MORE partisanship PLEASE !
( "Non-partisanship" is un-American )
Why is just about everyone who talks about "partisanship" these days buying into the idea that there's something wrong with it? It's the American way, for God's sake! It's just another word for "competition"! Do these people think that the center part of stadiums should be reserved for all those "independents" who come to cheer for the players who are too classy to be "partisan"? What color medals are awarded for athletes who excel in avoiding aggression? What about Toyota vs. General Motors or BMW? Where's the hue and cry about all the businesses in the world competing like hell to be "number one"?
Nobody in America complains about competition when it comes to sports, or business, or education, or anything else, because we all know that competition is the way products and services are constantly improved as time goes on. The "survival of the fittest" is the one thing about Darwin's theory of evolution that we Americans all agree on, and none more so than the conservative Republicans of our species.
So why all the penalty flags when it comes to politics? Who started all this crazy-talk about partisanship being some kind of crime or disease, and non-partisanship being the holy grail of a new "post-partisan" era? Talk about
the worst kind of "political correctness"!
Competition in politics is good for American politics, for the same reason that it's good in so many other areas of our lives. We need more of it, not less.
What do people expect to accomplish by dreaming of a day when rival parties will stop opposing each other? We are never going to see such a day any more than we are going to see the day when lions are going to lie down and cuddle with lambs. The way to get our government working right isn't to promote the unrealistic goal of "consensus" and/or non-partisanship, but to recognize that the real solution is in pretty much the opposite approach.
Have you ever been in a siutation where you had to loosen a very tight nut, and weren't sure which direction it needed to be turned. The current approach of American voters is to try one direction for a while, and if that doesn't work by the time of the next election cycle, try the oppositie direction, and back and forth ad nauseam, (interspersed with periods of "consenus" when there is no motion in either direction, as both sides agree to rest, while nothing is accomplished. Isn't the solution to figure out which direction the nut is threaded and then to put all your efforts in that direction, until you succeed?
The current problem with American politics isn't that there are contestants on the political field of battle who are contending, but rather that these earth-shaking contests have such hopelessly inadequate political referees and score-keepers! Just as it would be pointless to watch a baseball game, if there were no umpires to call balls and strikes, or any other sport, if there were no mutually agreed upon rules, or no one to enforce those rules, the political game needs umpires who know the game and the rules, and have the power and the will to enforce them. And like sports, politics needs
score-keepers, people who keep track of who's doing well and who's doing poorly and
constantly communicate that info to the voters both during and following each contest. Without somebody to tell voters when their past efforts have made things better and when they have made things worse, how can voters know which direction to turn the political wrench?
Instead of elections going back and forth like fads, hinging on which contestants have raised the most money, or put on the best shows, and/or told the most persuasive lies, each election ought to be an opportunity for the electorate to review how the public servants they elected the last time have performed, and to make better choices - if warranted - this time.
U.S. voters have every reason to be frustrated and confused, when it comes to today's American politics. But, instead of "going rogue" and blindly taking out our frustration on "incumbents", what we voters need to do is figure out what the political "game" is all about and to demand that the political umpires and score-keepers help us better play the position entrusted to us in that game. We Americans are so confused about the job of our political reporters that most of our mainstream journalists seem to think that it is their duty not to give us any hint of which party is more deserving of rewards and which is most deserving of punishment, if they have even made the effort to learn those crucial matters themselves. If one team has a well-established record of serving the public well, while the rival team has a well-established record of serving the public very poorly, these political score-keepers have been made to fear losing their jobs if they let us voters know what the score is, because we have all been misled into believing that the greatest crime political reporters can commit is the crime of "partiality".
What we should expect of our
information media when it comes to the performance of our political parties is
equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. While a game is still being
played, nobody expects sportscasters to take sides and be "partisan", but once
the game is over, we have every right to expects sportscasters to report on how well and/or
how badly the contestants performed. What would racing fans do about an announcer who insisted after the race was over on being "impartial" about which horses had done well, and which not so well?
So let the games begin !
In order for competition to be productive in the game of U.S. politics, the various players all need to be required by the referees to play by the same agreed-upon rules. But there's the rub, isn't it? Who knows the rules? How can people agree to rules, when they don't even know what they are?
There is a place for non-partisanship:
Although sports and business thrive on competition, they can only do so because the competition takes place within a context of regulation and civility. Without that context, competition would degenerate into rioting and chaos. What people are really looking for when they idealize "non-partisanship" is really the equivalent of "sportsmanship" in sports, i.e. the kind of fair play through which those who play the game best according to the rules of the game, are rewarded with victory and those who "play dirty" and try to score points by skirting the rules are declared "losers".
In politics, one team at a time gets to rule, but only for a given term. Once the electorate has made its choice, and a winner has been chosen to carry out their program for a particular term, � far from being expected to compromise with the losers, winners should be expected to spend their term in office implementing their winning proposals. The public should get the policies that they were promised and for which they cast their ballots, not some mishmash of policies cobbled together as a result of wheeling and dealing between the winners, the losers, and/or political appeasers of one sort of another.
During this period, opponents can continue to be critical of those in office, but no one should tolerate any effort on their part to actually sabotage the office-holders' endeavors.
The principal activity of parties when they are out of power should probably be the development of the alternative policies they plan to offer the public when it comes time, toward the end of each term, to make their case to the public that they are the ones who ought to be put in charge next time around. The object of the game at this point isn't to come up with ways to "make nice" with the other parties. What the public needs the opposing parties to do is to come up with policies that are better than - not compatible with - those of the past.
Once an election campaign is on, the various interested candidates or parties need to compete for the hearts and minds (and money) of the voters, by campaigning unapologetically and furiously in favor of their own brand and in opposition to their rivals' brands, in the hope of persuading the public to choose their brand over their rivals'.
Near the end of each "term of office" - when the election stage of the next cycle takes place - there needs to be a way for the consumers (voters) to evaluate how well their last choice has worked out and whether they want to stick with that choice for the future or go in a different direction. Without the help of the information media at this point, it's easy for the most deceitful brand, rather than the most worthy brand to win the day. For voters to evaluate in subsequent elections which contestants are most likely to benefit and which harm the body politic, it is crucial for the voters to have access to the kind of information that only news media can get for them.� Those media aren't helping when they think that all their job requires of them is that they repeat a fairly even number of the claims and counter-claims made by the rival parties or candidates, or report an equal number of misdeeds on both sides, without revealing to the public the total picture of how much more misbehavior there may be on one side than on the other.
Conclusions :
Where politics is concerned, we Americans are going to continue getting lousy public services until we stop discouraging "partisanship" and start promoting the good old American way of competition. Whom do you know that you can contact to join such a campaign? How can you help stop the media and/or politicians from bad-mouthing partisanship? Just because Republicans don't have a political brand that they can be proud of, let's not allow them to bad-mouth "all politicians". Buying into the political rallying cry "throw all the bums out" is just as nonsensical as hating all blacks, Latinos, and/or women just because you were once cursed by some Spanish-speaking black woman. What we need is a way of telling the difference between politicians who deserve our outstretched hand and those who deserve our boot. I am one Liberal Democrat who believes that we have far and away the best policies to offer to the great majority of American voters. If conservatives and/or Republicans think they have something better to offer, let them "bring it on". But then, let's make sure the American voters have the resources to do their job, so that every time there is an election America gets the opportunity to get better, and better and better!
Where the Obama administration is concerned, the public clearly elected a Democratic president and a majority in both houses of Congress in order to bring a change from the former Republican administration. When instead of getting what it asked for, namely less war, more taxes on the rich and better health care and education for lthe not so rich, America's body politic developed a bad case of constipation, why did it resort to the blind and senseless tactic of changing course without having any idea what good that might do, if any?
Yet, that is the only option available to most Americans because they have been led to believe that there's something wrong with political parties competing for their support.
I could end this article here. But, there are several related dimensions of the "partisanship" issue that I would like to address, i.e.:
Related insights
:
1) Party pride
According to the "post-partisan" view, it's wrong for voters to base their ballot decisions on the basis of their party affiliation. They should only "vote for the individual", i.e. on the basis of the personal qualifications and positions of individual candidates � I strenuously disagree.
It may be a simple matter for government officials to put any number of names on a ballot. But just because voters are given a choice of dozens of candidates' names doesn't mean that voters are thereby magically given the time and ability to check out all of those individual candidates' records and qualifications. In my humble opinion, the only thing that any rational person should expect the vast majority of voters to do is to study the records and the qualifications of two or three major political parties,
(and to usually decide on the basis of shared party affiliation which candidates to support). That is something they can reasonably be expected to do, because it's something their parents can give them a head start with, something they can develop and improve on over their whole life times, something they can develop in conjunction with their friends, associates and associations, something they can do with the help of thecommunications media day in and day out. When circumstances call for it, voters can certainly make voting decisions on the basis of individual records and qualifications, but that should be the exception, not the rule.
Thanks to this aversion to party affiliation, the Democratic Party has given young
voters fewer and fewer reasons to be proud of being Democrats and more and more reasons
to be - not necessarily Republicans, but - "undecideds" or "independents". Since the Republican Party doesn't have much hope of winning the hearts and minds of the public, that political party has extremely partisan reasons for promoting the idea of "non-partisanship". Since that party has little hope of winning the gold, because it has proven itself incapable of preventing the public from seeing its corruption and/or incompetence, the G.O.P. has been doing the next best thing, namely preventing its rival from winning the gold, by crying "they all do it", "all politicians are corrupt", "what we need are term limits" or "throw all the bums out". But just because Republicans don't have much to be proud of in their party doesn't mean that we Democrats should allow ourselves to be lulled into accepting the colossal falsehood that "party doesn't matter". If voters belong to a party they know to be really great, then working for the success of that party is nothing to be ashamed of.
2) Party "control" of Congress and/or of our Federal government:
It is always understandable when dishonest partisans promote a distortion of the facts when misconceptions of the facts serve their interests better than the truth, but any media personalities who mindlessly parrot such misconceptions, should be disqualified from serving as political referees? .
The most important example of such is the idea that any party which has the presidency and more than 50% of the membership of both houses of Congress "controls" the U.S. government and must accept the blame for whatever happens or doesn't happen in Washington under their "control". The plain truth is that without a supermajority of the U.S. Senate, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, no party can be accurately said to control our government. And not even the extremely unlikely confluence of all of these factors would give a party true control to the extent that they were in agreement on the policies in question.
3) The "blame game" is no game
Although I have made a point of comparing U.S. politics to sports, it has only been to highlight the fact that we should expect fierce competition in both. However, when people talk of "the blame game", they are usually trivializing something in politics which should be deadly serious, When some of us are adult enough to ask authorities to investigate the possibility that individuals and/or political parties or administrations have been guilty of needlessly causing the deaths of thousands of innocent human beings and/or needlessly squandering millions (or even billions) of dollars of public treasury, what is gained by allowing the suspects to squirm off of the hook by silly accusations that those raising the questions are engaged in "playing the blame game"? Isn't it those who are taking these matters so lightly who are playing a game here, i.e. the game of "whitewashing"? If they can get away with playing this "get out of jail" card, then Why shouldn't everybody in prison be allowed to play that game as well? Here's a thought. Instead of trying to avoid blame by referring to blame as a "game", why don't parties and politicians put more effort into avoiding blameworthy behavior?
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