America and Americans are desperately seeking solutions to their economic woes. As is typical of our citizenry, they persist in looking for the quick, the easy and the effortless fix. Doesn’t matter whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, or any of the lesser marginalized cults. They seize upon the particular orthodoxy, beliefs and tenets of their political theology to answer all issues, questions and problems. It doesn’t matter if their partisan faith is irrelevant, flawed or useless; their personal political beliefs provide them with an internal comfort that all will work out fine because they believe that they are in the right. From this unfounded confidence in their ideology, Americans guide their political judgments and decisions; and thus predictably we get the inevitable consequences from ill-informed, ill-intended and ill-defined legislative and administrative efforts. What is wrong with the political decisions that Americans are making?
Well, we don’t have the space to go into everything that the electorate is doing wrong, but we can at least identify three mistakes that they make over and over and over.
One: Many voters, particularly those aligned with a formal party, are sufficiently moronic to believe the political rhetoric and theater that is played out in the media, meetings and campaigns. Instead of engaging in any assessment and analysis of what the country’s needs and interests are, what the society’s needs and interests are, and what the people’s needs and interests are. They abandoned their responsibility to their countrymen/women agreed to in the country’s contract. Instead they believe the words and speeches of their partisan leadership without asking whether there is any substance to the text. Failure one is not noticing that the same answer, the same sound-bites, the same posturing stances on principles cannot be an informed, intelligent and appropriate solution to any issue brought into the public forum. If you don’t question and demand an explanation that makes sense and informs you then you just aren’t trying.
Two: When a politician is elected, you can choose to trust them or not. This one is really easy. If you trust them, then you must never have met a politician before. You must never have read or heard about what politicians do, or who politicians cozy up to. In short, you cannot trust a politician. So mistake number two is that voters put their preference into a special category of honest, different from the rest.
Three: Politicians can fix our problems. The simplest way to clarify your error on this one is to ask: “What problem have you ever actually seen politicians fix?” They follow, they don’t lead. They are not informed or intelligent enough to solve problems. This is why their legislative and administrative efforts always define how something is to be done or solved. That is not a solution, it is a dictate. It only says: “This is how I want it to be”, and has nothing to do with dealing with the physics of government and society. So mistake three is voters accept the premise that politicians have the ability to solve the country’s problems. They accept this without any evidence that politicians have any understanding of what the underlying conditions of the problem are, nor possess any notion of what actions can influence the situation to produce the results that are desired.
Is it any wonder that politicians have spent the last two plus years failing to do anything to correct the American economy? They talk about cutting budgets or taxing the wealthy. These of course are not solutions to the problem, and more importantly, they just talk about what is to be done. They do nothing. The definition of Congress: They do nothing
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