familiarity, for normalcy.
So it is not surprising that as we look ahead to the next election, many voters are looking for a “return to normalcy.” The instinct is perfectly understandable, but we believe it is more nostalgia than solution. Bluntly, the “normalcy” of the last generation of our federal political leaders has been a general failure to provide for the long-term health of our country.
America was once a country that saw problems and fixed them, that built interstates and space programs and envisioned structures to reduce wars and rebuild nations. But in the last few decades, this conscientiousness has come to an abrupt halt. Climate change, student debt, Social Security funding, immigration, prison overpopulation, unaffordable child care, wealth inequality and wage stagnation, medical costs, neglected infrastructure, and on and on. For decades, these problems have been as obvious to American policymakers as they have been unaddressed by them.
In fairness, recent decades have seen notable successes in addressing a few long-term problems. The Affordable Care Act got more people health insurance, and the Americans with Disabilities Act helps people with disabilities access public accommodations. But these exceptions highlight the rule of our inability to find solutions. Additionally, with the systematic assaults on the ACA, it’s difficult to say whether it will end up with the Kyoto Accord and the McCain/Feingold Act in the graveyard of solutions that failed in execution instead.
We’ve had nearly every combination of parties in control of Congress and the White House during these decades, so what has so thoroughly disabled our ability to address long-term problems?
Put simply, we have allowed our politicians to get away with it. It has now been more than four decades since Newt Gingrich went to Congress with an on-the-record agenda of destroying comity between the parties and Americans’ trust in Washington. The fruits of that agenda are obvious in Americans’ declining trust in government, in the decline of our governing norms, and in the desire of many Americans to “just let them all burn.” With this deepening cynicism comes lower expectations and requirements for our politicians. In other words, our politicians are no longer solving big problems because we no longer expect them to.
These lowered expectations of honesty and productivity run from the top down, from President Trump repeatedly praising repressive autocrats to conservatives consistently defending his aberrant and possibly impeachable behavior on the basis that all politicians are corrupt. The jaded line of reasoning is that because all politicians are crooks, any investigation must be motivated either by partisanship or finances. Such disillusionment may even help explain the Evangelical embrace of Trump. It’s an unlikely marriage from the outside, but as political researcher Lydia Bean says, many Evangelicals no longer believe that politics can advance the common good, making Trump just so much boiling oil to pour over the gates on their enemies. Sadly, those “enemies” are their fellow Americans.
So what are we to do?
Demand change. Our current systems have been broken, disproportionately thanks to targeted and deliberate action by Republican politicians over the past few decades. America is at its core an idea: together, we can secure the blessings of liberty and justice to ourselves and our posterity. We have not always lived up to our ideals, but we want to be a nation that regrets those failures and not one that embraces them. Anyone — and especially any politician — who tells you that failure and corruption are normal is an affront to the very fabric of our country and does not deserve to be in office. Demand that our candidates and elected officials support norms, decency, and the rule of law. This will almost certainly mean not just rebuilding, but substantially restructuring, a number of institutions that the current administration has been working hard to destroy. Our democracy depends on it.
Shannon Patrick and Kelcey Patrick-Ferree live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on November 8, 2019.