The recent
survey by Gallup indicates that Americans rated Congress dead
last among 16 institutions. Only 11 percent of respondents
expressed confidence in the deliberative bodies.
This was a drop of 17 percent from last year.
There is, of course, great irony in these numbers,
representing a collective, negative judgment on the institution
as a whole, despite the fact that incumbents are overwhelmingly
re-elected year after year after year. Presumably, Americans feel
about their congressmen and women the way they do about lawyers.
They hate them all, except for their own.
The reasons for this negative assessment are harder to
discern. No doubt, some hate Congress for doing too much. Others
hate it for doing too little. So the collective judgment is a
pastiche of mutually exclusive views about the role of
government, spending, taxation and regulation.
Congress becomes a kind of Rorschach
inkblot onto which citizens project their own visions of what
they think the nation should or should not be.
Or at least that is what I used to think. Now I am not so
sure. I have lived in Washington for almost nine years. During
that time, I have observed legion of supplicants coming to town,
many of them friends and colleagues, who have one mission and one
mission only. That is, they want to lobby their congressperson
for money for, fill in the blank, their school, their wastewater
plant, their roads, their welfare program, their entitlements,
their own precious little earmarks for this or that favored
project.
It almost makes you appreciate even the pro-choice and
anti-gun lobbies since they are at least focused on matters of
principle, no matter how mistaken they may be.
Personally, I share the view that an ever-expanding federal
government — bigger, fatter, spending at an atrocious rate —
leads, inevitably to alienation. Expectations are sky-high as to
what it can actually accomplish in a manner which can remotely be
termed cost-effective. Disappointment is inevitable.
So there is a kind of cognitive
dissonance in play.
Citizens get the government they want in a democracy,
especially one that is even more detached from the republican
constraints originally put in place by the founders.
Egalitarianism combined with a redistributionist mania leads to
disenchantment, Big Time, as Vice President Cheney might
say.
The other night I had dinner with a friend who is writing a
book on the dysfunction of Congress. He seemed to take the view
that the problem was driven, primarily, by the insular,
self-seeking political culture at the federal level. I argued
that the general societal culture drives politics, and there may
be something more fundamentally wrong with the body politic
itself. My friend agreed this might be true; and we agreed that
the two things could interact, synergistically, with each other.
He promised to re-read his Tocqueville and consider the matter
further.
Last week Anne Applebaum, a columnist for the
Washington Post and an intelligent
commentator on foreign policy matters, wrote an article
entitled, “A government of the people’s every wish?”
While launching a couple of snarky shots at the Tea Party
movement and Governor Sarah, Applebaum, expressed her concern
that Americans really are different than what she has experienced
around the world, but not in a good way:
If you don’t live in this country all of the time, and I
don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans —
with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above
all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand
more from their government than just about anybody else in the
world.
Applebaum claims Americans “want the government to ensure
that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or
that they are fully compensated in the event something goes
wrong.”
“And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the
government responsible for that, too,” says the columnist. “And
precisely because this is a democracy, Congress and the president
respond, pass a law, build a building.”
Yet, “we rant and rave against vast bureaucracies we have
created — democratically, constitutionally, openly” to deliver
the “ludicrous levels of personal and political safety.”
Now, one can legitimately reply, “What about the Greeks,
the French and the Scandinavians?” True, but that’s no excuse.
What about America? What have we become? Pogo, call your
office.
