I have written quite a few times about irresponsible politicians and what we, as the voting public in the United States, should do about it. The “what should we do about it” is the easy part. We should vote them out of office.
Unfortunately, that easy step makes at least two assumptions, neither of which is true; the first assumption, is that a replacement politician will be any better – they could well be worse. The second assumption, is that the general voting public has a good sense of what political responsibility should be. Since both the politicians and the general voting public have been educated by the same educational system, the chances of either of my assumptions being true, is remote, if not non-existent. The fact that the politicians are probably “better educated” than the majority of the voting population just makes the situation even worse.
I am currently fired up about this particular problem by the childish, irresponsible game of chicken recently played by national politicians with the country’s debt-ceiling law. Their behavior belongs in the schoolyard of three-year-olds. It is myopic, self-serving, totally irresponsible and, quite honestly, pathetic, apart from being potentially very dangerous on all sorts of levels. What happened to integrity, sense of duty to the electorate, and responsibility to protect the future of the country? Obviously, archaic attributes in today’s political arena.
A few days ago, the German Finance Minister was quoted as saying, with absolute justification in my opinion, “The U.S. should grow up”. There are few more demeaning accusations on an international and diplomatic level, and the damage this mess does to the country’s image abroad is incalculable.
And, it’s all nonsense anyway. The debt ceiling is a pretty useless tool that tends to be invoked only for political games. The real arguments over spending and debt take place in the budget cycle. The debt ceiling should be abolished as an archaic relic that is totally unnecessary, and a blockage to sensible government (now there’s an oxymoron, if ever I heard one). I should add the Electoral College should be abolished at the same time, as another archaic relic that damages democracy, but that is the subject of another blog.
However, the problem runs much deeper than this ridiculous nonsense about the debt ceiling, and that, unfortunately, is a much harder issue to address. The problem is symptomatic of an endemic system failure, both politically and educationally. A failure, I think, that, to fix, will take a major re-think of the structure of U.S. governance, as well as a major re-think of the education system that has forgotten that citizen responsibility and public service responsibility is a fundamental requirement for a successful democracy. Individual rights cannot override citizen responsibility in modern U.S. society any more than partisan politics and self-aggrandizement can override public ethics and responsibility in all public servants.
Unfortunately, history tells us that only catastrophic events produce such changes – Germany’s defeat in World War II eventually produced a democracy. A drastic example, certainly, but do we really want to wait for such an event in the U.S. to force constructive change. Perhaps we can hope that China’s challenge to U.S. world dominance might produce such re-thinks, hopefully without resorting to wars……….but I doubt it.
I keep trying to come up with a scenario that could address these issues without the resort to violence, but it is difficult. Education has to be the fundamental answer but, even with the best will and commitment in the world, that will take time, and we may not have enough of that scarce commodity left before events overtake us.
