Meyer: Civic Immaturity, the new Sophistication

The always thought-provoking Dick Meyer has a new column up over at CBS, and he makes an interesting observation but doesn’t really go anywhere with it. Which, I suppose is okay. There are plenty of us, left and right, who are hastily opining and drawing conclusions on every fresh thought newly uttered, like the seagulls in “Finding Nemo” who shout “mine, mine, mine” at anything that looks remotely like food, or something shiny.

Meyer, in watching the funeral of President Gerald R. Ford, had something of an epiphany: politics has changed. It’s not optimistic and hopeful anymore, it’s rather nihilistic (everything is bad) and the campaigns never wane.

These, Meyer concludes, are not good trends. I tend to agree.

What strikes me like a thunderbolt is that the world America faced in January 1977 was far more dangerous and volatile than our world in January of 2007, yet the stories our victors and rulers will tell us are scarier and more dire.

Americans, empirically and materially, are better off than we were in the winter of 1977 but we don’t feel that way. The wounds of Watergate that President Ford healed were far more severe, for example, than our recent ethics scandals, but the healing comes harder. Our political and civic skills are less, not more mature.
[…]
In the 1970s, inflation rates of 9, 10 and 11 percent were the norm. Since 1995, annual inflation has never cracked 4.5 percent. Unemployment was over 5.5 percent in nine of 10 years in the 1970s; it has been that high just three times since 1995. Yet our pessimism and insecurity about the financial future is much greater.
[…]
In the 1970s these [presidential] declarations came at the end of the year not the beginning. This is melting the foundations of our system. The seasons of campaigning and governing are no longer separate. Victors are not rulers, but perpetual seekers looking for the best angle, pretending to govern. This discourages so many from ever considering public service. And we’re dismissed as citizens, but lusted after as voters, and we tolerate that.

Aye, we do. We also tolerate being thought of as stupid enough to believe any gross disingenuity from “I have no idea how I made that $100,000.00 on cattle futures, I just gave the man a check” to “Amnesty is not really amnesty” (although I tend to like the President’s immigration plan more than most folks on the right, let’s call a thing what it is, shall we?) to “we’ve taken impeachment off the table.” Lies, all lies, and bad, intelligence-insulting lies to boot. We put up with them.

Well, let’s face it, maybe some of us are stupid enough, maleable enough or disinterested enough to make the easy lie so profitable a tool for modern politicians. I’ve never said we don’t get the leadership we deserve.

The thing is, Meyer’s piece, in identifying this situation, draws no conclusions about how we came to be here, and how we might lift ourselves out of this quagmire-of-lugubrious-doomsaying. For 6 years we heard the left scream that the right was trampling on civil liberties. Now the table is turned and the other side of the chorus takes up the refrain and this bodes well for no one.

Either everyone is lying their asses off, or no one is. Or one side is…but which side, friend? The side you want to believe the worst of? That won’t do. That’s not enough to go on. But “us good, them bad” does appear to be the height of political sophistication for many, these days.

Since Meyer would not venture to guess what’s behind this “civic immaturity, or how it might be redressed, I figured I’d take a shot at the first, and leave you to the latter. You’re not going to be surprised at what I have come up with:

1) We’ve become very used to the “endless campaign” first introduced by the Clintons because no one in the public venues ever spoke out against it or even wondered if there might be something unseemly-to-psychotic about it. Lots of private citizens did complain about the non-stop campaigning and endless vilification of “the other,” but the talking heads had no problem with it (and why would they) and so there was no public denunciation of this overdoing, overpoliticizing, over-demonizing, over-sound-biting trend. Now it’s entrenched. It is simply how things are done.

I have no idea how to undo it, but perhaps the American public is subconsciously reacting to the non-stop barage of politicizedeverything by tuning it out and turning in to Howie Mandel and those Celebrity Dancing people. But this is not a promising solution. The answer to any great problem can never be Howie Mandel, a walled-off citizenry and a voluntary dumbing down of the masses.

2) Baby Boomers are perpetual adolescents. Their mindset is still predominant in the public arena, and their mindset is…approximately 14 years old. So is their politics. Boomers are also the first generation raised to believe every damn thing they see on television, and perhaps because television and boomers rather “grew up” together, they are intensely loyal to the thing, which means they are intensely into pop culture, and incredibly easy to sway via media. My grandmother used to say “it’s in the paper!” to express that a thing must be true. To the boomers who are currently holding sway everywhere, if Tim Russert is saying it, if Jon Steward is deadpanning it, if Steven Colbert is satirizing it…it must be true.

Therefore, if all we ever hear on the news is how dreadful everything is (and props to Meyer for remembering what an utter disaster was Carter’s presidency, and I say that having voted for Carter) and if boomers are predisposed to believe the news…well…in the public perception, everything really is going to hell in a handbasket, even if inflation is low, unemployment is incredibly low, the markets are up, minority college enrollments are up, housing starts are up, numbers of the black middle class are increasing, the deficit is going down and oh, yeah, we haven’t been attacked on our soil since 9/11. We’re told it’s all bad. Many believe it.

And when those folks were told – all through the 1990’s, when AlQaeda was attacking our interests every 18 months and the market was running on “irrational exuberance” – that everything was better than it had ever been at any time before in the history of the country, well…they believed that, too.

3) Perhaps Americans don’t want to recognise how good things are here because it imparts guilt (what have we done to deserve it!) or conversely suggests that “who is greatly blessed is also greatly burdened” and we don’t really want to hear that they owe the rest of the world anything.

4) It’s the media, stupid.

I’ll leave it to you commenters to fill in the gaps, look for other explanations of why and how we got here and what we can do to promote growth and maturity among the civic-minded.