The Mindless Contingent
By: Brian Parks
It’s entirely possible that you’re reading this before November 4, 2008, but the likelihood is that you’re reading this after. Regardless, you will vote in an election sometime in the future, so the message is the same. The electoral system — nay, the whole political system — in the United States is broken.
This may, in fact, be an exaggerated statement, but the arguments in its support are undoubtedly true. This is primarily due to the political and social climate that has developed over the past eight years. Regardless of your position on the political spectrum and your opinion of the administration of the past eight years, it has had a catastrophic effect on the voting population of the United States of America at all levels.
The root of the issue is threefold. To begin with, the political polarization of the two predominant political parties due to foreign affairs issues has caused the average American voter to adopt a disinterested attitude towards politics. Secondly, civics education in our country’s public schools has completely and totally failed. Finally, media attention on both sides of the aisle has led to the radicalization of both camps, further causing the average voter to feel disenfranchised.
In his farewell address, George Washington warned against two things: political parties and foreign alliances. Time has proven our country’s first President right on both counts. Most conflicts the United States has faced since he left office can be traced to a failure to heed one or both of these warnings.
The past eight years have been no different. The major issues, until recently, have been predominantly related to foreign affairs. The War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, and the War on Terror have all been directly related to foreign alliances of one form or another.
In the early part of the Bush administration, this caused a rift between proponents of this course of action and those who didn’t support it. As time progressed, however, it became more politicized, leading to the point where a large portion of John Kerry’s platform in his Presidential campaign involved his stance against the various military actions that were proposed by President Bush and authorized by Congress.
Eventually, it became a situation where one fire fed the other. As people who were against the wars realized it was no good dreaming about the past, the question became what to do about the situation, then primarily in Iraq. It is this issue that was a major point of contention during the first Presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama.
Education, an institution on which we tend to pride ourselves, may not be nearly as much an issue this election season as foreign policy, but it is still an issue, especially with concern to the American voter. It may not directly affect the decision each citizen will make when they step into the booth to cast their ballot, but it will influence the way in which they make their decision.
In recent years, civics education has more or less disappeared from public schools. Amidst lawsuits and other issues raised over “bias in the classroom,” teachers have been reprimanded and even fired. This strips the innocent student not just of a biased civics education, but of any civics education at all.
Another factor that has robbed the average student of value in their education is the idea of No Child Left Behind. This is actually a misnomer; it would be more appropriately named No Child Expected To Do Better Than “The Test.” The intent of the legislation was to promote quality in public schools by setting a standard that all schools should meet in order to receive federal funding. The implementation, however, was to test the students that were being taught by the teachers whose quality was being assessed.
There is an obvious logical error here. In order to properly implement the intent of the bill, it would be more effective to test the teacher’s ability to teach. However, this is a far more difficult task, as an objective test would not be adequate, since knowledge alone does not make a teacher effective. On the other hand, subjective review by administrators or even a government agency or third party introduces potential biases, which are unacceptable in today’s climate of political correctness.
As such, “The Test” is hailed as the determining factor, providing teachers no incentive to teach anything more than what is on the test and drilling their students on the tested material, artificially inflating the scores. (The same is true of the SATs; however, neither the test administrators nor SAT tutors want to conduct a study to determine the effect of tutoring on SAT scores, as a correlation would undermine the credibility of the test and a lack thereof would put the tutors out of a job.)
Without adequate education, the average American has nowhere to turn but to the media. Most Americans read a newspaper on a regular basis and the vast majority of Americans at least watch some television. However, this institution fails us once again by presenting the most polarizing issues and doing very little to reconcile the two sides.
On the liberal side, what we see most on the news are protests and other acts of “Civil Disobedience.” (By the way, what Thoreau doesn’t recount in his essay is that, after being bailed out of jail, he did eventually pay his poll tax.) This further enforces the idea that liberals engage in acts of protest, which encourages other liberals to do the same and reinforces conservatives’ stance against protesters and their actions.
Likewise, conservatives have talk radio and talk shows. Despite being more or less within the system under which the media operates, it is merely a conservative version of the liberals’ outlet. This also has the effect of polarizing the issues. It causes liberals to automatically discount what they have to say while causing conservatives to strengthen their support of what they already believe.
In essence, both these forms of attention are preaching to the choir and not actually accomplishing anything like trying to win over the hearts of the “other side.”
Given that all of this has prevented Americans from making an educated and minimally biased decision on Election Day, the last hope is the televised debates. However, the debates are basically more of the same campaign rhetoric that each candidate has been saying ever since they received the nomination. Both candidates, regardless of question, end up repeating whatever part of their official platform might vaguely relate to the question at hand. This does little to quiet the minds of undecided voters and further polarizes the rest of America, as evidenced by an ABC News/Washington Post poll.
This sorry state of affairs has left many people, especially young people, apathetic toward the political process. While the turnout of young voters this year may be the largest it has been in several decades, they will be voting largely on emotion, and likely only for President. For most who do vote, that will be the extent of their political involvement.
This leaves us with little more than to fend for ourselves when we enter the voting booth on Election Day. The Constitution gives us the responsibility to vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. However, this responsibility to vote is not just as simple as casting a ballot. We have a responsibility as citizens of the United States of America to vote in an educated manner and not just cast a vote for the sake of casting a vote.
To that end, I offer the following guidance: If you know for whom you are voting and why you are voting for that particular candidate, by all means exercise your right to vote. Otherwise, do not vote. Every American citizen has a responsibility (and therefore a right) to vote. Likewise, each American citizen has a right to choose not to vote. It is not right to have the votes of educated and informed citizens, and thus, the final outcome of the election, tainted by uninformed votes.
