I’ve been an incurable political junkie for about ten years now, maybe twelve. For the past five years I’ve spent six-to-twelve hours a day reading or writing about politics, almost every single day. If you haven’t done that, you can’t imagine what the experience is like. It’s total immersion. I should have more than one Ph.D in political science by now. I have learned a tremendous amount about how politics works in this country. And the media. The number one lesson I’ve taken away from it all is that you should hate the vast majority of elected officials and members of the media in this country. I know that is depressing to hear, but it’s the truth. But I have a second lesson.
Once you learn to give up on almost all your heroes and all the people you think might change things for the better, you’ll overcome your cynicism. You’ll realize that you were wrong to think so highly of most of these people but that your instincts were right about who you should be pulling for. Total immersion in American politics will ween you of your idealism, but if you’ve watched what happens to politicians once they’ve been in Washington DC for a while this should come as no surprise to you. Yet, once you’ve lost that youthful and innocent burst of enthusiasm and you’ve digested your disappointment, you’ll get to another level where you begin to understand how progress actually occurs within this system (and how it can be thwarted).
And heroes will begin to emerge again. Heroes like Henry Waxman who fought valiantly for decades against Big Tobacco, or John Dingell who has introduced a universal health care bill every year for over half a century. If you look at them too closely you’ll see some unsightly warts. Waxman voted to authorize the war in Iraq and Dingell has been an opponent of environmental regulations. But the real heroes in Washington are the ones that keep up the fight, year after year, until they finally begin to deliver. They learn to be patient and take their progress piecemeal. They cut deals that infuriate their biggest supporters. But they keep moving the ball down the field.
If you think about it, this is how all the great reformers have accomplished their goals. It was true of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and it’s true of the people that have won rights for women and gays. If you live in the moment, you’ll find good reason to hate these people. But if you take the long view, things are much less hopeless than they seem.
“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”