Christopher Hitchens has a marvelous essay over at Slate on how cliché-ridden and devoid of substance political campaigns are today. A sampler of his best lines in the piece:
…It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be "charisma"?) it exerts. Take "Yes We Can," for example. It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake…
…Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together…
…And it’s not as if anybody is looking for coded language in which to say: "Health care-who needs it?" or "Special interests and lobbyists-give them a break," let alone "Dr. King’s dream-what a snooze." It’s more that the prevailing drivel assumes that every adult in the country is a completely illiterate jerk who would rather feel than think…
Hitchens does an admirable job of diagnosing much of what afflicts modern political debate, but he overlooks what might be considered the flip side of his argument. For while it is true that too many politicians lapse into empty sloganeering and vapid statements to describe their own agenda, they also have a tendency to resort to equally mindless drivel when attacking their opponents, drivel that has been successfully pushed by campaign finance "reformers" of all stripes for decades.
Rather than actually discussing what they see as their opponent’s flawed ideas and policies, too many politicians today fall back on charges that their opponent is in the pockets of "lobbyists and special interests," as though the people behind those lobbyists and interests were gaijin, some sort of alien species with no legitimate standing to advocate for their own beliefs and interests.
How many times in election season, or when important legislation is being debated, do we hear the charge that a certain bill is "supported by Big Oil" or some other "special interest" as if that alone were enough to prove that the bill had nefarious intent and not only should be opposed, but its sponsors should be tarred and feathered for accepting campaign contributions from whomever the bogeyman of the moment might be?
Lost in such absurd banalities is any discussion of whether the proposed legislation might be good policy, or at least what the relative merits and tradeoffs with any such policy might be. For example, imagine a policy that might be supported by "Big Oil" that allows them to significantly increase production. As just about anybody with more than 15 minutes worth of economics classes can tell you, such a production increase would almost certainly lower oil prices and, in turn, lower gasoline prices at the pump
Given gasoline prices hovering around $3 (and predicted to go higher), might it not be worth considering more than whether "Big Oil" supported such a policy? To be sure, whatever benefits the broader public might get from such a policy would need to be weighed against other factors, such as environmental damage that might occur in the production process or, for those concerned about such things, increased greenhouse gas emissions. But clearly the issue, like all issues, deserves a lot more consideration and debate than simply whether "Big Oil" supports the policy and whether elected officials favoring the policy have received contributions from individuals and PAC’s connected to the oil industry.
Unfortunately, campaign finance "reformers" and addled politicians unwilling to engage in substantive debate have spent decades explaining that which groups support which policies, and who has contributed to whom, are among the most important things to consider when discussing issues. Listen to a "reformer" talk about the need to disclose contributors to independent groups that run issue ads or otherwise try to educate and persuade the public and pretty quickly you will get something along the lines of "people need to know who is paying for these ads so they can judge their accuracy."
This sort of intellectually feeble argument actually undermines serious consideration of issues. Rather than providing citizens with valuable information, they provoke knee-jerk responses based on how individuals feel about certain groups, industries, professions, and interests – in other words, exactly the opposite of what is needed for serious consideration of competing proposals.
For example, disclosure of the funding behind ads addressing a proposal to cap contingency fees for trial lawyers add little and subtract much from any real discussion of such a policy. Am I supposed to be shocked to discover that trial lawyers might pay for ads opposing such a cap, while businesses who aren’t fans of the trial bar are paying for ads supporting such a policy?
How exactly would such information help me to decide whether a cap was good policy? The only thing such information does is allow for simplistic and thoughtless decisions on whether to support or oppose a policy – if I’m fond of trial lawyers I can simply oppose the policy without actually thinking about its benefits, and if I take a generally dim view of trial lawyers I can favor the policy because it "sticks it" to a group I don’t like. I fail to see this as an improvement over actually weighing the benefits and costs of such a policy.
Sadly, this sort of "debate" is all too typical in modern politics. Vapid pronouncements by candidates that they stand for "hope" and "with American workers" while their opponents "are bought by Big Labor" or "beholden to the pharmaceutical companies" substitute for real dialogue and debate on substance.
I fear that so long as "reformers" spin their slogans about the influence of "big money" and "special interests," this nation will never have a full and healthy debate over which public policies should be pursued.
