© Charles D. Hayes
Pretend
for a moment a medical checkup reveals that you may be on the verge of a heart
attack if you don't receive medical attention. The matter is urgent. You have
one of two options: bypass surgery or a new regime of drug therapy. Both
approaches have a proven track record, and you find the choice to be a tough
one. But it turns out your opinion doesn’t even count. You see, in this
scenario, the country you live in has only two doctors, and the two can't agree
on which approach to take. One doctor’s vote can block the other’s. Your only
option is to wait and wait and wait. You could die before a decision is
reached.
This
is precisely the predicament many people find themselves in today. Millions of our
citizens are being negatively affected by orchestrated gridlock: legislative
stalemate, funds for education cut, construction projects on hold, political
appointments blocked, unemployment payments denied, crumbling infrastructure
with no money allocated for maintenance, and scores of unfunded or underfunded government programs that are vital to our
middle class and to people who are barely hanging on economically. These
situations range from inconvenient to life-threatening.
I
have friends who take a great deal of satisfaction in the idea of legislative gridlock
as a viable political strategy. There was a time in America when I believed their
views were justified because it was intended as a temporary tactic, not a
permanent solution. Divided government works if politicians want it to work and
if they act accordingly. Democracy depends upon compromise and, in point of
fact, cannot exist without it.
But
when ideology becomes immersed in identity and fuses with the notion that we
are right simply because of who we are, the process is no longer democratic.
When the parties declare that if you oppose us you are evil, and that the sole
objective henceforth is to stop the opposition, regardless of what is proposed,
there is nothing to do except wait for cardiac arrest.
Our
history makes it plainly clear that neither political party has a lock on the
truth of how best to govern. Both liberal and conservative approaches are
necessary at times. Some plans work and some don't. But to take the position
that everything one side proposes has to be stopped—even if the government is
shut down and needless suffering among the citizens will be the result—is a
form of political mockery that undermines the democratic process.
Democracy
works only if the desire for solutions to our problems can trump ideology.
Ideology is something all of us have that can be measured in degrees. But when
the rigidity of one’s politics becomes a closed system, any hope of achieving consensus
is lost. Our three branches of government are supposed to provide checks and
balances, and yet today ideology is so stringent that Congress makes every
effort to prevent many appointments to the judiciary from even taking place.
Democracy
is a dangerous political system because there is always the risk that it will allow
things to happen that will abolish it. Balancing power is a precarious pursuit simply
because of what power is. When citizens don't pay attention to political
reality, a vacuum exists and power rushes in to fill it, as essayist Isaiah
Berlin so often explained.
Our
elected lawmakers add thousands of tweaks to the legislation they produce to
rig the system on behalf of special interests, who then give their clientele
exceptional treatment. When criticized for such tactics, the corporate
interests call it "freedom," and if pressed further, "moral
truth." There’s a simple reason that Obamacare is under unrelenting siege
by legislators, who are themselves under pressure from lobbyists: Obamacare hamstrings
the ability of the health insurance industry to profit at the expense of
medical treatment.
That
things are not as they first appear is one of life's most important lessons. At
the same time, it is also one of the hardest lessons to act on—especially when
it comes to politics—because we are too often blinded by emotion. People
imprisoned by ideology are easy to recognize when they show up on television
news as suicide bombers, but they are much harder to spot when they parrot
views we agree with.
Most
of the problems we face are much more nuanced and complicated than they are
made to seem by both liberals and conservatives. Media pundits and politicians
offer simplistic explanations to complex problems too often. If we were to
delve into these matters in deeper detail, we could discover things that shed
new light on the issues and perhaps reveal new solutions. Yet most of our
citizens get caught up solely in the emotion and look no further than how wrong
the other side is, based upon superficial hearsay.
We
can have gridlock in which those with heart conditions get no treatment, or we
can try more than one procedure. I would prefer to let either liberals or
conservatives try what they think is the right approach (without keeping the
other side from voting), and then hold them accountable at election time, rather
than let myriad problems continue to stagnate from gridlock.
The
sad truth is that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all want pretty
much the same things in life; they just disagree about solutions. Contrast their
behavior today with the way we cooperate in wartime when we have a common
enemy. If we can ever awaken to the realization that our problems are our
common enemy, instead of each other, we might actually solve our problems through
democratic means and move ahead.
Television
interviews frequently feature pundits who offer smug satisfaction about
political gridlock, claiming it is better than the alternative. These people
obviously are not having chest pains. Supporters of gridlock have one thing in
common: they all benefit from things as they are.
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