By James Kanady
Pissed Again
“Their main purpose is often to gather enough support, to seem all things to all people, and to clarify some issues and obscure others, in order to win elections.”
– historian Ralph Ketcham
When I voted at the Aug. 4 primary election, my status as an unaffiliated voter meant I could only vote on the question of electing judges to the Kansas Supreme Court (which was voted down). I could not vote for any candidate. They gave me the choice of changing my affiliation to either the GOP or the Dems so I could vote. In other words, I was forced to choose someone from the usual two-party system. I want the freedom of voting for the right person, whichever party they proclaim.
Nine other states (Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont) allow unaffiliated voters to vote for any party in primaries. The rest of us are forced to play in this outdated, decisive, two-party system.
I dug out my well-worn/well-underlined copy of Nancy Isenberg & Andrew Burstein’s “The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality.” John Adams, his son, John Quincy Adams, and John’s wife, Abigail, had no love for the emerging two-party system. None.
It evolved from ideological opinions about the role of our new federal government. Many of the Founders, like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, were against factions that might be a barrier to national unity. But Thomas Jefferson saw parties as inevitable.
They split into two factions: Federalists (Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay) who believed in a strong central government and a national bank; and the Anti-Federalists (Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason) who preached states’ rights, limited federal power, and protection of individual liberties. This set the stage for the system we have to this very day; not a democracy, but a democratic republic. Democracy wasn’t uttered until the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson.
The presidents Adams saw how two parties could undermine social and political justice, and were very critical of the hollowness of celebrity.
“They took note as popular personalities acquired power over citizens’ minds.”
No doubt, they were elitists, but could “skillfully employed a rhetoric that concealed their class interests, their impulse to protect those most like themselves.”
(Almost sounds like the formation of tribes.)
“Political parties did not guarantee democracy to everyone; they merely protected the interests of their more influential members.” And “they detested the provocative mania parties allowed for, when they roused an intense enthusiasm for select, heroically framed men without objectively assessing their merit first.
“Any faction that held outlandish power over laws and lawmaking threatened good government.”
Putting our faith in government by the people into perspective, doesn’t it? In reality, that phrase rings hollow because these men carried a conviction that the people are not always right, can be misled, and will arrive at conclusions with insufficient information. The real question to ask is: Who makes the wheels of power turn?
Both of the Adamses wondered if there would ever be a way to guarantee that good judgment and moral excellence rose to the top in our politics considering the evolution of a cult of personality, which they saw as an illegitimate political force and a tool to stimulate vulnerable citizens’ desires.
“All humans craved notice, fame, renown; if they could not attain it themselves, they found an object to worship vicariously.”
What was required was a type of theatricality, what John Adams called glitter. He hated that candidates had to promote themselves and make the mob stare and gape. His son often, and loudly, disavowed party affiliation, did not join movements, thought and spoke for himself, highlighting the inherent problems of party culture.
It makes sense that the Adamses admired the writings of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, whom they saw as an example of farsighted political courage. To Cicero, the object of good government was to dispose of anxiety, not to intensify it. But the emerging American system had a built-in, intense contradiction: as a force for good, it offered freedom of expression, but it had a downside, too, in the dangerous fallout from high-spirited public performances that fueled hatreds. Image building carried far too much weight. After the end of his presidency, JQA regarded national parties as a political tool to co-op thought.
Neither of them cared for Andrew Jackson. His party was, in JQA’s view, composed of obsequious champions of executive power, acolytes of a warrior-based cult of personality who wallowed in a fantasy view of the glamour of conquest. He decided to name the party he wished to belong to as a Constitutionalist: meaning thereby faithful adherence to the two Constitutions, of the United States and the Commonwealth. They are the fruits of the wisdom and valour of our forefathers matured and modified by the experience of more than threescore years.
John Adams told of three sins of parties: 1) As factions, they ultimately served private interests, and were therefore often driven by greed and fame. 2) They exploited the cult of celebrity. Selling candidates by “trumpeting” fake talents. 3) Relatedly, they were so stuck on the Washington image that they make it a standard for all others, focusing on gestures, going so far as to praise Washington’s silence as a “gift,” and privileging the superficial—mere public performance—over words of import. As a result of the prejudices built into the party system, voters turned men of wealth, or men with recognizable family names, into idols. To do so was to ignore the real requirements for good government: established expertise and beneficial public service.
The Adamses knew it was impossible for parties to be truthful, because parties were driven by the need to win at all costs; a vehicle for moneymaking, for amassing personal wealth, and masses of committed people surrendering their capacity for critical thinking to an unwavering party orthodoxy. Greed finally eclipsed even the manufacturing of fame in a presidential election.
In our time, privilege and power operate in ways so monstrously large that the Adamses could never have imagined us. Our politicized court system had made campaign funds solicitation and influence peddling (effectively, bribery) the law of the land. Money in politics is so blatant that it ruins any chance of democracy.
And the amounts of money funding candidates these days are mind-boggling. In the last presidential election, $5.5 billion was spent. That is a lot of influence-peddling, and that figure doesn’t consider the money spent in elections for senators and congressmen.
National governance is a colossal failure. The answer is local, local, local. Focus on your community and the men, women, and children who inhabit it. We are a nation that once came together to build barns for one another. In looking at huge number of social service agencies in the U.S., a wise woman once told me: We have given our care over to strangers. And given the reckless way Donald Trump and his tribe have hacked at budgets, that care is jeopardized.
I remember in 1981 when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to crush the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, my dad, Virgil, an engineer for the Rock Island and the Southern Pacific and the head of his union, pointed at the television and said: “Jimmy, look at that! G—damn rich man’s president! The sonsabitches are gonna crush workin’ people! You wait and see!”
And they sure as hell did. So, we’d better start taking care of each other because billionaires and their sycophants don’t give a damn.
I was asked a couple of weeks ago what is America now, and I said, “In the words of Kris Kristofferson: a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”
James Kanady is the resource/program development advisor and creator of special projects for New Beginnings in Hutchinson. He is a published author and avid reader.