Slate has a rather interesting article today on the chorus of politicians crying out for bipartisanship so that the government can do, umm, well, they don’t really say. The article, however, lists a number of things that have gone wrong when government actually manages to agree on something.
When we devote ourselves to working together in the name of national unity rather than obsessing on our differences, injustice loves to strike. Writing slavery into the Constitution was perhaps the greatest triumph of nonpartisan compromise in U.S. history. The denial of suffrage to non-property owners and women ranks up there, as do prohibition, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and the so-called war on drugs, declared by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and waged bipartisanly by every president—Republican and Democrat—since.
From there they go on to to mention more current travesties such as the so-called Patriot Act, earmarks, and such. As well as discussing how the public and reporters love getting “drunk” off such fantastic “unity” speeches. It’s well worth a read if you haven’t done so already.
All in all, the urge to “do something” is probably the thing which annoys me most about modern politics. Especially when statists try to define progress as the process itself, with little regard given to the end result. For instance, in debates about Presidential candidates, one often hears claims that politician A is better than politician B because they wrote or sponsored more bills. What you seldom hear is any mention that 90% of said bills were useless things like naming post offices, or non-binding resolutions supporting an existing holiday. Even rarer is what percentage of said bills were actually bad, like, say, the Patriot Act.
But, hey, who cares just as long as it looks like they’re “doing something,” right?
