We Get the Government We Deserve
It’s true. Some of this mess is on us.
We get the government we deserve. That won’t be a popular statement, but consider:
Congress has a ~9% approval rating but yet a 90% incumbency rate.
That’s right: 91 out of 100 people hate Congress yet 9 out of 10 members of Congress (i.e. the thing they hate) get to stay in Congress (while the people will probably continue to hate it).
This is some Bizarro World math. In order for this to add up, we need an equalizer.
Enter: America’s education system.
A system that, in theory, is supposed to plant seeds of knowledge in young minds and prepare them to become informed and active citizens but, in practice, does the opposite.
The problem is that we now have a population– young, old and in between– that is largely uninformed, disengaged, and misguided. They’re apathetic—and yet somehow weirdly passionate—about politics and politicians, mostly just the President and the ones all over TV and the Internet because that’s likely the only politicians they know. This is a problem and it’s the same problem as the fandom insanity of Bieber and Miley:
We’re a nation of consumers; not thinkers.
Does anybody like those TV advertisements during election season? One attacking the other; the other attacking the one… And nowadays with social media, it’s not just TV that reeks of this ridiculousness. How many of you like to read political updates from your friends on Facebook? Do you like those memes (images—of the politicians, stills from classic movies, stock photos, or cats) with some witty political/PC/anti-government/anti-politician message that’s supposed to stop you dead in your tracks and induce an “aha” moment upon you that infiltrate your News Feed?
Why are we constantly bombarded with 6th grade name-calling ads? Because they work. They get politicians elected and re-elected. Just like a new track of Justin Bieber singing about how he’d make a great boyfriend sells.
This is how we get a 90% incumbency rate even though almost no one approves of Congress. The incumbent raises enough money to flood the airwaves of his/her district with ads attacking the challenger and, Presto, re-election.
Terrible, I know, but we must stop blaming Congress and politicians. They’re only able to do this because we allow them to do it.
The government perpetuates this problem simply because we let them.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in McCutcheon v. FEC that, constitutionally, no limits can be placed on monetary political campaign contributions because it’s a violation of free speech. Predictably, people went ape shit, with complains such as, “this will just further enable the richest Americans (the 1%’ers) to buy elections and control politicians!”
But what’s a lot of that money spent on? Those ridiculous attack ads on TV and the Internet! They’re not buying elections as much as they are selling them. Or investing in them.
If we don’t think elections should be bought, we must stop buying them.
How? Here are some thoughts (these are pretty much just common sense, non-controversial initiatives that most anyone can agree with yet still somehow elude us):
- Increasing citizen education
- Encouraging critical thinking
- Applauding coherent opinions
- Rational discourse
- Incubating new ideas
- More focused and widely-available research
- Effective education of historical analyses
- Nurturing a creative culture
- More thoughtful consumerism.
In short, we need a mass population that is comprised of smarter, more informed, more rational, and more ambitious problem solvers… and one that isn’t held captive by attack ads and Internet memes.
The way to address these deficiencies is through education (and not just in school classrooms). Critical is an attempt to move us forward.
#StayCritical, fellow citizens
Justin Lyon is a former high school math teacher and Founder of Critical, a project to make critical thinking and real world problem solving based learning feasible and scalable in education and advocate for more thoughtfulness in society in general.