Saturday, December 27, 2014

Don't Worry, Be Happy - The Debbie Downer Election


Shiny Happy Presidents Having Fun.


Any list of the most popular politicians in American history would include:
  • Teddy Roosevelt,
  • FDR,
  • Dwight Eisenhower,
  • JFK,
  • Ronald Reagan, and
  • Bill Clinton



- and while these guys differed on many, many things, they have something in common.  They are/were positive guys.

Contrast the Shining City on a Hill to anything coming out of current politicians' mouths.

None of these guys ignored things that were going wrong.  But they largely focused on positive outcomes, rather than on fear-mongering.  The public image of all of these guys was about America moving forward - and in that process, they made their political foes seem petty and little (even when they weren't: see e.g. Walter Mondale or Herbert Hoover).  And people liked them for it.

Our current political climate is incredibly negative in tone:
  • Ebola fear-mongering and forced quarantines or shutting down flights from affected countries.
  • ISIS fear-mongering and a potential new war.
  • Despair on the D side about the election and potential flip of control of the Senate. (From a Democratic fund-raising email title: "This is THE END.")
  • On the R side despair about potential (so far nonexistent) voter fraud.

And this tone persists even while a lot of things in our country are going better -






- and while we still have substantial problems, can you think of a single time in history when we didn't?


The difference is the way we view things, and the way our leaders and the news talks about them.

How do you deflect from the fact that Congress hasn't done anything in the last two years?

How do you move people to the polls?

The modern theory is that playing on people's negative emotions can make them vote and make them give you money - but that's a dangerous game to play for politicians, because it undermines democratic cultural values.

Speaker Boehner earnestly said: "We should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal."

When you view everything negatively, and view obstruction as "success," you subvert all progress - even basic functions like funding the government and paying our bills.  This builds a belief in our people that government itself is the problem, rather than an extension of our will as voters.  And that, in turn, erodes our common touchstones as a democracy - we don't see democratic institutions as good and non-partisan, we see them as partisan tools.  We don't believe in universal American values of democracy and impartial justice and governance, we believe Americans who do not agree with us are bad.  These negative, partisan viewpoints being built by politicians and deliberately partisan media are eroding our democracy by undermining our democratic political culture. That's how we have people now earnestly arguing that a duly-elected government is "tyrannical," and "despotic."

What's interesting about the Republican side of this negative political culture is that many of the same Republicans who promote obstruction and partisan use of all political tools consider themselves the political children of Reagan.  In reality, they are closer to the political children of Newt Gingrich - the very negative guy who started the modern wave of politicization of formerly non-partisan democratic processes.  As Speaker, Gingrich politicized a government shutdown.  He and his deputy Tom DeLay scorned the collegiality of former House Minority Leader Bob Michel and promoted hardball politics in everything from scheduling to which groups they would deign to meet with based on the political affiliation of the group's lobbyist.  And that kind of political theory - that politics is war, everything is on the table, and no process should be non-partisan - is how we got heavily gerrymandered districts, politicization of early voting and voter IDs, and the government shutdowns over budget impasses.

What Would Reagan Do?  What Would Bubba Do?

They would come up with a set of ideas, and they'd passionately advocate for them as positive change to voters.  Then they'd work with the other side to come up with compromises that everybody could live with - both Reagan and Clinton did this regularly.  This downer of an election is brought to you by a wave of Debbie Downer politicians who view the world in fundamentally negative terms.  You aren't imagining it, all those political ads, all the talking by politicians on TV, they might as well be accompanied by the SNL Debbie Downer sad horn.  We deserve better.


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