On Politics and History...Part I

It’s not that important. But it is.

A couple of weeks ago, in the wee hours of the morning, my friends and I were at a diner. The conversation turned inevitably to politics and history. One of my friends said there were fifty-two states. Her defense was that it was way too late and she wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe. She’s clearly bright but such an offense struck me to my core. Another of my friends asked, Why is knowing who the sixth president of the United States is, important? He argues it isn’t. I tend to agree. But it doesn’t hurt either.

Year after year the United States ranks below other western, industrialized nations when it comes to the quality of education that its citizens possess. The social studies field, obviously comprising History and Politics, suffers. Americans are known for not wanting to know. That’s one of the biggest qualms that Europeans and indeed the rest of the world have about us. They see us as a people happily oblivious. This is a country where only one out of four people actually have a passport. Where bilingualism, and God-forbid, multilingualism, is not ubiquitously embraced, but in some sectors, frowned upon and warily accepted. And as the Miss Teen USA pageant posited last week: a recent study concludes that only one in five Americans can located the United States of America on a map. The list continues. This is who we are, the majority of us. And this is why we’re in the state that we’re in.

It’s important to know. To accept things is dangerous; dangerous not only to us, but indeed to our world. We traverse through great peril day-in and day-out by not knowing.

Today, we begin with politics…

This is hegemony. More than any other civilization in the History of the World, more than at any other time in the march of progress, the United States of America is the most perfect example of hegemony. Some scholars write of post-hegemony (as if the sun has already set…), while others decry it and see it as nothing more than neo-Imperialism. Imperialism, for obvious reasons, always gets a bad rap. But let us not forget that the paragon of imperialism, the British Empire, through much of the last three hundred years did much more to spread liberal democracy throughout the world than any other form of government before, or even since. Hegemony is a lot more than military might. And hegemony, if used properly, is not a tool for bullish behaviour or arrogance—something that candidate Bush in 2000 warned the voters about. Hegemony exports ideas. We export our ideas of liberal democracy as much as we export a Big Mac or Titanic. Nary a place in the world exists where people do not know the symbolism inherent in the American flag, the magnificence of the Statue of Liberty. This is what America stands for and this is what we fight for. No matter how difficult a situation Iraq has become, in trying to come about to a viable, political solution, and indeed, how difficult the conduct of foreign policy has become, we’re still in a position where we can exert our influence, and indeed, our prestige.

And what is wrong with that? Francis Fukuyama at Johns Hopkins University wrote an influential piece almost fifteen years ago entitled, “The End of History.” In it, he argued that modernization, and the march of progress has inevitably led to the presence of Liberal Democracy, and that this, at its essence, is the goal of humanity. That we finally made it. In the shadow of the end of the Cold War and the dismemberment of the USSR, this thesis seemed to sum up the exhilarating, exciting time that we were in. At Harvard, Sam Huntington wrote of a “Clash of Civilizations.” The name is self-explanatory, and in our post 9/11 world, Huntington’s thesis got exulted, Fukuyama’s was sent into the dustbin of history—pun intended.

It’s time to rehabilitate Fukuyama’s thesis. Obviously, it is not the end of History, but that still does not negate the fact that the historical continuum of humanity itself is to achieve modernity, and practice Liberal Democracy. And that may still happen.

And we’ll achieve this with politics. Politics is all around us. Politics happens every day. It is the most basic form of human interaction. You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

We elect leaders. We elect our representatives on the world stage. The dirty little secret is that no matter what, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, our leaders all want the same end result—make America better, stronger, more secure. But we disagree in how. We live in a country where more people vote for an American Idol than for the American President. We live in a country of political apathy, ignorance, and disassociation. Where our citizens are unimpressed with and suspicious of the system. This is not the Republic that our founders envisioned. Focus groups and the politicizing of words are now in full force to reach out to a target audience. Big government is seen as something evil, when it should be not. I guess this goes back to our legacy of Jeffersonian Democracy. But the world is too complex, too sophisticated, to still be practicing such naïve, and plain paradigms when talking about how our democratic republic should be governed. Indeed we live in the Two Americas. And in a nation of plurality, no one wins. There’s something to be said about the wisdom of crowds. Vox Populi, Vox Dei. And we need as citizens to become more politically knowledgeable, more politically sophisticated to be able to undertake, solve and answer the great questions and problems of our times.

Politics is important because the leaders we elect to carry our mission, and indeed to carry out or promise, have to measure up. And they’re not measuring up because we’re not measuring up. And we’re not measuring up because we don’t care. It’s all cyclical. Politics is important because we elect people because of how they look instead of because of what they say. We have gut feelings. And most of the time, they’re wrong. Michael Deaver, who recently passed away, gave us this legacy. No matter how dire the nightly news tried to portray America in the 80’s, the images that they would use was the president on a ranch or in the midst of a sea of flags. Deaver was fond of saying that in the battle between the sight and the sound, the sight always wins.

But the sound should win. What we’re creating is an America that’s living today in a duality. An America in Myth and History.

The myth is something that has existed in a state of secula seclorum. It’s always been the case. In practice, the America in History is something that has existed in a more ad hoc composure. We like to think of politics as something civil but it isn’t. Indeed, the good old days never were. There’s always backroom compromising, and backstabbing in American politics. It is a zero sum game. And that’s what turns many Americans off.

But they shouldn’t be turned off. Politics is neither clean nor civil. It’s ruthless. It’s all about winning. And it’s all about fighting for what you believe in. It’s always about advocating. And guess what, the people have the tools to win in the process.

The legislative process enhances responsiveness to the public because the legislative process itself is intrinsically related to elections. It’s obvious that the dominant goal for legislators is reelection. There are also well known access points which citizens utilize to influence governmental decisions, in the form of influencing the individual legislator’s decisions, the agenda, and the policy outcomes. Challengers themselves know that the way to win an election is by undermining the incumbent’s support, thereby, with the help of the media, challengers raise issues that will indeed stir inattentive publics, removing a degree of ignorance and apathy by making prominent issues salient.

There is no reason by which inattentive publics will remain so perpetually. Inattentive publics can become attentive publics, through the arrival of an instigator, many times in the form of a challenger to the incumbent. Challengers are successful when they are able to undermine the support that the incumbent has. Challengers do this by showing that the incumbent is out of touch with district sentiments, in the form of exploiting roll-call votes or the pattern of the incumbent’s voting. By bringing these votes to the fore, especially key votes—such as votes on Judicial nominees or on supporting or opposing military action—inattentive publics may at least lose a degree of ignorance and become informed of what it is exactly that their legislator is voting for. Another instigator is the media, where print and television media may release damaging exposés of a legislator’s votes and behavior. See Sen. Craig (R-Idaho). Stemming ignorance is also made possible by engaging in sub-constituency politics, where appealing to groups becomes efficient, and issue intensity manifests itself into votes, money, and volunteers. Displacing ignorance also becomes pivotal in removing apathy. Interest is then created by presenting salient issues which resonate with a once-apathetic public. Salient issues are those which affect the public greatly. For example, the high price of gasoline last year has forced congressional leadership, in the persons of former Speaker Hastert and former Leader Frist, to call for an investigation to probe gas prices. These leaders are aware that this issue has the potential to activate inattentive publics, who were once apathetic to the price of gas, and are now feeling the burden of this price on their wallets. A latent issue became salient, the ignorant and apathetic—inattentive—became informed and interested—attentive.

We can cause change but we don’t. We can make things better but we don’t. We could become more attentive but we don’t. With cynicism and naïveté aside, citizens do still control their legislators to a great degree and legislators in turn have to be responsive to their constituents, if only as much for pragmatic political gains and results. But we don’t take advantage of this.

It’s important to be politically sophisticated. Political sophistication can also lead to a greater understanding of foreign policy and international relations. And when one becomes politically sophisticated in other systems and regions of the world, then one can form a better opinion, a better understanding of what the course of action of the hegemonic power should be.

We the people, control the government. It is not business. It is not the elite. At the end of the day, political history has shown that no matter how much money is poured into elections or into candidates, without the votes of the people, no one will get elected. The old joke goes that politics is the art of getting money from the rich, and votes from the poor, and promising to protect one side from the other. Admittedly, there are a lot of smoke-and-mirrors involved. And I could see why. But the end result still exists…make America better.

And we can do this one voter at a time.

Soon: Why is History Important?