Thoughts on America's Political Deadlock

The facts the remain the same: the evolution of human consciousness is inherently defective. As a scholar and a believer in the democratic process, I consistently strive to examine the consequences of that fact in our daily lives. For example, these days one of the most dramatic examples of this problem is our government’s continuing inability to resolve our fiscal problems, so in this post I want to use this as an example of what I see as just such unconscious, defective thinking.

In light of the continuing dysfunction of our federal government, two thoughts have come to mind. First, I am old enough to remember when our mass media treated the reporting of national and international news quite differently than entertainment programing. Today the media often present politics as a blood sport, but in the era of Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite, political news was presented in an entirely different context. It seems to me that the radio and television networks held political reporting to be a public service, not driven by the profit motive. Today it is obvious that such reporting is treated as a form of entertainment, with a strong emphasis on enflaming the emotions of the audience by emphasizing conflicts and animosity between the two reams, Republicans and Democrats.

In other words, the media now treat news reporting as a profit center, used by the networks to increase their audience share and thereby increase their ad revenues. They understand very well that the human mind is hardwired to pay more attention to emotions than to concepts. Advertising has made a science of this evolutionary characteristic of our current form of consciousness, so it was only a matter of time before the media started to transition from careful analysis of political events to emotional exploitation of those events. Of course, it should be no surprise that the corporations that control our mass media are perfectly happy to segment our body politic and cultivate conflict, even hatred, between Americans simply in order to increase their profit margins. After all, is was our elected representatives that enabled the mass media industry to control and profit from this extremely influential dimension of our modern environment.

My other thought has to do with our major political parties. It seems to me that over the last decade, or even longer, both parties have been working together to ensure they would have complete control of how candidates for major political office are chosen. This overall strategy has manifested itself in the gradual expansion of the parties’ ability to controls the mechanics of our democratic process. For example, the increased use of such tricks as gerrymandering electoral districts along party lies, closed party primaries, the refusal to limit campaign spending and most recently the policy of unending campaigning are all changes both parties have supported. I can’t help but wonder if these practices are part of an unspoken agreement between both major parties.

Could such a development, perhaps, have begun with the dramatic increase in independent voters on the 1960s,, and/or as a result of H. Ross Perot’s relative success as a third party candidate in the 1992 presidential campaign? If anyone has any insights into such trends in contemporary American politics I would be delighted to hear them…