If NPR station manager Caryn Mathes had her way, the upcoming mid-term election would be meaningless. And if President Obama’s pre-election analysis of his party’s troubles is correct, it should be. For America’s governing class, the scariest day of the year isn’t Halloween, but Tuesday, November 2—the day we cast our ballots.
In response to recent calls for NPR’s federal funding to be cut or eliminated, Mathes, general manager of WAMU in Washington, DC, argued: “I would hope that it reinforces how important it is for funding sources to be firewalled from editorial decisions. Whatever government funding a station gets needs to be protected from the vicissitudes of emotion and passion over a particular issue.”
What if President Obama is right: “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.” In such a case, it could hardly be right to force NPR stations to supply their own funding like just any other radio station.
The problem with politics, in other words—and especially elections—is that it involves under-evolved people whose fears disrupt the march of progress. Too bad we can’t all be like the President, who himself seems to have avoided the “hardwired” reaction to reject “facts and science and argument” when afraid—or perhaps has managed to avoid fear altogether.
Why not, then, protect everyone’s federal subsidies, tax breaks, and special privileges from the messy “vicissitudes” of political life? Why should any good program be repealed or have its adoption delayed by those who reject “facts and science and argument”? Irrationality cannot reasonably stand in the way of such obviously good things as national health care, green jobs programs, and public employees union protections. If the President and Ms. Mathes are right, the American people have no justifiable claim to participate in politics, much less shape its direction.
But there is one problem. The governing class view of the American electorate stands directly opposed to the first principle of our government: “that all men are created equal.” As political equals, American citizens together choose their representatives and hold them accountable for the measures they enact. New men bring new measures—perhaps even changes to the budget of NPR. This is the essence of self-government.
If that old-fashioned notion still strikes you as vaguely attractive, it may be that you have some more evolving to do, but, this year at least, you can be consoled by the fact that you are certainly not alone. Many others like you, moved by passion and logic, are rightly inclined to believe in such other dusty American principles as “No taxation without representation.”
Once upon a time, the American people were not led by individuals who believed themselves “hardwired” differently than the citizenry. These men, like you, understood the value of science—the science of politics. Our founding statesmen did not assume the self-evident goodness of their every intention or design, but labored to persuade the American people, appealing to the common reason of their equals with seriousness and respect.
Why? Because they knew that whatever authority they exercised, their fellow citizens had a right to pursue happiness and to be treated as those who are responsible for themselves rather than as cogs in another man’s machine.
When you go cast your ballot next Tuesday, ask yourself whether the person seeking your vote is hardwired more like Barack Obama or George Washington. Your answer to this question, and choice thereafter, will go a long way to determining whether a government of, by, and for the people is simply an artifact of the past or a prospect for the future.
Dr. Corbin is an associate professor of politics and Dr. Parks the assistant provost at The King’s College in New York City. They are the co-authors of the forthcoming Keeping Our Republic: Principles for a Political Reformation (Resource Publications).
November 1st, 2010 | 11:01 am
Once upon a time, the American people were not led by individuals who believed themselves “hardwired” differently than the citizenry.
When was that time, exactly? Maybe one should read what the Founding Fathers wrote about “democracy”.
Our system of government was designed from the very beginning to insulate certain aspects of the state from “the messy ‘vicissitudes’ of political life”. The purpose of the Constitution was to balance the interests of democratic accountability and elite responsibility against one another.
One may reasonably debate whether our current system has developed too strongly in the direction of elite rule — or one may argue the opposite, perhaps citing the effects of ballot initiatives in California, or the degeneration of the U.S. Senate after the 17th Amendment.
But such debates are matters of prudence, and an absolutist defense of an idealized democratic America doesn’t add much substance to them.
November 1st, 2010 | 11:57 am
Re: Our founding statesmen did not assume the self-evident goodness of their every intention or design
Neo-Conservatives are the normative Republican candidates. And Neo-Conservatism has its own axioms of self-evident goodness. The most dominant being Military Exceptionalism. By extension, maintaining the obsolete and unaffordable American Empire project using the unassailable National Security State Leviathan is paramount to the perpetual war Republicans.
Hardly a philosophy George Washington would have supported.
Democrats – Free Lunch and Free War. Republicans – Free War and Free Lunch. I don’t see a single Washington among any of them.
November 1st, 2010 | 1:44 pm
The easiest way to avoid “the vicissitudes of emotion and passion over a particular issue” is to stop taking governmental funding and build up an endowment.
November 1st, 2010 | 6:39 pm
By extension, maintaining the obsolete and unaffordable American Empire project using the unassailable National Security State Leviathan is paramount to the perpetual war Republicans.
There is no empire. The ratio of military expenditure to domestic product is 0.05. Bar two brief periods (ca. 1948 and ca. 1997) the number of men in uniform is as small as it has been in 70 years.
November 2nd, 2010 | 12:23 am
Excellent comments as usual. You have nailed the problem – lets hope for the best….
November 5th, 2010 | 5:11 pm
[...] Corbin & Matt Parks posted a pre-election op-ed at First Things “First Thought” on Monday asking whether an electorate that (according [...]
November 5th, 2010 | 6:17 pm
I take issue with Ethan C’s sophistry on the subject of the Founders’ opinions of democracy and with his 2nd paragraph about protecting agains vicissitudes.
First, the Founders’ rightly and clearly feared the dangers of democracy as it was seen in Populist, violent uprisings like Shay’s Rebellion and in nightmares of pure democracy that were later borne out in the French and Russian Revolutions. However, that said, they forthrightly defended the notion of democracy as understood in the Declaration as “all men created equal”. What they wished to protect against in democracy was specifically when a majority becomes a mindless, visceral mob, unfettered and trampling the unalienable rights of the minority, especially it’s property rights, as the Dems are so wont to do using the IRS as their enforcement tool and their “entitlements” as their excuses. It is this kind of populist democracy that all Democrats seek to appeal to in their arguments for “fairness”, “equality of outcomes” and wealth envy.
The protections of the minority, deliberately put into the separation of powers and the Constitution’s Bill of Rights clearly don’t apply when discussing the inexcusable theft of taxpayer money to fund left-wing, partisan media outlets like NPR and PBS. These do not need protections from the fickle vicissitudes of politics. Au contraire, it is the citizenry, and their pocketbooks whose protection was intended by the founders, from rapacious “progressives” who amass power in a democratic majority or through the hustings of a kleptogcratic, permanent central bureaucracy which cares nothing for the Constitution which if abided by would only limit them from their kleptocratic, regulatory indulgences. (Now that Cap and Tax is dead watch the EPA to see this strategy in spades.)
So, Ethan, you’re point on democracy and it’s discontents is taken, but you sought to apply it to the wrong victims, in a rhetorical sleight of hand. It is NPR who is the ruling class thief and the American public who are the pursesnatcher’s victim.
On the other point about the writers’ “absolutist defense”; well, that’s just you throwing up a straw man and being reductioninst in your reading of the article. Clearly, anyone who’s read “Miracle at Philadelphia” or the Federalist Papers or the state debates on the ratification of the Constitution should know that the Founding generation was much more interested in persuading their fellow Americans than those in either party are now, but especially in the Bolshevik Democrat Party, which doesn’t even seek to persuade at all, but merely ram things through using bribes, threats and skullduggery and then insult the citizenry as being mental midgets whose minds are clouded by fear of “the new”, who can’t comprehend their brilliance when their machinations to reduce and eliminate liberty and choice aren’t embraced by the American public.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact