Today’s Apple iPhone 5 has 2.7 times the processing power of the 1985 Cray-2 Supercomputer. Across a broad spectrum of human ingenuity technological progress has been breathtaking.
Gallup reports that while Cray was leading the computer world in processing power President Ronald Reagan was regularly receiving approval ratings in the 60% range. Yet today if you look at the grand experiment in self-government it is clearly not working so well.
In country after country the governed are rebelling. I do not, however, need to go offshore to find examples of breakdown between the governed and its elected leaders.
In 1970 I was an Assistant Attorney General in Missouri working for John C. Danforth. He had been elected Attorney General in 1968 and decided early in 1970 to run for the US Senate. I managed his campaign.
Political campaigns were just beginning to use targeted direct mail to raise money and the Danforth campaign retained Richard Viguerie, a pioneer in that business. I remember well a conversation with Viguerie who had drafted a direct mail letter for Danforth directed at carefully selected lists of people who were pro-life. The candidate refused to use highly emotional language and Viguerie correctly predicted he would have limited success.
Today most candidates have no hesitance to go to the emotional edge of an issue. Doubly the special interest organizations that are aligned with one or the other of the political parties gleefully use the raw edge to gain members and raise money having long ago learned the lesson passed along to me over 40 years ago.
Mostly the emotional edge has no relationship with truth or reason. Indeed there is often an inverse relationship between incendiary language and either. The more inflammatory, the less truthful or reasonable.
So while we live in a scientific age where virtually everything can be measured most politicians only measure emotion. Political science, including courses assessing the efficacy of government programs, is taught but in real politics the only science is used to measure emotion and then fine tune its appeal.
The ultimate consequence of this irrationality will be failure. And while history will record the most egregious practitioners of demagoguery it will also record the disillusioned victims and their slide into cynicism. Disillusionment and cynicism are enemies of self-government.
As Republicans and Democrats practice their talking points (scripts) from their political sanctuaries and gerrymandered districts and think they see the rest of the world all they see is their reflection in a distorted mirror. In this case the mirror has been cleverly angled to convert the unreal into the real.
Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al recently published of Culture Leads, Leaders Follow. He and his wife, Marty, now live fulltime on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Stephan Sonn says
Another shade of lament well put. It as if some kind of spell was cast and writers here have substituted rumination for resolve.
Zane Carter says
This is a beautifully written and exceedingly thoughtful commentary on the current state of our partizan political environment. Thank you for sharing your insightful and well-reasoned perspective.