View from the sidelines
Just want to point you over to Peter Levine with some thoughts on how disconnected people feel from politics, even in a watershed election year such as this one.
Among the most important observations is this one:
Among the most important observations is this one:
Third, there was no empowerment agenda--no talk of how citizens have becomeThis lack of "empowerment" or whatever label you want to give it is an issue that I plan on giving a lot of attention to. Go see what Peter has to say, and feel free to share any thoughts on what could possibly "empower" voters.
spectators but could be given new responsibilities for self-government. This is
a deep problem exacerbated by the complexity of modern issues, the delegation of
power to administrative agencies and courts, the weakness of grassroots groups,
and the influence of specialists (lawyers, economists, professional
educators).
Conservatives respond to public unease about spectator politics when
they attack "activist judges" for "legislating from the bench"; but their
critique is usually inconsistent and opportunistic. Some progressives may have
seen voting as a sufficient form of empowerment in 2006--but it isn't. We will
need richer and more demanding forms of civic engagement if we are really going
to grapple with our problems.
posted by Patrick at 1:30 PM
1 Comments:
Sorry in advance for the rantiness.
I perceive (and I don't think I'm alone in my perception) the government as being in an awful stalemate. On one side, you have politicians who want to keep their cushy jobs. On the other side, you have politicians who want to keep their cushy jobs. What divides them is their blind adherence to beliefs on both sides of "wedge" social and foreign policy issues that (by their very nature) preclude compromise.
The electorate has been fully indoctrinated to believe that a vote for one party or the other will drastically change the direction of the country, pulling it either so far to the left that we all become lax, promiscuous, career boozehounds with no focus on the common good, or so far to the right that we all become Puritanical closet cases with a monolithic, intolerant state religion.
So it's with understandable trepidation that people approach election day: do you cast your vote for the nervous hedonist or the nervous xenophobe? The worst thing that can happen, in this kind of situation, is that one of them actually wins.
So it's not just a complexity involved in modern issues that's alienating voters. It's that a lot of these issues rely on unbendable belief systems. You can leave them as they are, or you can break them. There are no compromises, particularly in morality issues.
I would love to be able to remove morality legislation and morality issues from the purview of governing bodies entirely. But of course, stripping morality from the government makes them lose the incentive to provide a social safety net for the poor, and outlaw violence, etc., all things that I would argue (from my own morally-grounded standpoint) that a governing body is obligated to do.
So morality is enmeshed in governance...but how do you justify choosing a candidate who doesn't match your moral outlook completely? Would people feel better about candidates who made compromises? Maybe the disempowerment of the electorate has more to do with a lack of compromise in politics?
Post a Comment
<< Home