And speaking of partisanship, Davey, the Democrats have not ignored intelligence -- or Senate testimony from respected, non-partisan scholars and experts who know the Iraq situation best -- by recommending we have a plan to redeploy our troops out of their current positions as brightly painted sitting-duck targets. They have listened well to those who have said that the war cannot be won militarily, that we must utilize diplomacy in Iraq and the region, and that the presence of our troops are, in many ways, exacerbating the violence, not ending it.
So who's being partisan now, Davey?
Private Virtue, Public ViceBy David Brooks
The New York Times
Deep in the bowels of Washington, hidden from public scrutiny and prying cameras, there is an illicit underworld where people are subtle, reasonable and interesting. I have occasionally been admitted to this place, the land of RIP (Reasonable in Private).
I have been in the Senate dining room and heard senators, in whispers and with furtive glances, acknowledge the weaknesses in their own arguments and admit the justice of some of the other side’s points. I have seen politicians fess up to their own evasions and acknowledge the trade-offs inevitable in tough decisions.
I have always felt honored when politicians admit me into the realm of RIP, because if it ever got out that these pols were sensible and independent, it would ruin their careers. If it ever got out that they could think for themselves or often had subversive and honest thoughts, they would be branded traitors to their party and uncertain champions for their cause.
For politicians are not permitted to ply their trade in the land of RIP. In our democracy, all public business must be done in the land of SIPB (Self-Important Pathetic Blowhards).
In our democracy, everybody has to line up in party formation for each week’s mighty clash, no matter how stupid they think the exercise may be.
In our democracy, lawmakers are compelled to spend their days maneuvering for trivial advantages that nobody will remember by dinnertime.
In our democracy, presidential aspirants spend a few months fighting a general election but two years positioning themselves for the primaries. That means they spend the bulk of their time in transcontinental cattle calls, competing to most assiduously flatter the prejudices of their most febrile supporters. They traffic in pre-approved bromides while searching with their hyperattenuated antennas for their party’s maximum sweet spot of approval, love and applause.
In our democracy, top officials lead frantic, overscheduled lives, with almost no time alone and with major decisions made by instinct during rushed limo rides from one forgettable event to another. They spend their days talking, and pretty soon they become human jukeboxes — their snippets of conversation are just chunks of oft-repeated material they have retrieved from the stump speech audio collection in their heads.
In short, our democracy, at least as it has evolved, takes individuals who are reasonable in private and it churns them through a public process that is almost tailor-made to undermine their virtues. The process of perpetually kissing up to the voters destroys the leadership qualities the voters are looking for in the first place: tranquillity of spirit, independence of mind and a sensitivity to the contours and complexity of reality.
The best politicians try to build a fortress around their private lives to protect themselves from the ravages of the process all around them. They try to separate their real belief from their public spin. They stage little rebellions against members of their political base, who would otherwise be their slavemasters. They try not to let the bloated public persona smother the little voice within.
But this week it has become clear what an uphill struggle that is. This week, everyone senses that we have reached a crucial juncture in the Iraq war debate. This week, in private, everyone acknowledges how complex the choices are. Everyone senses that the policy being promoted possibly won’t work and could have ruinous consequences. This week, the mood — in private — is sober and anxious.
And yet the politicians have completely failed to institutionalize that sense of sobriety in the public sphere. Instead of having a serious debate, the Senate disgraced itself with mind-bendingly petty partisanship. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidates engaged in an unholy bidding war to get out of Iraq soonest, which had nothing to do with realities in Iraq and everything to do with applause lines in Iowa.
In a week when the private mood was grave, the public action was partisan and shortsighted. Instead of trying to educate public opinion by stressing the realities described in the National Intelligence Estimate, the political class, by and large, publicly ignored those findings. The Republicans maintained near lock-step solidarity even though privately, Republican opinions are all over the place. The Democrats ignored the intelligence community’s warning about withdrawal after spending three years blasting the Bush administration for ignoring intelligence.
In private, we have a decent leadership class. In public, it’s rotten.
Photo Credit: David Brooks. (The New York Times)
Technorati tags: David Brooks, The New York Times, Politics, U.S. Government, Congress, Senate, Foreign Policy, International Relations, news, commentary, op ed
2 comments:
I submitted this comment to Brooks' website. Of course it wasn't published...
"In private, we have a decent leadership class. In public, it's rotten". Ok, but what you don't address is whether the actual policymaking is being done by the private or the public personae. It makes sense to me, although admittedly it's a bit "tacky", that these lawmakers are quietly doing in private what their constituents and more importantly their financial backers don't want them doing in public. Somewhere in my education, I remember hearing that "politics is the art of compromise". This does not necessarily mean, however, that the compromise will show in the public square. As far as I can see from reading pre CSPAN speeches in the houses of Congress, bombast and hyperbole have a long and honored tradition that has only gained currency with the advent of electronic media. This does not mean that it has any real effect on the legislative process. It is simply the equivalent of professional wrestling, and better than Ted Kennedy being physically beaten in the Senate Chamber by some opponent of abortion or stem cell research,like his predecessor Charles Sumner was in the 1850's by a supporter of slavery. There has therefore always been at least an aspect of theatre in politics, and politicians by and large seem to enjoy their thespian sides; certainly the public would be less inclined to watch them if their public acts were as boring as reason would dictate them to be. It's only when a fraud with only personal gain in mind, or an ideologue with no sense of the greater good, gets into a position of power that the public rottenness needs to be seen as anything more than a sideshow; and this seems to have happened more within the party you normally support than its adversaries at least where ideology is concerned, and I would posit that it is because the GOP has a tendency to take itself more seriously than the Democratic Party, as well as having a hierarchical construction that is more institutionalizing and therefore more self perpetuating. All in all, unless you give us some evidence that the theatre of the absurd which is being produced in the halls of congress by a cast paid far less than its broadway and hollywood equivalents is having a real effect on the laws that this congress is actually passing, and that anything other than limiting the power of nongovernmental financial interests will force a change in the mis en scene, I'll sit back and watch the show as it is, and if don't like the actor from my home town, I'll find someone else to play the part at the next election. You, given your status as a paid professional critic, might want to direct your focus to those big producers who are paying for these actors' perks, rather than portraying the stage play as reality.
Excellent post, Seth. Thank you.
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