There’s a lot of trends in the U.S. that annoy me, mainly having to do with politics, pundits, and the media. The “he said, she said” method of reporting in which ridiculous arguments are put on an equal footing with sane ones, and hence legitimized. The inability or unwillingness to point out when leaders are lying. The overall shallowness of a lot of reporting. The general anti-intellectualism of a growing segment of this country. But few things annoy me more than those pundits who think that politics just has too much of that messy politics in it.
Duncan Black calls it “High Broderism“: the clamor for leaders who avoid the messiness of democracy by simply splitting every issue down the middle, calling it “compromise”, and thereby taking it off the table forever. Namesake David Broder is certainly an offender, as are people like Mark Halperin. However, the biggest, and most annoying offender, has to be David Brooks. For him, there isn’t any issue that can’t be solved by simply splitting the difference, no matter what the reality is. Middle class wages stagnating? Two-thirds of income growth going to the top 1%, leaving the small piece of the pie for the rest of us shlubs in the lower 99%? It doesn’t matter, because when we are in a recession, Brooks says that we should “Make Everybody Hurt“. On issue after issue, the Wise Leaders of the traditional media just want us to listen to them, so we can simply avoid unpleasantness like those protests in Wisconsin. A must-read takedown of that nonsense is here.
It is a very disgusting kind of elitism, from people who never have to worry about things like paying the mortgage or having health insurance taken away. And despite how highly they think of each other and their wise, “centrist” beliefs, they do not have the answers. You can’t solve the disagreements over unions, or health care, or the environment, or abortion, or the deficit, with these wise, faux “compromises” from on high. These are big, messy political fights because Americans have widely divergent views about how they think things should be. We aren’t looking for strong, wise men (and they are almost always men) to rule us from on high. That’s not democracy.
We are having big fights over public employees, deficits, health care, and the like, because they are huge issues with no easy solutions. People have different priorities, and they (shockingly) do not always align with pundits whose incomes are in seven figures. My priorities are going to be quite a bit different from the priorities of a member of the Tea Party, and I really don’t think that any solution will magically appease all sides. Like all of U.S. history, there will be a knock-down, drag-out fight to move things incrementally in one direction, until the tide turns and we move in a new direction. That’s democracy. It’s a contact sport where you play for keeps. As bad as it is, I’ll happily take it instead of some aristocratic fantasy world.