How Far Gone Are We?
Thu Jun 30, 2005 at 12:55:28 PM PDT
Note: I've decided to change my screen name to my real name, Jonathan Schwartz. Mainly, because the surname thing just isn't me. I prefer it if people know the real me. Also, I've long since started to feel that a screen that mixed Socrates and Decartes was a little on the presumptious side.
Cross-posted from Moral Questions Weblog.
I was listening today to Terry Gross interview former Republican Senator Danforth about what has become of the Republican Party. At one point Gross asked him about the filibuster and he responded that in his day it would have been virtually unthinkable to imagine that a low level political nominee like the UN ambassador would have been filibustered. An up or down vote was always considered a courtesy to the President in his work of filling executive branch posts.
What struck me about the conversation was just how badly things have deteriorated for our form of government over the past eleven years. The conservative movement that assumed control of Congress in 1994 was, as compared to the individuals in power at the time, very extreme. Keep in mind that it was in that year that George W. Bush assumed the governorship of Texas, resentful over his father's loss two years before. In six years he and his political advisor, Karl Rove, would plan a method of revenge for this loss, leveraging their conservative extremism as they governed from the Presidency.
Over the past decade the Republicans have fastidiously tended to their base and to their campaign donors by creating as adversarial an environment as possible. As true conservatives like Danforth and Pat Buchanan have argued, present day Republicans have long since betrayed genuine conservative values. Governing for them has long since become little more than an exercise in maintaining and accruing more power.
So how badly has democracy been eroded since the ascendancy of Radical Conservatism? I would say so badly that the current Constitution in now inherently corrupted by the wielders of power, so much so that there may not be any solution other than building a new one. The House of Representatives has been gerrymandered to the point of virtual electoral irrelevance. Hugely important issues like energy security and health care are completely ignored because of the lobbies of the business interests involved in them. And the partisan atmosphere in Washington has become so divisive that long held legislative traditions like unlimited debate in the Senate and Presidential perrogotive are now in question.
These are all important aspects of the American tradition of democracy that we may never have back again. Historically, it seems that once institutionalized power has been corrupted, it tends to be very difficult to remove that corruption fully without at least to some degree creating a new order. For the time being, I doubt we can know anything for sure. We'll much more when the democrats get back into power.
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