By Carl Weinschenk
It sounds simple because it’s far from the whole story.
People “of a certain age” (a polite way of saying old) likely read a novel in high school entitled The Oxbow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. The theme of the great book is that there are two types of sin: Sins of omission and sins of commission.
Sins of Omission, Sins of Commission
Stealing a car is a sin of commission. Not calling the cops when you see somebody stealing a car is a sin of omission. The former is doing something bad. The latter is not doing something that would keep a bad thing from happening.
Sins of omission drive our political system. Traditional machine-driven politicians know what they promise won’t survive the legislative process. Not saying so is a sin of omission. Speaking that inconvenient truth – “This is what I want to do but it’s unlikely I’ll be able to do it” – would hurt their electoral chances. People only want to hear the feel-good stuff and don’t care about the details.
Thus, the untarnished truth goes unspoken, election after election and decade after decade. It is a corrosive that feeds the cynicism that permeates our politics. It certainly is one reason that only about half of the eligible electorate votes in presidential elections and only about 40 percent during midterms.
At its core is a good question: Why vote if politicians lie to us?
The tension is that politics is rooted in unrealistic promises and responsible governing is rooted in compromise. The health care reform debate during Barack Obama’s first term is a good example. Obama campaigned for an aggressive system that would provide universal coverage by the sixth year of his second term. He did so despite almost certainly knowing that resistance from the Republicans and conservative Democrats meant that such a system likely was decades away.
The Obama administration and Congress compromised and (barely) pushed through a watered-down version of health care reform. Obama and the Democrats were smoked in the 2010 midterms. The party lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives and six Senate seats.
The point is that actually legislating is hard and the result is guaranteed to fall short of what was promised. At the same time, the electorate will be disappointed – and won’t care about the reasons that they are not getting what they were promised.
Put more simply: Politicians lie — even the good ones — because politics is a sales job in which promises are made that can’t be kept. That leads to a lot of unhappy customers.
The Silver Lining
There may be a silver lining to this. Donald Trump is a chaos agent. Politics has gotten far messier and unpredictable during his years. He has normalized unconventional candidates. Two examples are Graham Platner (a Democratic Senate candidate in Maine) and Ken Paxton (a Republican Senate candidate in Texas). Neither would have been nominated if the old rules applied.
A system that produced Trump is archaic and receding. There are other signs of this: The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee have lost influence. The seniority system in both the House and the Senate, which kept younger elected officials from having significant influence for years, barely exists any longer. The influence of billionaires (and one trillionaire) has grown. Contribution from hidden sources (dark money) is pouring in.
In the short term, Trump’s dominance proves that our political system is at a dangerous point. In the longer term, a better outcome could be the emergence of a new system (”Democracy 2.0 perhaps?) that replaces this antiquated system with one that is more responsive to the needs of the people and is not based on an endless stream of little lies.