The Dumbing Down Of Democracy

There’s a reason for the old adage that watching laws being made is like making sausage. Why? Because it’s so messy.
Quite simply, the whole point of the political process to be full of messy discussion and heated debate. By being cluttered and sometimes bordering on the chaotic, reasonable people often eventually come to conclusions they normally wouldn’t. By being outside of their comfort zones, they generate compromises that don’t make everybody happy, but are probably best for citizens on the whole.
That’s how the democratic process worked for 200 years. But lately, our democracy hasn’t been working as well in Washington or closer to home. Issues are packaged cleverly, replete with cookie-cutter soundbites, charts and graphs with circles and arrows on the back, as Arlo Guthrie might say. Media specialists hone and craft messages to their simplest to dumb down complex ideas and appeal to visceral instincts. TV interviews in which people holler at each other are much more common that people who talk and listen to find common ground.
When you visit the U.S. Senate chamber in Washington these days when the body is in session, it’s rare to see more than two or three senators on the floor listening to colleagues. Instead in their offices, they glance periodically at a television on a low hum. Committee meetings become less of substantive working sessions than media opportunities for a quip.
There is a slew of contributing culprits — the professionalization of campaign politics, pollsters, advertising, lobbyists, big money in campaigns, simplified messaging and focus groups, and reporters who look at the horserace of stories instead of digging for details.
Four recent events exemplify growing intolerance for substance in our democracy.
At the national level, South Carolina’s own Jim DeMint, who gave up his job in the U.S. Senate to run the Heritage Foundation, is changing the culture of the stodgy old think tank started by the Republican Party as a policy generator. Now, according to a Feb. 23 profile in The New York Times, policy wonks are leaving as raw politics supplants policy. Young staff members are called the “sales force,” instead of being analysts. “Research that seemed to undermine Heritage’s political goals has been squelched, former Heritage officials say. And more and more, the work of policy analysts is tailored for social media.” In other words, policy should be in 140 characters or less.
In Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a GOP-backed bill that opponents said would have led to institutionalized discrimination for gays and lesbians by business people acting on “sincerely held religious belief.” When the state’s economic leaders went into a tizzy after figuring out what the state’s political leaders had done — and when several admitted that they didn’t fully understand what they voted on — Brewer had to step in to right the discriminatory wrong.
In recent headlines in South Carolina, the S.C. House passed a bill that would have eliminated lots of regulations that protect the environment, health and public safety. The sponsor, Rep. Todd Atwater, R-Lexington, said he intended for new regulations — not existing ones — to sunset after five years if they didn’t merit continuation upon review. He said it was an oversight for it to apply to existing regulations. (When the bill went to the Senate, it died in committee.)
And during the last week of February in Columbia, state senators amended an already-milquetoast ethics reform bill with more blather, showing they couldn’t work out real compromises to change a legislative ethics system pilloried by the governor, her chief political rival and voters across the state.
Almost 30 years ago, an essay by mystery writer John D. MacDonald highlighted how true believers on both sides of the political aisle searched for simple answers to complex questions because that’s all they wanted:
“Their basic lack of education, of reading, of being able to comprehend the great truths of reality has left empty places in their heads, into which great mischief has crept.”
Fast forward to today and you can see how easy it has been for MSNBC and Fox News to kowtow to audiences of true believers and facilitate the dumbing down of American democracy.
 
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com.