To recap: Roughly speaking, I think we have three main political problems in this country: 1) that too many people with a megaphone talk crap; 2) that too many citizens believe crap; and 3) the ratio of crap to non-crap in the public dialogue is much too high.
I have reformulated the last one of these three political problems as follows: 1) our news media are broken; 2) civic education is broken; 3) CIVIL leadership is broken.
As ever, there is no support for my assertions and there is lots more wrong with civil leadership than just this.
Today, we deal with a broken civil leadership, the people who shape and run our republic.
3) The ratio of crap to non-crap in the public dialogue is much too high and civil leadership is broken.
a. Overturning of the Fairness Doctrine has been part of a general trend to turn the media from something that people do because they want to into something that people do because they want to make money. This accounts for much of the media’s contribution to the general decline in caring about the country. As with all business in the US, the last 35 years of the conservative ascendancy has corporatized many family media businesses. This helps set a price for crap as commodity in the public dialogue, and the crap has Rushed in.
b. This is a piece of a general decline in noblesse oblige among America’s wealthy. With corporatization has also come a professionalization of business. Fewer people take an undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts from a good private college and then run a family business than used to. More take an MBA and become manager at a business that they work at until they get a better offer or fail. Or both. Think of Daddy Bush v. Baby Bush: Daddy: Phillips. Yale. Youngest Navy fighter pilot in WWII. Successful business. Daddy did the tax increase even though it cost him politically because it was the right thing for the nation v. Baby: Phillips. Yale. Couldn’t pull off Guard duty even when handed to him on a silver platter. MBA. Failed businesses. Still rich. Baby didn’t care about the nation, just his smirky friends. The rich today just don’t care as much about the nation as their class used to.
c. This revolt of the managers takes power away from long-range shareholders and puts more in the hands of the gamblers. Pretty much everything taught in MBA programs for the last 35 years is wrong or destructive to society or both. Our corporate leadership is more powerful and more parasitic than it has been in many years, and it is more incompetent than it has ever been. All of this shows up in the civic arena because, as Jefferson anticipated, concentrated wealth becomes concentrated political power eventually. This pays for corporatized crap in the public dialogue.
d. If the rich don’t care about the country – and most don’t – as the party of the rich, the Republican Party sure doesn’t care either. Believe it. Their contribution at the national level to success at civil affairs is pretty much all negative at this point. They have power, albeit reduced, and they are misusing it for no visible reason better than spite and hoped-for political gain. Republicans are dumping enormous amounts of crap into the public dialogue and civil affairs generally.
e. Item d. describes the goodest guys (and gals) in the Republican Party. Out to their right lie the Bush dead-enders, the Tea Baggers, the shrinking 25%, mostly in the South, who never reconciled themselves to civil rights for persons of visible African ancestry, the Union, or democracy and the rule of law. Probably they never will. People on the far right are utterly full of made-up crap and get too loud a megaphone in the public dialogue. And the business Republicans are terrified of them.
f. The Democratic Party has become the Eisenhower Republican Party. Ike described himself as a “progressive conservative.” I think that’s pretty good shorthand for where the center of the Democratic Party has been for the last 35 years. Nothing wrong with Ike – we need a party like that. It just shouldn’t be the Democratic Party, because then there’s no party of Roosevelt to speak up for the common man and woman. Democrats have been dumping tepid crap into the public dialogue and doing tepid things in civil affairs for decades and they still are.
g. Where is some left-wing leadership who can figure out how to get into the dialogue? Steal this Book. The Whole World is Watching. Some bright young minds need to see through the fog to a solution. Note to self: send some money to Pacifica.
h. Educational leadership and the educational ethos have broken down in this country. It’s not just the homogenization of public education at mediocre that came after Brown. Professionalization of education – cadres of degreed, certificated educationalists with huge budgets – hasn’t improved everything about the one-room schoolhouse where Miss Nellie taught everything to everybody after two years at Slippery Rock. Universities see too many things and people as profit centers and funding sources. The students, especially the undergraduates, are getting lost in the publishing, the research applications and grants, the patents, the TA’s, the tuition, the loans, etc.
i. With the professionalization of everything else has come a turning away from the liberal arts. This has been a two-way street: yes, there is less respect and money for literature, history and social sciences, but professors in these fields have also turned their faces away from being useful to society. Too much of what academics do is relentlessly small and relayed in a voice that is intentionally hard for the common man to hear.
j. The assassinations of the ’60’s and the stolen election of 2000 have deprived the nation of generations of experienced liberal-left leadership. This had a direct effect – Al Gore would have contributed a better non-crap to crap ratio to civil affairs; who knows what a Bobby Kennedy administration might have achieved? But it also has had a knock-on effect: there have been a lot fewer people with a chance to work in government or successful citizen movements and develop their leadership skills than there would have been.
k. Respect for, and concern with, the state of civil liberties in this country is abysmal. America, for example, cannot ever say torture is OK, much less institute it as a policy and make hit tv shows about it, and still keep its soul. Casually tasing children and the mentally ill when they don’t comply quickly enough is not OK. Cut and dried.