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August · 06-06-22, 04:31 PM

Pretty good article:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...fight-politics

Food fight politics

by Jay Cost, Contributing Editor

| June 02, 2022 11:00 PM

The tragic shooting of an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in late May led predictably to another round of public debate about guns. Or, maybe better put, public screeching about guns. Progressives demanded stricter gun control laws. Some, such as Robert “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas, went so far as to call for the seizure of AR-15s. On the right, conservatives insisted on the inviolability of the Second Amendment.
Here’s a prediction you can take to the bank: The two sides will bicker pointlessly about this issue until Uvalde fades from the news. Nothing of substance will happen, nothing will change. People will get bored and go on to find something else to be outraged at each other about. Two weeks ago, it was abortion. A month ago, it was Ukraine. Three months ago, it was trans rights. We’re just about due for another round of Trump and Russia. Eventually, of course, another shooting will occur, and then, we will be back to yelling about guns.

Are we doomed to repeat this, again and again? Why must our politics be so pointless? Unfortunately, the answer to the first question is yes, because the answer to the second question is that we as a people no longer possess the civic virtue necessary to fix it.

In an alternate universe, left and right might agree to disagree about gun control, then come together on commonsense measures. Increased school security. A more reliable system to identify, treat, and monitor those who are seriously mentally ill. Better training for law enforcement. A law would be passed, the government would implement it, and hopefully, shootings would decrease.

But we do not live in that world, for two reasons.

First, only a fool can possibly believe that our government at this point can design and implement effective public policy to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. This is, remember, the same government that could not get HealthCare.gov to work. The last quarter-century has witnessed our government fail on all sorts of issues across almost every imaginable policy dimension — from claiming there were WMD in Iraq to securing the peace in Iraq or Afghanistan to reining in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which it created, by the way) before the housing crisis to dealing with the housing crisis to promoting efficiency in public healthcare spending to managing COVID to securing economic growth in the post-COVID economy. Failure, failure, failure.

It really says something that the most successful piece of government action in the last generation was Obamacare.

Our administrative state, across departments and agencies, is a byzantine tangle of sclerotic incompetence. Our Congress is shot through with conflicts of interest. Legislators do not even write, let alone read, the laws they pass. They outsource lawmaking to staff who then go on to take jobs at lobbying firms. Too many of our public intellectuals are well-credentialed time servers, lacking wisdom, prudence, and especially virtue. Govern? We don’t do that around here anymore.

Nationally, it is shocking to consider the extent to which we are still running on laws mainly promulgated during the Great Society and early Nixon years. Most, if not all, of them need to be substantially redesigned, but our institutions of government cannot do it.

Second, too many people, on both the Left and Right, are completely uninterested in fixing any of this, for that would require compromise. Politics is supposed to be the venue by which a diverse people finds points of agreement. But that is not how we treat it. Politics is our religion these days, and the worship of the divine does not usually admit of splitting the difference.

But this might be too charitable, for it implies that Americans have some profound, yet overwrought, commitment to abstract principles of right and wrong. Does that give us too much credit? Perhaps. Certainly, some Americans are so severely committed to a set of abstract principles that common ground is anathema to them. But many, many others enjoy the conflict for its own grubby pleasures. Our politics are a cafeteria food fight, and lots of people love flinging the meatloaf.

The ones who enjoy American politics for the sheer malice of it seem to sample disproportionately from the most engaged quarters of the citizenry. Anybody who has spent any time on Twitter is surely aware of this, at least on some level. Here’s a fun experiment. Take your “favorite” Twitter loudmouth, be it on the Left or the Right. Really, it can be anybody with a huge following who tweets provocative things that make compromise less likely, not more. Navigate over to his homepage on Twitter and take a gander at when he joined Twitter. Then, notice how many tweets he has sent over his time on that Godforsaken website. A little bit of fourth-grade division will quickly reveal how many times a day he tweets, on average. I conduct this experiment regularly and am shocked to discover the blue-check “thought leaders” on Twitter blasting out 100 or more tweets a day on average. Assuming they sleep at all, that can work out to be six to 10 tweets an hour, every waking hour, for a decade.

Do these people strike one as the types interested in compromise? It seems like what they really want is the cheap dopamine rush of screeching at how evil people (whom they’ve never met) are, and seeing their righteous indignation rewarded with thousands of likes and retweets.
Crazy as it may sound in the age of social media, the original purpose of the First Amendment was to facilitate collective deliberation. Public opinion, James Madison once wrote, “is the real sovereign in every free” government. And for it to be a benevolent sovereign, there must be a “general intercourse of sentiments” among the citizenry. In other words, the people must talk among themselves, figure out what they agree on, and have the government go do those things. It's supposed to be constructive.

But we the people do not do that anymore. There are retweets to be had. There are libs to be owned. There are “ultra-MAGA deplorables” to be reviled. The issue of the day is not an opportunity to come together around shared values to try to make life better. It is a chance to denounce the opposition and feel good about our own moral rectitude. And all the while, the institutions of American self-government decay, decay, decay.

And for politicians such as the execrable O’Rourke, there’s money to be made. More stunts, more posturing, and more moralizing leads to more small-dollar donations, and ultimately greater clout in national politics. These days, you’d have to be a fool to get into politics to make things better. O’Rourke, at least, seems to recognize that. On some level, one can’t help but admire the hustle of our political confidence men.

American self-government in the 21st century is, at its core, a rotten spectacle. Day after day, week after week, we spew splenetic rage upon our fellow citizens in the hope that our side acquires control of a government that is too incompetent to do much of anything. For this, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College.

06-06-22, 04:31 PM	#3444
August Wayfaring Stranger Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Massachusetts Posts: 22,682 Downloads: 0 Uploads: 0	Pretty good article: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...fight-politics Food fight politics by Jay Cost, Contributing Editor \| June 02, 2022 11:00 PM The tragic shooting of an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in late May led predictably to another round of public debate about guns. Or, maybe better put, public screeching about guns. Progressives demanded stricter gun control laws. Some, such as Robert “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas, went so far as to call for the seizure of AR-15s. On the right, conservatives insisted on the inviolability of the Second Amendment. Here’s a prediction you can take to the bank: The two sides will bicker pointlessly about this issue until Uvalde fades from the news. Nothing of substance will happen, nothing will change. People will get bored and go on to find something else to be outraged at each other about. Two weeks ago, it was abortion. A month ago, it was Ukraine. Three months ago, it was trans rights. We’re just about due for another round of Trump and Russia. Eventually, of course, another shooting will occur, and then, we will be back to yelling about guns. Are we doomed to repeat this, again and again? Why must our politics be so pointless? Unfortunately, the answer to the first question is yes, because the answer to the second question is that we as a people no longer possess the civic virtue necessary to fix it. In an alternate universe, left and right might agree to disagree about gun control, then come together on commonsense measures. Increased school security. A more reliable system to identify, treat, and monitor those who are seriously mentally ill. Better training for law enforcement. A law would be passed, the government would implement it, and hopefully, shootings would decrease. But we do not live in that world, for two reasons. First, only a fool can possibly believe that our government at this point can design and implement effective public policy to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. This is, remember, the same government that could not get HealthCare.gov to work. The last quarter-century has witnessed our government fail on all sorts of issues across almost every imaginable policy dimension — from claiming there were WMD in Iraq to securing the peace in Iraq or Afghanistan to reining in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which it created, by the way) before the housing crisis to dealing with the housing crisis to promoting efficiency in public healthcare spending to managing COVID to securing economic growth in the post-COVID economy. Failure, failure, failure. It really says something that the most successful piece of government action in the last generation was Obamacare. Our administrative state, across departments and agencies, is a byzantine tangle of sclerotic incompetence. Our Congress is shot through with conflicts of interest. Legislators do not even write, let alone read, the laws they pass. They outsource lawmaking to staff who then go on to take jobs at lobbying firms. Too many of our public intellectuals are well-credentialed time servers, lacking wisdom, prudence, and especially virtue. Govern? We don’t do that around here anymore. Nationally, it is shocking to consider the extent to which we are still running on laws mainly promulgated during the Great Society and early Nixon years. Most, if not all, of them need to be substantially redesigned, but our institutions of government cannot do it. Second, too many people, on both the Left and Right, are completely uninterested in fixing any of this, for that would require compromise. Politics is supposed to be the venue by which a diverse people finds points of agreement. But that is not how we treat it. Politics is our religion these days, and the worship of the divine does not usually admit of splitting the difference. But this might be too charitable, for it implies that Americans have some profound, yet overwrought, commitment to abstract principles of right and wrong. Does that give us too much credit? Perhaps. Certainly, some Americans are so severely committed to a set of abstract principles that common ground is anathema to them. But many, many others enjoy the conflict for its own grubby pleasures. Our politics are a cafeteria food fight, and lots of people love flinging the meatloaf. The ones who enjoy American politics for the sheer malice of it seem to sample disproportionately from the most engaged quarters of the citizenry. Anybody who has spent any time on Twitter is surely aware of this, at least on some level. Here’s a fun experiment. Take your “favorite” Twitter loudmouth, be it on the Left or the Right. Really, it can be anybody with a huge following who tweets provocative things that make compromise less likely, not more. Navigate over to his homepage on Twitter and take a gander at when he joined Twitter. Then, notice how many tweets he has sent over his time on that Godforsaken website. A little bit of fourth-grade division will quickly reveal how many times a day he tweets, on average. I conduct this experiment regularly and am shocked to discover the blue-check “thought leaders” on Twitter blasting out 100 or more tweets a day on average. Assuming they sleep at all, that can work out to be six to 10 tweets an hour, every waking hour, for a decade. Do these people strike one as the types interested in compromise? It seems like what they really want is the cheap dopamine rush of screeching at how evil people (whom they’ve never met) are, and seeing their righteous indignation rewarded with thousands of likes and retweets. Crazy as it may sound in the age of social media, the original purpose of the First Amendment was to facilitate collective deliberation. Public opinion, James Madison once wrote, “is the real sovereign in every free” government. And for it to be a benevolent sovereign, there must be a “general intercourse of sentiments” among the citizenry. In other words, the people must talk among themselves, figure out what they agree on, and have the government go do those things. It's supposed to be constructive. But we the people do not do that anymore. There are retweets to be had. There are libs to be owned. There are “ultra-MAGA deplorables” to be reviled. The issue of the day is not an opportunity to come together around shared values to try to make life better. It is a chance to denounce the opposition and feel good about our own moral rectitude. And all the while, the institutions of American self-government decay, decay, decay. And for politicians such as the execrable O’Rourke, there’s money to be made. More stunts, more posturing, and more moralizing leads to more small-dollar donations, and ultimately greater clout in national politics. These days, you’d have to be a fool to get into politics to make things better. O’Rourke, at least, seems to recognize that. On some level, one can’t help but admire the hustle of our political confidence men. American self-government in the 21st century is, at its core, a rotten spectacle. Day after day, week after week, we spew splenetic rage upon our fellow citizens in the hope that our side acquires control of a government that is too incompetent to do much of anything. For this, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College. __________________ Flanked by life and the funeral pyre. Putting on a show for you to see.