Partisanship and the demise of American democracy
As the remainder of his second term waned to a close, President George Washington penned his famous ‘Farewell Address‘ — a letter written from the nations first president to its people.
Over two centuries ago, Washington warned future generations of citizens and politicians alike about the inherent danger political parties posed to the fledgling democracy. With prophetic accuracy, he noted that the rise of parties would erode the very system of government America had been built upon and in degrading the effectiveness of governance, parties themselves would be ‘destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them’ to positions of power.
Fast-forward some two-hundred years and you’ll come across a new Gallup Poll that should have Americans worrying about the future of their country, despite our national innumeracy. Numbers don’t lie: Congress now has an approval rating of 10%, earning it the title of the most unpopular social institution in the United States. In their own words, ‘this is the lowest level of confidence Gallup has found… for any institution on record.’
The disapproval cuts across all political cleavages as well (it is not just the party without a majority of seats bickering about their lack of authority).
Houston, we have a problem.
If the American model is built upon efficacy and citizen participation, and nearly 2/3 of the citizenry do not approve of the legislature (the same legislative body the people voted into power in the first place), then clearly something is amiss in the USA.
Follow the downward trend, and you’ll find that it seems America has created a system wherein people vote for their leaders, only to be fed up with them a few months later. If the definition of insanity is the repetition of actions with the expectation of a different outcome, than unfortunately American politics is in need of an asylum. Worst of all, the problem is not confined to recent negative factors (i.e. the 2008 Financial Crisis).
Voter turnout has been steadily declining for decades. Thanks to Robert Putnam’s work we know that more Americans went bowling in 1993 than voted in the 1994 congressional elections. As Putnam pointed out, it was America’s gleaming civic participation that Alexis de Tocqueville claimed was our ‘key to making democracy work’.
So how did we lose the most important key in our nation? Almost a hundred years ago, one man provided us the answer.
Few outside the realm of politics have ever heard of Walter Lippmann, and even amongst our masonic order his name is not uttered as frequently as it should be. Lippmann was an academic: he graduated Harvard in three years’ time, became an advisor to President Wilson, and even coordinated with Wilson on his famous ‘Fourteen Points’ speech; all while he was still in his 20s. If you’ve ever said the words ‘Cold War’ your vocabulary is indebted to Lippmann; he himself coined the phrase in 1947.
Lippmann was dedicated to studying the interactions between American politics and society and his particular focal point was the role mass media played in bridging this gap. Yet in 1939, he wrote an essay entitled ‘The Indispensable Opposition‘, a critique of the direction our democracy was going in. It is within this essay that we find where we lost our key to the maintenance of a healthy democracy.
According to Lippmann:
‘We miss the whole point when we imagine that we tolerate the freedom of our political opponents as we tolerate a howling baby next door…because freedom of discussion improves our own opinions, the liberties of other men are our own vital necessity…For while the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes the right important…Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.
Just as George Washington warned, partisanship has eaten away at our democracy. Gone are the days of examining our opinions, of debating one another not to confront our opponent’s ideas, but to analyse, morph and if need be rectify our own. It is no wonder that a nation which breeds men the likes of Alex Jones cannot unite to reduce gun violence. It is of no surprise that in a country clinging to bibles, abortion is as heated as a topic as the fire and brimstone of hell itself.
And finally, it is of no shock nor disbelief that a people who cannot engage one another in simple discussion so as to seek to improve their own arguments are led by a government hindered by the same lack of personal scrutiny. We are divided into camps, and no side seems mature enough to compromise with the other. For America, the opposition has become dispensable, and with it so has an effective, efficacious, and efficient democracy.
This article is written by: Patrick Pitts
