The breaches of political promises are accepted as “par for the course” among voters worldwide. Yet constituents voice passions to support their disappointing candidates, even knowing they aren’t going to get remotely close to what they really want. Elections are increasingly about “sending messages” rather than getting anything done. Add to this mix the anticipation in too many countries that all that an election creates is choice of which political faction will rape the system, purloining, skimming and doling out favoritism for cash. The Pope rails against corruption, lambasting politicos in his recent travels to the Philippines, and elected officials the world over promise to end a practice that has never been ended… anywhere.
Revolution often replaces corrupt incumbents… matures… and then creates a new elite with a new need for financially-induced corruption. The cycle continues. Some societies institutionalize corruption – allowing legitimate campaign or issue contributions at such a large level as to permit wealthy influencers vastly more power than could possibly have been envisioned by those who created the political system in the first place. The United States fits this category. Voters get filtered “big brother” messages from the influences that promise much but deliver little to average citizens. The old “the rich get richer” mantra is dead on. But this form of “legitimized” favoritism generates the same negative impact on society as bribery and cronyism in traditionally corrupt nations.
To some, the notion of cutting the size and scope of government itself seems to be a path to reduce this proclivity towards elitism, even though government might be the only hope of containing this form of corruption. Taking away regulation and reducing taxes sounds good, but these policies often produces the opposite result. Elites grow fatter and more powerful to the exclusion of the majority.
Most nations have anti-corruption statutes, but then, the question is – wink, wink – how are they enforced? Given enough corruption, the corrupted elements are rich and deeply powerful and hard to challenge. Sometimes one corrupt faction uses corruption laws to oust competitors who are equally corrupt but who have fallen out of favor. We see this system in Russia and in too many developing nations. For people want to move to new, open and uncharted new lands to start over again with newly documented freedoms, the bad news is that most of the habitable regions of the earth are now occupied, and immigration reform is often directed at keeping newbies out.
The evidence of corruption is economic polarization, where elites are a very narrow segment of any society and control the vast majority of wealth in the relevant country. There is no “free society” anywhere where the vast majority of the constituency would vote for a narrow band of rich to control virtually all of the wealth. But giving that narrow band a louder voice, laws that support retention and building of wealth at the expense of everyone else, and supporting a mythology that having a narrowly defined elite at the top is good for everyone is not sustainable in the longer term. Anger mounts, and how that anger is vented will determine the future of any country. And there is a lot of anger in America now, a very well-armed country.
Yet some of the bastions of the party that has championed the causes of the rich elite – the GOP, with its emphasis on cutting social programs, slashing public education budgets, cutting taxes at the top and taking away environmental and financial regulations from big business and wealthy elites – are beginning to create new mantras to salve the wounds of a falling middle class and an increase in those at the bottom. Jeb Bush’s “right to rise” or Mitt Romney’s new fight against the “scourge of poverty.” But their policies continue the myth of job creation by enabling those at the top with lower taxes and less regulation has so completely been disproven that they need theCitizens United political action committee publicity machines to convince us that this failed econ-theology can work if we give it one more try.
Democrats, on the other hand, have failed to define principles that would make them practically relevant to solve our nation’s clear problems. What exactly can they do to fix our nation that is realistic and pragmatic? What is a path that we really can buy into? How will this be funded in a way that Americans can accept? We’re waiting.
In the middle of this horrific economic shift, this maturation of elites and incumbents using their power to keep polarization alive and well prospering during the big economic reset, is the overriding clashes of civilizations. Most notably are the extremists in the Islamic world against the free-wheeling West, which results in the need to prioritize national security at the expense of everything else. It’s a question of survival. But this extrinsic enemy also forms the basis for those at the top to represent that it is only their power that is needed to push these vicious forces back.
Without doubt, we must fight back and remain committed to resist this negative movement. But we need to do this as a nation that doesn’t mirror our enemy under an “ends justify the means” vacuous morality, that unites people of all classes and embraces more of the equality that justifies our form of government. It is not even in the interest of the most powerful and wealthy elites to create a system that will, sooner or later, confront this inequality within a country with too many guns. I have blogged recently about the massive growth of “gated communities” for wealthy Americans, so it’s not as if there is a lack of awareness of the natural consequences of polarization.
It’s time to level our own playing field, find reasons for Americans to get onto the same page, generate a new focus on equality and enable a political system based on compromise and what’s best for the most. Or we are fighting to save a system of government that will eventually implode under the weight of its own inequality.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if we cannot figure out how to join hands to be “Americans” united again, what exactly is this all about?
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