By Magic Love Hose
Right now, in my home and native land, the Liberal Party is going through a bit of soul-searching. After three straight elections with three different party leaders in which they continually lost seats to both the left and the right, the Liberal Party has to take a good long look in the mirror, admit to its mistakes, and figure out where to go from here in a version of Canada that’s become more partisan, much like the United States.
I don’t know where their soul-searching will lead. I do think it’s good that they’re having it. I wonder if such a level of self-reflection is equally possible any more in the United States political system.
The times we live in are a culmination of many long term and short term trends and events, and it’s a mistake to blame any one event. But if I had to pick one that rises above all others to define the current dysfunction of the U.S. political system, I would have to go with Bush vs. Gore.
In Bush vs. Gore, the Supreme Court divided down partisan lines to award Bush the Presidency, sidestepping a lot of thorny questions that remained about the Florida vote count. A lot of blame has been thrown around, at Nader for siphoning off votes, at Gore for running a middling campaign, at the electoral college for sucking so goddamn hard, but at the end of the day, the person sitting in the Oval Office came down to nine people instead of 300 million.
Now I happen to think that the election result was dodgy in the extreme, and that a better system of electing an executive wouldn’t have these problems since it’d be based entirely off the popular vote. But what I think isn’t as relevant as what people came to believe post-Bush vs. Gore, which was that the other guy won’t play fair, even at the level of the Supreme Court. In other words, we can no longer trust the umpire.
This first manifested on the left, since the left lost that battle. It came around again in 2004 where people said that the voting problems in Ohio rendered Bush’s win illegitimate. When the 2007/2008 primary came down to the wire, many people were convinced that Clinton was going to steal the win from Obama, or that Obama had already stolen the win from Clinton. Then when Obama won and beat John McCain, it became an article of faith on the right that Obama’s win wasn’t legitimate and that he wasn’t really President. Since then, the right-wing’s loopier fringe has made the left from 2001-2008 look like mice nuts – taking the theme of illegitimacy that was far more applicable to Bush than to Obama, and applying it to Obama with far more zeal than the left ever did with Bush.
I believe that that, more than anything, is where birtherism comes from. Racism helps, to be sure, but the core of birtherism is “I do not believe this man should be President and I don’t care what popular and electoral votes say and I will do anything in my power to get him out of office.” All explained masterfully by Mark Kleiman and Douglas Adams, here. These people haven’t come to their conclusion via their arguments like a scientist does – they are supporting their conclusion with arguments formed after the fact, like a lawyer does. (There’s a lot more on this in the current print issue of Mother Jones.)
I know it seems nauseating to equate legitimate concerns over Bush’s 2000 victory with the slimy xenophobia of birtherism, but what they have in common is a prevailing lack of faith in the rules and institutions of America – justified or not. And that, I believe, is the big contributor to the modern trend of scorched earth negotiations. They don’t see this as give-a-little-get-a-little. They see this as war. As the Chief Royal Head Motherfucker in Charge of this blog says, “war is about hurting people and breaking their stuff.”
Viewed through that, it’s little wonder that neither side wants to give up the filibuster and in fact is willing to use it as a cudgel with unprecedented frequency (though the GOP’s usage of it and other obstructionist rules reached truly sickening proportions in 2009-2010.) They don’t view the other side’s majority as a legitimate extension of the will of the people. They don’t want to negotiate with the President because they don’t think he’s earned his office, via a quirk of birth certification or ACORN stealing millions of votes or something, anything. They talk openly about Second Amendment solutions because they don’t see their losses as legitimate and believe that the seat of power was stolen by a tyrant. They don’t trust the system. They think the umpire is bought off.
A lot of us on the left don’t trust the system either – with good reason. But without some level of trust in public institutions, they can’t function properly. If no one trusts the police, their jobs are hampered. If no one trusts the courts, no one seeks redress through them. Paradoxically, this means that soon the distrust is earned after the fact, as police repay distrust with distrust and the courts lose touch with people who no longer rely on it.
This is why the GOP acts the way it does, and this is also why the fractures within the Democratic party have gotten more and more pronounced and raw. The activist wing wants to repay open war with open war, reasoning that you can’t negotiate with people who see you as illegitimate. But without negotiation, in the face of a united filibuster that is breakable only by 60 votes – which the Democrats only had for seven months, from Franken’s swearing-in to Scott Brown’s victory – bills do not get passed, and the challenges that the government is here to meet do not get met. So the activist left, or the warriors, see the negotiators as negotiating with “the enemy,” while the negotiators see the warriors as torpedoing delicate negotiations that are needed to meet the challenges government is meant for, however imperfectly. Many of the warriors then think that the negotiators are part of the other side – part of the system that they no longer trust.
The game theory is all messed up. Divisions on our side hurt us – but unification is not possible because that requires trust, and trust is one thing that the left hasn’t had in the system for the better part of a decade, however good its reasons are. So we are divided in the face of a movement that is united, in turn, in its distrust of the system. No one trusts the umpires. No one believes their calls when their calls favor the other team (but they trust the calls that fall in their favor, explicitly.) Without a level of institutional trust, the system of rules runs aground. If no one trusts the umpire in baseball, no one regards the win or loss as legitimate.
Worst of all – with such a convenient scapegoat as the blind umpire, there is less need to look in one’s own mirror and engage in the self-reflection necessary of a political party that has suffered a loss. The Democrats are more capable of self-reflection than the GOP, but paradoxically, that means that the GOP keeps doubling down on failed policy while the Dems keep abandoning their ideas. The game theory of the situation rewards united ignorance and punishes divided clarity.
All because a win is no longer called a win, and a loss isn’t declared a loss. Because no one trusts the score. Because they say the umpire is blind.
Magic Love Hose is not a professional politician. You can trust him because of in spite of that. He has a website and a Twitter and is 60% sure how to use them.
Special thanks to SportsCardForum.com, specifically at http://bit.ly/mnSQ5U
