A new batch of gray clouds moves overhead every few hours as we move a little closer to April, one of my two favorite months in Louisiana (the other being October) and a little further from February. The GOP nomination process continues on like a long February as well. But I suppose every presidential election year is a leap year, in some ways more than others. Calendar-wise, check. "Leap of faith" is a common enough term, but less so in the political arena. Taking a leap of faith requires confidence, security, trust, and adaptability. But as we proceed into another most important election in our history, each of these qualities is in decline. Confidence is applied only to the notion that one's opponent is beyond wrong....the wrongness is driven by evil forces, the worst of humankind's potential for social destruction is manifest. Horrendous comments on Andrew Breitbart's death, for example, have no doubt already spread across cyberspace, providing ample fodder for "the other side" to reciprocate the demonization, happily implying that the decidedly non-random sample of such comments represents all adherents to the other other side's ideology. The latest Rush-invented controversy is similarly exemplary.
Such confidence in the absolute nature of others' destructive potential only betrays insecurity in the resilience of one's society and political system. "American Exceptionalism" has become an exercise in exceptional self-rebuke, exceptional weakening of the social contract, and exceptional fear from threats that are by almost every measure asymmetric and manageable except that the momentum for destructive policies will likely outpace that of reasoned recommendations.
I feel like I can just skip over the trust part. To say that no comment, no action, no accident even is above suspicion is understating the case, as, again there is full confidence in the distrust necessary to succeed politically. It's probably the adaptability point that I'm most concerned about in the long run. The winner-take-all electoral system has locked in the two major parties long past their ability to represent a nation of 300+ million people. The networking power of the information revolution is not allowed to operate in the electoral process except as tools of the struggling parties and mass media demagogues. Dissatisfaction can drive increasing numbers of Americans to deny allegiance to either party, but because of the political structures in place for so long, and the dominance of winner-take-all elections in the Electoral College, no candidate outside the two major parties will win a presidential election. He or she may hold some influence over the outcome of the two party contest, but no more. This is not to say there aren't downsides to any system that would replace the current one, of course, but the reality of the moment is a system made increasingly dysfunctional because of resistance to change. This dynamic is at work throughout many areas of society and in the realm of global politics as well.
Social and political expectations of the politically attentive public have reached utopian levels. Notions of public goods and civil society have been blunted by anger over exaggerated fears and demands for absolute security from bad news. There are no doubts that the challenges we face are daunting and in some ways unprecedented. But to paraphrase a Republican candidate, it's more common to set one's hair on fire and scream about worst case scenarios than it is to return to the true American ideology in search of answers -- the anti-ideology of reasoned pragmatism. In the world depicted by today's ideological rhetoric, all legislation, all executive actions, and even all position statements are frozen in time, ends but not beginnings as well, and, of course, ultimately destructive of a great power sovereign state that sports 300 million people, a $14+ trillion economy and the most sophisticated diplomatic-intelligence-military security system in the world.
To conclude for now, it's likely to be a long and depressing campaign year, punctuated by spikes of hilarious and/or completely mystifying statements. But what does this say about where we are, about our political culture? I do not hold that in the short-term, the country, or the economy, or the security future is at risk of destruction from either internal or external forces, though the resilience of the system is strained by such forces, especially the internal centrifugal forces of ideological tribalism. What's at immediate stake is quite simply the ability to work toward the resolution of problems, which has traditionally been difficult but workable among opposing, but ultimately pragmatic, political forces.
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