Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
08 October 13
n
old friend who has been active in politics for more than thirty years
tells me he's giving up. "I can't stomach what's going on in Washington
anymore," he says. "The hell with all of them. I have better things to
do with my life."
My friend is falling exactly into the trap that the
extreme right wants all of us to fall into - such disgust and cynicism
that we all give up on politics. Then they're free to take over
everything.
Republicans blame the shutdown of Washington and
possible default on the nation's debt on the President's "unwillingness
to negotiate" over the Affordable Care Act. But that law has already
been negotiated. It passed both houses of Congress and was signed into
law by the President. It withstood a Supreme Court challenge.
The Act is hardly perfect, but neither was Social
Security or Medicare when first enacted. The Constitution allows
Congress to amend or delay laws that don't work as well as they were
intended, or even to repeal them. But to do any of this requires new
legislation – including a majority of both houses of Congress and a
president's signature (or else a vote to override a president's veto).
Our system does not allow one party to delay, amend,
or repeal a law of the land by shutting down the rest of the government
until its demands are met. If that were the way our democracy worked, no
law would ever be safe or settled. A disciplined majority in one house
could always use the threat of a shutdown or default to gut any law it
didn't like.
So the President cannot re-negotiate the Affordable Care Act. And I don't believe Tea Bag Republicans expect him to.
Their real goal is far more insidious. They want to
sow even greater cynicism about the capacity of government to do much of
anything. The shutdown and possible default are only the most recent
and most dramatic instances of terminal gridlock, designed to get people
like my friend to give up.
And on this score, they're winning. Congress's
approval rating was already at an all-time low before the shutdown,
according to a poll released just hours before Washington went dark. The
CNN/ORC poll
showed that only 10 percent of Americans approved the job Congress was
doing, while 87 percent disapproved. It was the all-time lowest approval
rating for Congress on a CNN poll.
A recent Gallup survey
found that only 42 percent of Americans - also a record low - have an
even "fair" amount of confidence in the government's capacity to deal
with domestic matters.
And in a recent survey by the Pew Research Center,
26% of Americans say they're angry at the federal government while 51%
feel frustrated. Just 17% say they are basically content with the
government. The share expressing anger has risen seven points since
January, and now equals the record high reached in August 2011, just
after the widely-criticized debt-ceiling agreement between the President
and Congress.
It's a vicious cycle. As average Americans give up on
government, they pay less attention to what government does or fails to
do - thereby making it easier for the moneyed interests to get whatever
they want: tax cuts for themselves and their businesses; regulatory
changes that help them but harm employees, consumers, and small
investors; special subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare. And
these skewed benefits only serve to confirm the public's cynicism.
The same cynicism also makes it easier to convince the
public that even when the government does act for the benefit of the
vast majority, it's not really doing so. So a law like the Affordable
Care Act, which, for all its shortcomings, is still a step in the right
direction relative to the costly mess of the nation's healthcare system,
is transformed into a nightmarish "government takeover."
So here's what I told my friend who said he's giving
up on politics: Don't. If you give in to bullies, their bullying only
escalates. If you give in to cynicism about our democracy, our democracy
steadily erodes.
If you believe the fix is in and the game is rigged,
and that a handful of billionaires and their Tea Party puppets are
destroying our government, do something about it. Rather than give up,
get more involved. Become more active. Make a ruckus. It's our
government, and the most important thing you can do for yourself, your
family, your community, and the future, is to make it work for all of
us.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public
Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of
Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the
ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has
written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The
Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
No comments:
Post a Comment