A moderate proposal

It really has been too much to ask that our members of congress present an actual set of ideas and/or plans for fixing the country. Democrats think too small and present policy ideas as little laundry lists without an overall narrative. They are often quite divided amongst themselves and usually compromise on tinkering fixes more than halfway to the formerly republican position as opening bids. Democrats rely too much on pollsters to try and meet the electorate despite the incoherence of mass public opinion, even among the various inclusive constituencies in the Democratic Party. Though these moderate and mild prescriptions usually do more good than harm, there is no structure to differentiate the Democratic platform from the radical and very harmful republican platform. Speaking of which, the GOP has repeatedly demonstrated such incompetence, sadism, corruption, and every other disqualifying political feature that it would be considered a revolutionary terrorist organization in any other country rather than a legitimate party.

So if one party is too timid to fight the partisan battles that are necessary by definition in a representative system like the United States and the other party is inconceivably vile and anti-democratic that it cannot be trusted with power, what can be done? There is a growing movement of libertarians out there, swallowing young and dumb Americans from both the extreme left and extreme right, that would simply scrap the whole system in favor of... nothing. This movement is even less able to agree and compromise on a program, just limited government, end to spying or military incursions and the drug war but without a hint of long-term consequences. Even in the short term lobotomizing government would have grave consequences to stability and the economy, etc. The so-called tea party of old white people simply embraces the part left unsaid by libertarians, namely that private power steps into any vacuum left by the (re)public. Double-standards, racism, self-righteous aggression, strict hierarchy bordering on castes; basically this is fascism wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross. Fascism has many faces and is notoriously shifty, it can spring from almost any right wing authoritarian popular movement.

Things are pretty bad and the trend line does not look good either. Almost as though our whole society was rotting from top to bottom. These are symptoms though, is the tea party the cause of disintegration or a response to it? It is very difficult sometimes to distinguish correlation from causation. The thesis of this essay is how to address symptoms to a sufficient degree that peoples' better angels can be reawakened. Starting from the conservative intellectual James Burnham's thesis that liberalism extends freedom to democracy's assassins, whether on the extreme right or extreme left, any treatment must reinvigorate the responsible center. Not the center of contemporary America, which Thomas Frank has repeatedly stated comes part and parcel from corporate management theory, but pragmatic reformers and reasonable statesmen. Competent professionals that can debate ideas fairly from the same shared reality, making changes or preserving tradition by putting the breaks on reforms that go too far too fast, are desperately needed in the US Congress.

The proposal is fairly simple. In a system where too many citizens cannot be counted on to learn even basic civic responsibility and neither party can be counted on to know what the heck they are doing, perhaps what is needed is not restricting voters or suppressing groups of voters but raising the bar of who can be admitted to the House of Representatives. Theoretically the House sets its own rules, in the past it has taken drastic steps to exclude communists or fellow travelers, why not make rules to exclude the kinds of idiots regularly lampooned on The Daily Show? Force elected members to pass basic tests on economics, political science, history, law and other applicable fields before they can take their seats. I personally know scores of graduate students who would love the chance to grade essays written by presumptive legislators. The rubric must include detecting when partisan ideology is trumping common sense and for the flying spaghetti monster's sake, ethics tests that stand a reasonable chance of excluding the blatant confidence men who routinely sneak into the halls of power.

Changing public opinion is difficult, the electorate is fickle and in the aggregate has no idea what it wants anyway. Even if the Astroturf tea party moneymen are having trouble keeping their mass movement in perpetual high energy activism, they got a significant number of drooling sociopaths elected. And these suicidal whackaloons will get reelected over and over to pillage and destroy, impeach, default, shutdown the government, and generally display that awful combination of arrogance and ignorance that typifies the tea party as a whole because of the advantages of incumbency and gerrymandering. So, the masses of old and lame extremists run out of steam but their chosen representatives are like the energizer bunny.