When I was working on my Ph.d for political science (how’s that for a first line, name-dropping, “look how important I think I am” opening?), one of the observations I kept making was how so many political pundits of their day were constantly making the prediction that the empire was about to crumble. There would be all sorts of analogies pointing at the fall of Rome, and yet another self-important political pundit of that time and day was convinced that the United States republic was about to collapse upon itself. It got to the point where I started to make predictions about the predicters, figuring that the eventual demise of a political entity is the propensity to fall into the ultimate entropy of political discourse: The belief that eventual destruction has to come on that person’s watch.
So, as I am watching the events of today unfold, I can’t help but find myself making the same mistake that everyone of these Thomas Paines, Mark Twains, Bill Buckleys and Helen Caldicotts kept making. We underestimate the inevitable apathy of the American people to care enough about their own circumstances to ever want to try to make things better.
You see, that’s pretty important, and as a political observant, it’s equally important to understand why people don’t do something as well as why people do the things they eventually do. Political scientists are very good at seeing French Revolutions under every rock, but incapable of seeing Moscovites living in squalor and despair, yet never doing anything to change their personal situation because while the payoff might seem great, the cost of achieving that payoff is sometimes just a bit more than any one man (or woman) is willing to pay. It’s one thing to complain about current events and to demand justice, but when that demand requires that you stand up against oppression by personally risking your own hide, that dynamic changes quickly. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We’re really good about making grandiose statements, like “give me liberty or give me death” or “I may disagree with you but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it” but when it comes down to actually putting up one’s survival against one’s survival instincts, survival instincts win almost every time. We’re really good at complaining and claiming a backbone that we believe we might have, but like every bad war movie there’s that inevitable scene where the cigar-chewing sergeant reveals that a soldier may act all tough, but it’s only on the battlefield when you see whether he puts up or shuts up. In reality, we’re very much like that. We’re often all talk and very little action. I’ve often thought that political science could benefit from incorporating psychology into its discipline (where we put people into a room to see how much their political rhetoric stands up to experimentation…for the record, we don’t do that sort of thing because it’s ethically vacant in social science, but I’m really only talking in semantics right now).
Which brings me to my thesis for today, and that’s that I’m seeing all sorts of “fall of the Republic” activity happening on a daily basis right now, and I wonder how much of it is in place observation that always happens versus actual observations of real implications. In other words, I wonder how much my educated observations are really seeing as opposed to how much my educated perspectives are skewed by that same institutional framework I’ve been talking about since the beginning of this essay. In even more words, am I really seeing what I think that I’m seeing, or am I just another one of those overly observational folk that see things that have always been there but our current paradigm now recognizes it as something less than it really is?
I mean, let’s look at some of the evidence. We’re currently in a budget mess that this country has never been in before. Unlike the past, our solutions were usually to go back to the drawing board and come up with new solutions. Today, we aren’t going back to the drawing board but spitting out rhetoric that doesn’t solve anything but actually makes things worse. People are out of jobs because we may have exhausted the majority of the low-hanging fruit that was once available to us by virtue of our ever-expanding economy and untouched resources. Our economy is no longer expanding, and our resources are essentially tapped, overtapped possibly. The solution was always to find cheaper labor and cheaper resources, but we’ve run out of those options because the former labor solutions have wised up to this act and now controls the labor channels that we used to exploit. Instead, we have lost revenue sources, labor pools, and our own people don’t seem to be able to find the jobs that they used to find that usually existed on top of these other resources and lower income labor pools. If you look to our political leaders, the choices are either to raise more taxes or to cut spending. But neither solution is a solution to the actual problems we seem to be facing. Raising taxes doesn’t do any good if you have no one to raise them on, especially if we have fewer and fewer jobs. Cutting spending is great, but at the same time that only kicks the can down the road again because as we lose that choice labor we used to have, more people end up relying on government to fill in the gaps, yet cutting spending makes that even harder. In the end, we have what’s called the continuous rush to the bottom, and rather than recognize this and try to push back up, we are building infrastructure to make sure the trip to the bottom happens a lot more comfortably.
So what’s the solution to all of this? Well, if you’re a naysayer or a doomsayer, your answer is pretty simple. We let it all collapse and start over again. And sadly enough, we have political leaders that seem to be advocating just that. Oh, they won’t say that exactly, but their solutions are just that. Rather than try to find viable solutions to build prosperity, we seem to have a lot of leaders who are basically just trying to fund the megastupidopoly a little bit longer so they can cash out before it all comes crashing down. The solutions all appear to be named: I’ll get mine and the hell with the rest of you.
Which brings us back to the “people”, the ones who are responsible for fixing it all sans great leaders. But what can we really expect from them when the only input we allow from them is to punch a Yes or No hole on a ballot? We don’t ask for their ideas. To be honest, our political leaders don’t care about their ideas and are really only interested in their money, support and again, what the people can do for their leaders rather than the other way around. Oh, the rhetoric always sounds the opposite of what I just said, but actions speak much louder than words, and those bad actions have been speaking a lot lately.
When the economy started to collapse, our leaders bailed out the car companies, the banks and Wall Street gazillionaires. The common person received zilch. When the common person had his house foreclosed on, the government backed the banks. When it become political impossible to keep doing that, the government stepped in and demanded the banks be slower about taking everything away from their customers. Not that they stop taking everything away. Instead, they gave the banks everything they wanted in practically every area of discourse. Credit card companies received guarantees that people could no longer go completely bankrupt without some kind of continuous debt to the banks involved. When banks were discovered with their pants down involving overdraft charges, government stepped in and did as little as they could there as well. Even with the tiny movement made by government on the people’s behalf, the banks managed to get huge lobbying to soften the changes, and even now are working on reversing some of the impact they have “suffered” as a result of government forcing them to be less greedy and more upfront about their attempts to screw over their customers.
But what it really comes down to is the question of whether or not the common person in America really cares enough to pay attention to what’s happening. President Obama and the minions of government are trying very hard to convince the rest of the country that the budget impasse is important. The media is starting to make comments about how much the debt really “costs” each person and how much in debt EACH person is as a result of the debt ceiling we are currently living under. But what none of them have been capable of doing is convincing the average American that he or she really should care. Oh, they’re trying to make that argument, but it’s falling flat. Let me explain why, using simple logic that the average American is using.
Let’s call me Citizen A. The government tells me that my current debt (as a result of the deficit) is $70,000 (just for the sake of using an arbitrary number because the real number is just that, a number). My first thought is that as a citizen of this republic, I should be concerned, but in reality, I’m more concerned about the $150,000 student loan debt I’ve incurred trying to get a college education, my $350 monthly car payment, and my $500-1000 monthly rent bill I have to pay. Adding in a whole bunch of other expensese I probably have to pay a month, Citizen A really doesn’t care one iota about the personal $70,000 that is part of my slice of the deficit because to be honest, it’s not really my debt. I don’t see it that way. That $150,000 I owe in student loans is my debt, but it’s going to take a lot of rhetoric, a lot of speeches and quite possibly an overweight FBI agent in a bad suit with a crowbar to convince me that the government’s deficit is in fact, MY deficit. Citizen A doesn’t feel a connection to that debt. In fact, he thinks the government squandered that money, and that it’s really the debt of people who work for the government. That, in fact, it’s THEIR debt, not his.
Now, as a rational individual with a bit of education, I understand it shouldn’t be this way, but game theoretics are involved here, and when it comes to payoffs, the average citizen feels just like Citizen A. We don’t feel the debt is ours. It belongs to the government that for years has treated the “people’s” money as its own. When we took away the draft, made voting voluntary, and made presidential state of the union addresses optional television programming, we eliminated the ties between government and Citizen A. People see our government as an entity that exists because it has to exist, but as none of us fought to create this republic, very few of us actually have served to defend it, and most of us are oblivious to what this republic does on a daily basis, it’s very difficult to sell the supposition that government and people are tied to each other.
So, I ask: Are we seeing the end of days, or is this just another hiccup in the usual way things happen? And if it’s the latter, then how do you get people to care enough so that it doesn’t end up becoming the former by eventual default?
