It is election day today. I have hopes of substantial Democratic advances, but no hope at all of democratic advances. [1] That is the difficulty I would like to deal with today.
I would like to make a small detour, mostly for my own pleasure, to display this difficulty as what I used to call a “problem” back when I was teaching political psychology. A “problem” is a difficulty that the one experiencing it formulates in these four movements. The first is something he is trying to do; then a statement about why he is trying to do it; then the fact that his efforts have failed (failure is taken for granted in the model); then the reason why he has failed.
I’d really like to go see my girlfriend tonight/because I just can’t stop thinking about her. [I can’t do that] because her old man is guarding the house with a shotgun. Intention/motivation/failure/cause. It’s not that hard.
It is the American people taken as a whole—the electorate—who would be formulating this problem.
I really want to make the economy livable again/because we work as hard as we can to afford to live a decent life [we are unable to do that] because our leaders are giving us complicated bullshit instead of giving us what we are demanding.
That’s a problem in the formal sense; it has all four pieces. And if problems like this were aggregated by the problem maker—the electorate in this case—over the last fifty or so years, the pattern would emerge very clearly. It turns out that “complicated bullshit” is a reference to the systemic changes that will be required for stable prosperity in the U. S. Let me offer several varieties of “complicated bullshit” i.e. systemic solutions.
We could adjust national taxing and spending policies so that the wealth of the country is made available to everyone. In this formulation, the difficulty is that there is plenty of wealth, but it is not distributed fairly. The result is the extremes of wealth and poverty that are described in the problem statement as working as hard as I can but not being able to afford a decent life. There are lots of ways to “adjust national taxing and spending policies” but they all require that we look differently than we have at just who deserves what and why. All of the explanations of what these changes would look like and why they are important will qualify as complicated, often “academic” bullshit.
Imagine, for instance that the electorate is like a guy who is dependent on drugs. Sometimes he has to rob something to get the money to meet his needs but so long as he has the drugs, everything is fine. There are two kinds of “solutions” to the problem formulated in this way. First, there is an adequate supply of drugs for everyone who needs them. Then there is the line of complicated bullshit that will involve his giving up the drugs and adopting instead the practices that will give him the kind of life he keeps saying he wants. But all the reasons why he needs to give up the drugs and how he can manage to do that are “complicated bullshit” and what I really need is a fix right now. Man.
Every election day, a lot of people show up at their polling places looking for a fix. The fix isn’t on the ballot. On the ballot are two directions the voters might take, both of which they have tried before. Both of them seem to be working for a little bit and then they stop. So the electorate chooses the solution that has failed most recently in favor of the other one because “what we are doing now” is not working! Man.
If systemic change is required, which is what I believe, is is not going to be chosen by an electorate looking for a fix. And the complicated bullshit is going to take a little while to begin producing effects that will matter to the electorate. That’s why they don’t choose it. Election day is the day we get our fix.
Politics is our fix. Governing the country is the complicated bullshit. The post-World War II consensus is gone. It couldn’t have lasted forever anyway. Establishing a new consensus—not a universal consensus, but a consistent and substantial majority in favor of this new direction—is going to be required. The electorate will have to say what they believe will be the best solution for the country as a whole even if some parts of it will sting people like me for a little bit. Voting for a new set of practices held in place by a new way of understanding just how we belong to each other will be difficult, but nothing less than that will restore us.
If it isn’t that, it is just the time between fixes. Man.
[1]. Keep track of the capital letters.
