Why I (still) care about politics

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”

-A. Bartlett Giamatti, former Major League Baseball commissioner.

Giamatti was talking about baseball, but he could have been talking about politics. They both break your heart. Elections have broken my heart more than I care to count. I’m a Democrat, and my team has its share of crushing losses. Crushing margins, sure, but also a crushing loss of potential that often ends with my candidate’s concession speech.

Most of my favorite candidates are just footnotes now. Electoral hopefuls who tried once, twice, maybe thrice, then after the losses, or the isolated win followed by more losses, moved on. Back to their pre-political careers or wherever. In my area I can think of so many. Paul Hackett energized a local Democratic party in dire need of something to believe in, but neither he nor his successor Victoria Wulsin could win the Ohio 2nd, a district now as firmly in Republican control as it has ever been. Hackett went back to practicing law, and Dr. Wulsin’s now chancellor of a university in Kenya. Longtime congressperson and one-term governor Ted Strickland is back, at least, running for Senate. I hope he does better than his former Lt Governor, Lee Fisher, did in 2010. I could go on and on with the name of other potential greats—Roxanne Qualls, Connie Pillich, Nina Turner, David Pepper from the last few years alone—all out of office, potential (so far) unrealized.

Worse than these losses, to me, are the politicians I love as candidates and hate in office. Those pols at least nominally on your team that, upon election, fail to serve the constituencies that got them elected in the first place. It’s like highly anticipated prospects who never live up to their potential, only worse. The worst first round draft picks usually don’t start scoring TDs for the OTHER team, like bad officeholders can. Yet you see this in politics, time and time again. *cough* Rahm *cough*

If this were a game, this would just be part of life in a competitive league. Win some, lose some. For every Gore and Kerry there’s an Obama and Franken. There’s always next season, hope springs eternal, Opening Day’s right around the corner. Thus seasons pass.

But, of course, it’s not a game. In games, when your team loses, you personally don’t lose much—some happiness; the opportunity to spend even MORE money on your team in playoff games and merchandise, sure, but unless you’re unusually committed, those losses don’t negatively affect your life chances.

Not so politics. Set aside the theater—the speeches, the personalities, the trivia, the negative campaigning—and you have a fight over the distribution of resources. Who gets what benefit, who pays what taxes, who can do what and when. And not merely the distribution of resources among people—but between people and the natural world. More on this later.

Bad governance raids your pensions, steals your homes, wrecks your jobs. Bad governance pollutes your air, poisons your water, and lets people put salmonella in your food. Bad governance can and will kill you.

Conversely, good governance can save you. It can create and run effective agencies like the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to prosecute thieves and fraudsters, the Centers for Disease Control to stop epidemics, the FDA and USDA to make sure our food won’t make us sick, and the FAA to make transportation safe. Good governance can fight discrimination, inequality, pollution. It can help distribute resources fairly and justly. It can, and does, save lives.

This is not hyperbole.

I consider myself an environmentalist, and like any clear-eyed one, I’m in pain, a lot. The author and environmentalist George Montbiot wrote recently: “To love the natural world is to suffer a series of griefs, each compounding the last.” I feel this grief often: unchecked global warming, the loss of over half the world’s wild vertebrate life in the past 40 years, the devastating declines in migratory bird populations. Government action, like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Antiquities Act, National Park Service Act, and many others, has done so much. But there is so much more to do.

The only way any of these issues are addressed is through political action. It’s the only way we will get a more just society, the only way we can punish the guilty and protect the innocent, the only way we can save the natural world for generations to come.

Despite all the ugliness, despite all the disappointment, despite the heartbreak, I’m still interested in politics, I’m still going to contribute money, write letters, march, protest, campaign, vote. There’s simply no other way to have the world we need.