[THS] !!! David Michael Green: The Age of Ennui

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25407.htm

The Age of Ennui

By David Michael Green

May 09, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Watching the British electorate in
action (inaction?) during this campaign cycle I'm reminded of... well, the American
electorate.

This is nothing new.  There's been enormous parallels between the two countries for
decades now, even if the timing of that link has gotten a bit skewed of late.

Trading back and forth between two centrist parties in the first post-war decades, in
both countries the center-left party, exhausted in spirit if not ideas, had its head
handed to it at the end of the 1970s by the center-right party.  Only now that
starboard party was under the leadership of the radical right - in Britain Margaret
Thatcher, and in the US her ideological soul-mate, Ronald Reagan.  They governed
for a decade and bloody well wore out their welcome (notwithstanding the regressive
hagiography of Reagan since he left office, their attempt to turn him into latter day
deity).

Then, in the election which followed (1988 in the US and 1992 in the UK), the
watered-down version of the far-right candidate (John Major and Bush the Elder)
somehow, surprisingly, managed to thrash out the weakest imaginable endorsement
and hold the keys to government for another term.  After that came the other party
with an even weaker version of the same politics.  Just as Thatcher and Reagan were
like peas in a pod, and just as Major and HW were nothingburger clones, so too the
backward and oleaginous Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were twin sons of different
mothers.  Now it looks like Britain may be getting its barely-endorsed ‘compassionate
conservative' to match our George W. Bush, in the form of the polished-up-to-seem-
less-abrasive Tory David Cameron.

Looking at the two polities, only three things seem terribly clear:

First, in these confused political times, people don't really know what they want.

Second, except that they definitely want everything.

And, third, no single item on the menu of political parties looks terribly appetizing.

Oh, and one other thing:  there's that small matter of gross incompetence at voting
stations (taking the most benign interpretation).

Nor are these tendencies, in their broadest sense, hugely different from other
Western democracies.  It's the Age of Ennui, really.  Nothing seems to be working,
and no solutions seem to be on the horizon.  To be honest, the moment feels
considerably volatile - well beyond the scale of the hardly insubstantial problems
facing these societies and the planet as a whole.

People are simultaneously looking for societal change, and yet desperately holding on
to the status quo.  People are simultaneously hungry for different party choices, and
yet continuing to vote for the existing bums in office.  People are simultaneously
hungry for something very different in politics, and yet clinging on to the same old
same-old.

In the UK, it looked for a while like they just might get a bit of some real shake-up,
both small and large.  The biggest development of this election cycle was the
introduction of US-style televised debates, and the biggest product of that, at least
initially, was that the leader of the half-party Liberal Democrats, who was allowed to
share the stage with the Big Two, knocked them both sideways with his "they're-
endlessly-petty-and-to-blame-for-everything-but-I'm-above-all-that" act.  It worked
for a while, though it had already lost its punch by the third debate.

Were the Liberal Democrats to come to power as junior partners in a coalition
government, owing to the failure of either Labour or the Tories to win an outright
majority of seats in Parliament, that alone would only represent minor change.
Politically, there is little about the party that is remarkably different from the two
majors.  And that's before they get into government, when the drill is to promise the
world.  Imagine what it would be like afterwards, when instead it's all about figuring
out ways to not deliver on your promises.

The big potential change entailed in these dynamics, however, would revolve around
what the Lib-Dems, acting as king-makers, might extract from either other party in
exchange for forming a coalition that would allow one of them to govern.
Presumably, that price would be a change in - or at least a referendum on the
question of - the country's electoral system.  Like the US, Britain uses a district system
to choose members of the national legislature.  And like the US (though not as
severely), this results in a huge obstacle for third parties to ever gain traction, and
makes it almost impossible for them to ever govern.  (The reason is basically
mathematical.  Unless we're talking about regional ethnic parties, as in Scotland or
Wales (but not in the US), third parties could theoretically win a whopping 25 or 30
percent of the vote nationally, but continue to come in second place in every district,
and thus have minimal or even zero parliamentary representation).

The big change in the UK could entail the use of a proportional representation system
to replace - or partially replace using a hybrid system - the district model.  That could
have very significant longer term repercussions with respect to the distribution of
parties in the British Parliament, and the possibility for smaller ones to not only
flourish, but perhaps even govern at some point.

None of that will happen in the US, however.  First, because there is no significant
third party to hold some other major party hostage in exchange for a restructuring of
the national electoral system.  But more importantly, because it would be far less
relevant even if there were, since the executive branch of American government does
not require any form of legislative majority to be elected.  Such a system might work
in determining the leadership of one or both houses of Congress, but the president -
unlike the British prime minister - is elected entirely separately.  If the US kept its
Electoral College system, the only way third parties would matter is if no candidate hit
the magic number and the parties then got into some serious horse-trading for
electoral votes.  And if we moved to a system of electing presidents directly, on the
basis of winning a plurality of the popular vote, or even a majority run-off system,
third parties would have little or no effect.

I'd love to see a lot more choice in America for voters, as an abstract principle, but
before we get ourselves all worked up about what we're missing, it's worth reminding
ourselves of what else we might also be missing, were we to move in this direction.
Three not so happy other consequences come to mind.

First, it's worth asking who these third parties would be.  They could be anybody,
and they might be everybody (that is, there would surely be a number of them).  But
the sad truth in the US is that the serious alternative political energy in this country is
generally either on the nutty-scary extreme right, or the libertarian right.  In addition
to the fact that a certain party led by a certain fellow named Hitler once rose to
power via precisely these means in a certain country which then had similar
regressive political tendencies, I think we can say with some assurance that a
multiparty system in America is only going to tug the country's politics even further to
the right.  Much as it pains me to say it, if we did engineer a multiparty system, many
progressives could wind up - after, say, Social Security and Medicare were chucked
overboard in the name of small government - pining for the good old days of the
two-party monopoly.

The Nazi analogy also reminds of a second liability of multiparty systems, which is
that they tend to be less stable.  In moderate doses, that's usually not a hugely bad
thing.  But in more severe cases, especially during times of duress (like, well, now), it
can be catastrophic.  Another reason that the Nazis came to power is because voters
got sick of a Weimar Republic where governments hardly lasted five minutes at a
pop.  That's bad enough ordinarily, but when the economic wheels are coming off
the wagon, as they were then, the situation is enormously ripe for someone to come
along promising to make the trains run on time.  Sound like  a familiar scenario?
Again, for every bit as abysmal as Bush and Cheney were, we need to think carefully
about what we wish for.  History is quite emphatic in reminding us that it can get a
lot, lot worse than that.

The third problem with reform of the party structure is that it is - like term limits and
sundry constitutional amendment proposals - at some level just another attempt to
avoid a serious reckoning with the hard work of seriously governing and being
governed.  Like I said, I'd like to see American voters have more choice in elections,
especially because what they now have is just about zero.  But I suspect for most
people this electoral system reform project represents a quintessentially American
quick-fix panacea to make the big ugly problem of not being able to have everything
all at once just go away.  And, therefore, people will only be disappointed to find that
the problem doesn't go away.  It might even get worse.  And, worst of all, the notion
of multiparty democracy could even get discredited by association, just as it in the
Weimar case, or post-Soviet Russia.

The hard but profoundly simple truth is that Americans can't have giant tax cuts,
substantial entitlement programs and a ridiculously bloated military all it once.  It's
called math, and it's just about as simple as a little basic addition and subtraction.
(The alternative choice, by the way, goes by the name of voodoo economics.)  But
recognizing that and making the (seemingly) difficult choices involved is less
appealing than searching for a magic bullet that can be achieved by showing up for
a vote in a referendum.  Then we can all go home, pop open a beer, watch the ball
game and allow the government to take care of business for us.

Sorry, but that's a world that never was and never will be.  And, indeed, never
should be either.  The real problem with American society is that we're supremely
greedy, stupid and lazy when it comes to our politics and government.  Most of us
invest next to nothing in thinking about issues and voting intelligently, let alone other
more robust forms of political participation.  Heck, nearly half of us can't be bothered
to show up and vote every four years.

There's no mystery here.  People that disengaged are going to get precisely what
they deserve when it comes to their government.  It's like if you were raising your
kids by popping your head into their lives once or twice a decade to check in, and
then you're startled to find out that they've grown up to be disastrous little
delinquents.  What a surprise, eh?

The weirdest thing about our times is that the solution to so many of our problems
are really astonishingly manifest, and would often involve little real sacrifice.  America
had actually found its way to many of those solutions during its mild experiment with
progressive politics in the middle of the twentieth century, learning from the
meltdown of regressive Hooverism which preceded it, and would have found more
had it taken the right lessons from the subsequent Vietnam disaster.  Unfortunately,
we've essentially unlearned the former and never did get the latter.

But its really not that hard to get out from under the Atlas-sized burden we've piled
on our own shoulders, if we wanted to.  To wit, if we simply dramatically scaled down
military spending and dramatically increased investment on alternative energy
research and development, we could make a huge dent in our indebtedness,
environmental, unemployment and foreign policy problems in one fell swoop, and
with little cost in terms of dreaded change for most Americans.  Few of us would
have to give up the big flat-screen TVs or the reclining chair.  We could still engorge
our way into obesity and diabetes if we wanted to, and occasionally invade some little
country full of brown people whenever our insecurities flared up to especially high
levels.  And yet we could still radically improve our lot in the meantime, with just
these easy steps.

For the meanwhile, though, voters in the UK have given us a paradigmatic sampling
of our political times.  They don't know where to turn.  They vaguely remember that
letting the right have the keys to government is a prescription for disaster, but the
so-called left has not only lost its nerve and purpose, it's lost its leftiness too.  Hence
an electorate all over the map in this week's election, and a hung parliament.  Look
for more of the same in America this November and again in 2010.

The great irony is that solutions are so close by.  It's as if one crawled across the
desert for ten days, only to die of thirst a hundred yards from an oasis.

Well, maybe that metaphor gives us too much credit.
Maybe it's more like dying of thirst sitting on your couch, because you got too lazy
even to traipse over to the fridge to grab a Coors.


David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New
York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (
mailto:dmg at regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always
allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net.