I stopped watching the State of the Union Address somewhere in the middle of the 2nd Bush Presidency. Part of the reasons for that can be found in this piece on the pageant by Kevin Williamson of National Review Online the remaining reasons are that I find political speeches, almost in their entirety, boring. For many of the same reasons, I don't watch political debates. If you honestly don't know who you're voting for by this point in the game maybe you should question whether or not you should really be voting.
While debates are bad enough (Oops.) the spectacle that surrounds the SOTU address is a special kind of political stupid. From Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee camping out for hours like a pre-pubescent fangirl trying to capture a Belieber moment with 0 to the rounds of laugh-track like cheering when a.) the President is announced, b.) when he says something regarding a policy that's never going to pass and c.) when he finally closes up shop, it's a political spectacle for low-information voters. It's the worst type of political fawning and hero worship and it needs to go away.
If blogs are an online ego-stroke, then the SOTU is a nationally televised ego-stroke for politicians who receive too many of them in the first place. We hold up these experts in spin and obfuscation to be Gods of public discourse and then get upset when they turn out to be petty feudal Lords just trying to retain their holdings. We've abdicated rule of our own lives to the Government and are disappointed when they don't pay proper attention to the things we think they should. We've lost the ability to think critically, instead asking that a group with the intellectual ability of cheese to do our thinking for us. Then, when things don't work out (The Affordable Care Act for example) we listen to them tell us that the solution to the problem is designed by the same people who created much of the problem in the first place.
In a sane society, Nancy Pelosi ("We have to pass the bill to find out what's in the bill"), Charlie Rangel ("I laugh when people say 'have you read the bill?"), Harry Reid (“I have been a fan of earmarks since I got here the first day.”), Mitch McConnell (“The biggest hero to emerge from the hearings before the 9/11 Commission has been the Patriot Act.”), John McCain ("The problem, is that most members of Congress don't pay attention to what's going on.") and Barack Obama ('If you like your Doctor, you can keep your Doctor") would be run from the public stage in a hail of half rotten vegetables. Yet, as media coverage makes perfectly clear our current society is neither rational or sane.
We have become the citizenry that Obama predicted, a nation of bitter clingers. Bitterly clinging to our government subsidies and the clawed hand of dependency that's there to help us in our race to the bottom. So gone are we that Obama actually spent time chastising people who dared to disagree with him that America is not still great. That he even had to defend the premise supports the case of the opposition. It also set up the election for the Democrats.
We are now a country of whiners and enablers (I write while whining) who pick and choose facts that prop up the heroes we have chosen for ourselves and we don't react well when the facts suggest that we are wrong. Our sole purpose in politics these days is to be seen as "cool". That's why Millenials flock to Democrats, because the cool sycophants in Hollywood are telling them to do so, not because they have some unique understanding of domestic finance or international geopolitics. When they're not playing on social media they probably give little thought to that anyway and wouldn't understand it much even if they did.
What is not in doubt is this: America developed the greatest economic engine the world has ever seen. It created wealth such that it's dispersion redefined our notions of empire. No longer did a Country need to invade with military force to gain influence. After the rise of America this could be accomplished through the markets. Granted, it wasn't always successful, but more often than not we got our way. However, this is a reality that's currently in decline, and the sooner we come to terms with not being the economic bully on the block, and start talking about how to deal with it, the better off we'll be.
It's much like the brouhaha over climate change. Right now the focus of the world is on how to prevent it. This assumes that mankind has the ability to alter the climate of Gaia at all. What we should be focusing on is how to DEAL with it once it arrives. The problem with that theory is that there's less extortion money for the ruling class to collect. Our politicians know this, but none have the courage to speak the truth.
The rub to all of this is that I'm not writing today with any solution in mind. I'm not sure how those of us who believe in free markets and reduced dependency can reverse this tide. It's one thing to say we need entitlement reform and point out, rightly, that increasing food stamps and other give-aways don't hurt the poor but make them less dependent, but it's another thing altogether to get people to see through the rhetoric that "those on food stamps didn't cause the great recession". Straw-men arguments and non-sequiturs are the norm in political discourse, not the exception. The first step, obviously, is to elect representatives who don't use this language. The problem is they are few and hard to find.
The three biggest problems that we face as a country today (domestically) are over-taxation, burdensome, complicated regulation and government scope-creep. These have led to a business environment that is unhealthy, shedding good-paying jobs and creating a permanent underclass in American society. Amazingly, you're going to hear little about this in the run-up to the election as the debate is centering on immigration, free-speech and gun-control. Not that the latter three issues aren't important, but they're unlikely to be resolved or even, seriously, acted on. They are fodder to fire up the low-information base and deliver votes. Meanwhile, the man behind the curtain (the bureaucracy) is slowly choking the livelihood out of business.
And yet, all we heard last night was some such about cynicism, from the other side.
So I didn't watch. We would all be better off if we gave the political class the classic middle-finger extending gesture of pointing the remote directly at their noses, and changing the channel.
Talk amongst yourselves. Let us know when you're serious about actually getting things working again.
