This day the world’s great “beacon of democracy” fulfills the principal exercise of its charge, the most salient vehicle granted its constituents to practice self-determination, the election.
These generous powers impose great responsibilities which one might expect best be administered by the governed for their own sake with sober assessment, informed judgement and common objectives. How curious that the business of elections in the United States now more closely resembles an excrement fight in a hothouse full of rabid baboons. The functions of argument, reason and deliberation have been displaced by a corrosive scourge of anger, disgust, fear and loathing. Yet Americans continue to loudly wail and moan in complaint over their incompetent, corrupt government. Amazingly, it remains lost on them that when something is “of the people, by the people, for the people”, when one puts “garbage in” one can only expect “garbage out”.
Having been groomed from birth to be consumers, Americans respond reliably to marketing messages and thus election advertisements don’t so much facilitate as define what is referred to as “the debate” in both tone and content. This year’s general election cycle, referred to as a “mid-term”, doesn’t have a Presidential or many other “important” races so voter participation will be low; if the majority of the electorate abstains from the vote, all decision-making power therein is awarded to a few marginal groups and those most “motivated” to vote.
As it turns out practical matters like policy positions and proposals do not motivate the act of voting nearly as effectively as emotional responses do. Both the easiest and most reliable emotions to elicit are disgust and anger. For those reasons triggers for outrage, xenophobia, nationalism, prudishness, economic anxiety and racism are among the most cost-effective plays to employ in campaign messaging, which explains the universal adoption of “attack ads” as critical campaign strategy. Another fruitful strategy is to putrify voters’ attitudes vis-a-vis politics by sowing disgust and cultivating hopelessness to sour the electorate into abstaining from the vote altogether; for practitioners of this dirty-bomb approach, a voter staying home is as good as a vote against the opponent.
The Republican Party and its campaigning candidates openly characterize these elections not as a contest of ideas, but rather a referendum on the Presidency of Barack Obama. They don’t waste time talking about material issues because they cynically know those don’t matter to voters and that instead their best hope to get elected is to foment a hate-vote against the President. What has emerged among Republicans nationally is a broadly concerted effort to bring the chief executive as low as possible in the public perception, so low their own fatally damaged goods seem somehow favorable in comparison. It’s a battle for “less unfavorable” where they all live at the doghouse end of the approval-ratings scale.
This author regrets to report that according to expectations these tactics will work. However, even in success such a development will present problems for the presumed Republican victors. They will not have received any affirmations of thier own platforms, but rather solely a repudiation of a vague monolithic other. Their best argument in support of themselves, “we’re not them”, is not a strong position from which to lead. The validation of their counterpoint, “if you think they suck give us a shot”, will impose significant expectations and commensurate pressure that they produce and legislate, feats of accomplishment likely to outmatch their shaky resolve if not their questionable competence.
A U.S. Senate controlled by Republicans will still be at the mercy of the reactionary “I don’t give a fuck” whims of its unruly “Tea Party” faction. Anything congress might manage to get passed will face the President’s veto pen, so an override of the veto would require even more votes, and establishment Republicans to venture ever more loving anilingual congress with Tea Party ass, or even stoop to working with, forgive them Jesus, Democrats !
Republicans in the United States have tenaciously and consistently practiced the politics of obstruction the past six years, but now that very weapon may be turned against them by their own party. How metaphorical to the likelihood that one will be shot with the gun that’s kept in the house.
If Democrats are smart (for which there is at best scant evidence) they’ll take their electoral lumps this cycle and give just enough rope to the Republican reprobate regime the next two years for it to empty the clip shooting itself in the foot, setting up Democrats with even better prospects in 2016 and Republicans with even clearer choices to either shape up, show up and grow up or stubbornly march into the sea under steam of their own stupidity.
“Every downside has at least one darkly entertaining article. Keep your head up…”
— Downside Abby