KOLUMNI
The Real News Story
from America
AN IMPARTIAL, dispassionate observer of the American
political scene -- if such a person could be found
-- would probably report both good news and bad.
The good news is that the breadth and intensity
of the silliness of this year’s silly season have been
blessedly modest. Coverage of Congressman Matt
Gaetz’s deplorable sexual mores, First Son Hunter
Biden’s dubious artistic pretensions, and Representative
Marjorie Taylor Green’s verbal transgressions
against truth and decency notwithstanding,
serious news has in fact been getting reported. Whole
days now go by without former President Donald
Trump’s curiously delusional ramblings being the
lead news story.
The bad news is that, as usual, America’s political
attention remains myopically focused on the
daily Sturm-und-Drang, chest-thumping, and finger
pointing that pass for political debate. To be sure,
the issues nominally under discussion -- voting
rights, covid policies, and Congressional filibuster
and budget reconciliation rules, for example -- certainly
do matter. And it is always conceivable that,
in the very end, action of some sort will actually be
taken. There are, however, two costs to the media’s
and public’s fixation on the daily political circus.
A false sense of crisis
The first is the creation of a false sense of crisis.
Only a national public as blissfully uninformed
about its own history as America’s could believe
that the partisanship, gridlock, and general dysfunctionality
of America’s current political life is
at all out of the ordinary. (Any Americans appalled
by what is being said or done in Washington
in 2021 should go back and take a look at what the
Republic’s founders had to say about each other
and each other’s policies.)
Contrary to what news reports might lead one to
believe, the gap between the political parties today
is quite modest. Again, this is not to dismiss the
differences between party agendas. (To paraphrase
the late Senator Everitt Dirksen, “a trillion here and
a trillion there, and pretty soon we are talking real
money.”) But no one who actually knows what Jim
Crow was like really believes that the Republican
Party is proposing a return to it, and no one who
actually understands what the word “socialism”
means really believes that the Democratic Party is
embracing it.
Unfortunately, however, the hyperbole of imaginary
crisis tends to erode common sense – a
resource in short supply even in the very best of
times.
The tectonic transformation of the physical
and economic realities of daily life
The second cost of fixating on what is (or is not) happening
on the Washington stage is that it distracts
attention from the truly extraordinary process that
Edward Rhodes is a professor of Government and International Affairs at George Mason University. Rhodes is best known
for his research into the philosophical and cultural roots of American foreign and national security policy. Rhodes received
his A.B. from Harvard University and his MPA and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University.
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