Patrick McSweeney


 

The Politics of Seeming to Care

American politicians pander to the populace, telling them what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. In this year's transportation debate, Virginia's lawmakers are no exception.


 

The expression was coined by columnist George Will, but “the politics of seeming to care” so aptly describes what has happened to our representative form of governance that I don’t hesitate to borrow it.

 

What concerned the Founders when they designed our political system at the end of the 18th century is a pervasive condition today at all levels of government. Too many elected officials are so eager to please their constituents that they are incapable of making hardheaded decisions in the best interest of those very constituents.

 

The modern concept of Plebiscitary Democracy would have appalled the authors of the United States Constitution and the Virginia Constitution. They understood and valued classical republicanism, which emphasizes wisdom and restraint on the part of both the governed and their governors.

 

No fewer than 48 of the 85 papers in The Federalist were devoted to demonstrating that the proposed Constitution was sufficiently republican. The Founders feared passionate excess by the majority as much as they worried about despotism and its opposite, a weak and ineffectual government.

 

Much of the discussion at the 1788 Virginia Ratification Convention in Richmond focused on the republican virtues of self-restraint and individual responsibility, without which the new Constitution could not succeed. Critics of the American Experiment insisted that, human nature being what it is, representative democracy would ultimately devolve into mob rule.

 

One such critic, the Englishman Thomas Macaulay, warned that our system of representative democracy would lead to ruin. In 1857, he wrote to a legislator in America: “The day will come when … a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a Legislature will be chosen?”

 

In "Democracy in America", Alexis de Tocqueville noted the tendency of American political candidates to attempt to bribe people with their own money. He hardly would have been surprised by the orgy of pork-barrel spending by today’s federal and state legislators.

 

The politics of seeming to care has frustrated responsible policymaking. Obsequiousness has displaced courage and wisdom. Pandering is an inadequate term to describe the behavior of some elected officials. Former President Bill Clinton gave new expression to this tendency of politicians with his famous line: “I feel your pain.”

 

This brings us to the latest manifestation in Virginia. Del. David Albo, R-Fairfax, is leading an effort to appease voters in Northern Virginia, who experience maddening gridlock, by promising more funding for transportation. It’s easier for a politician to offer this illusion of a solution, even if it involves a tax increase, than to educate the voters about the need to try a different approach.

 

The old tax-and-spend transportation strategy hasn’t worked anywhere for decades. House Speaker Bill Howell, R-Stafford, has been on target for months stressing the need for major reform and innovation. The major state tax increases in 1983 and 1986, each of which was predicated on the promise that gridlock would be curbed, didn’t accomplish their objective, worsened transportation problems and postponed the reforms that must be addressed to assure real relief.

 

Likewise, the heavy state borrowing for road projects from the mid-1990s to 2000 provided no long-term solution to gridlock. Even the massive federal spending for transportation authorized by Congress in 2005 will make no substantial dent in the problem.

 

These tax-funded strategies are fundamentally flawed. A 1990 Brookings Institution report concluded that so long as some pay less than full costs to use the transportation system, congestion will continue regardless of how much we increase spending.

 

-- June 12, 2006

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contact Information

 

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Richmond, VA 23219
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