Pound That Meme
Matthew Yglesias, who's an up-and-comer in liberal foreign policy publications, points out one of the fundamental problems with our electorate in this post:It's no mystery why Matt, who's a really smart and thoughtful person, finds writing about trivial horse hockey like the stuff he mentions boring, the problem is it's this kind of shite that decides elections in America.Mark Kleiman points to a real problem, noting the contrast between the attention paid to "Markos Moulitsas's unpremeditated, quickly-retracted dismissal of the deaths of four contract fighters in Iraq" and Stu Bykofsky's publication of a column calling for the deaths of thousands of Americans in a massive terrorist attack in a "large-circulation big-city newspaper and then featured on Drudge and Fox News." Just like Mark, "I don't really wish that we behaved like our wingnut opponents, but their capacity to work up and sustain outrage has to be counted among their structural advantages."
This is what I've referred to as the "hack gap" and it seems to me that it's very important. The nature of two-party democracy is that elections are decided by the small minority of the public too confused or too ill-informed to realize that there are persistent, substantial differences between the two federal political parties. As a result, the issues (or, more likely, pseudo-issues) that are most important in deciding elections tend to be the issues that are least important in substantive terms.
As a writer, though, I'd rather spend my time writing about things that I think are important or at least interesting. Harping away on haircuts, Bykofsky's appalling column, the way George W. Bush lied to the American public about what kind of cheese he likes on his cheesesteak (really!), etc. doesn't seem like an appealing way to spend my time. But the fact that the right has an army of people willing to pretend that this sort of thing is the most important thing in the world is a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming, etc.
[emphasis mine]
I'd quibble with his argument that this is the nature of a two party system. It's not. I blame the media on one hand, and the mentally incurious American public on the other. No ones seems to be able to come to grips with the fact that while Americans are good at their jobs, they're basically civic dummies. I'm inclined to think that regular Americans assume that our democracy operates on auto pilot, and that there's no need for them to intervene because the basic structure was so well defined. But guess what? The garden does need tending, and aside from replacing a Rep or Senator here or there, the whole construct is easy to destroy.
American democracy came about at a certain time due to a confluence of events and ideas set in an almost perfect time, enabling it to grow and flourish. Putting the Executive in the hands of despots like Bush, and say, Guiliani, and the whole slips rather easily into just another example of failed statehood. Having complete idiots casting votes doesn't help.
p.s., his reference to Bykofsy's op-ed is here. This guy wants another 9/11 to "unite us all".
posted by FuzzFinger @ 8/14/2007 07:38:00 PM
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