Government's "Corrupt Compact"

I was watching an interview with David Kilcullen, author of "The Accidental Guerrilla” and, especially for an author, a remarkably fascinating speaker. He was on Cspan2 being interviewed by David Ingatius about the book.

One of the things he said quite struck me as he was explaining why the Iraqi government is not functioning properly. He stated that “The members in their government do not represent the people, they represent the parties.” He went on to say that we should be doing something to make the Iraqi government more representative of the people.

I could not help but think that maybe we should look to our own house.

Consider both houses of our own legislature, where measures pass based not on the content of the legislation but on the permissibility placed on them by party leadership. Only very rarely does a public hue and cry erupt that is of sufficient volume to cause legislators to vote based on the desire of the governed; our legislators represent their own party interest and openly work to keep their own party in power when they are in the majority, or to depose the majority party when they are not.

The mantra of the modern legislator is never “How can we best serve the nation?” but “How can we maintain our own power and beat the other party?”

Earlier in the day I had been listening to Juan Williams discuss how Martin Luther King had changed American politics, and at the end of his talk he quite eloquently challenged voters of color to reengage in the political process. One young woman asked a question, wanting to know how the House of Representatives, the body that the founders had designed to be the “closest to the people,” could have evolved into its current state with the highest reelection rate in politics. His reply briefly addressed congressional districting, and he said that this was “a corrupt compact” that politicians had made in order to preserve power.

This “corrupt compact” is abetted by the fact that barely half of the people in this nation who are eligible to vote perform that duty, often far fewer than half in local and primary elections. Only the most ardently political voters participate in primary elections, and as a result only the most radically partisan politicos emerge from them to campaign in the general elections. That leaves the general population with nothing but fairly bad choices, but that is of their own making since they did not participate earlier when they could have affected those choices.

The partisanship that has infested and paralyzed our governance today is partly, not in full but in significant measure, of our own making. When you care so little about who will govern you that you cannot be bothered to go to the polls and participate in electing them, then you will get bad people in government. When you care so little that you go to the polls and vote without knowing the people or issues, when you vote on a partisan basis, then you will get a partisan government.

This partisan government and its “corrupt compact” is the one we elected.