The Perils of the Democracy Fetish — Part Two
As George Bush has demonstrated, you can pretty much destroy an entire country and more than a quarter of the public will still insist you did an O.K. job.
The target of Collins’ comparison is New York’s accidental governor, David Paterson, who — thanks to his wide, broad and deep incompetence — is setting new records for “drops in approval ratings.”
But Paterson is not the target of this blogpost:
Meanwhile, the 32 Democrats who control the [New York] State Senate by one vote have discovered that a party with a one-vote majority is exactly as good as its weakest, dumbest and most venal member. This in a group where one guy is about to stand trial for beating up his girlfriend and several others give the impression of being willing to trade their vote for a television someone handed them from the back of a stolen truck.
Gay New Yorkers could have told you that.
And not just gay New Yorkers. Gay Californians had the state legislature, the governor and the attorney general on their side. Oops, they forgot to check with the “weakest, dumbest and most venal” element of their governing process — bigot voters. Outcome: Not exactly as planned.
Or gay Vermonters. State legislature on their side. Oops, they forgot to check with the “weakest, dumbest and most venal” member of their governing process — a bigot governor. Outcome: Not exactly as planned.
Of course, this phenomenon of “weakest, dumbest and most venal” is non-partisan. Remember how Republicans briefly exhaled a sigh of relief upon learning that they still had a filibuster-enabling bloc in the Senate? Well, the three “weakest” members of the Republican caucus promptly put that wishful thinking in its place.
As for the Democrats in Congress (and remember, there are an awful lot of them now), they still can’t come up with the votes to repeal DOMA or DADT. Why? Three reasons: weak, dumb, venal.
Or maybe not. Maybe to be weak is to be powerful and to be dumb is to be smart. (Since all politicians are by definition venal, we’ll leave that one aside for the moment.) The least Democratic members of the New York State Senate essentially captured the entire legislative agenda. So did the three New England pseudo-Republicans in the U.S. Senate. And who could possibly forget Joe Lieberman?
Sometimes “weak as strong” goes Mobius Strip and becomes “weak as strong as weak as …” See, e.g., Arlen Specter, who is either the strongest weak Republican, or the weakest strong Republican, in the Senate. Or maybe he’s not even a Republican anymore — hard to tell these days. But card check still hinges on his weak-strength/strong-weakness.
The idea of “weak as strong” even transcends the legislative branch. Recently, a silly woman wrote a silly book espousing a silly idea: That Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is a (“modest”) libertarian. Um, no. The best way to describe Kennedy (or at least post-O’Connor Kennedy), as I have explained previously, is as the perennial chaser of the swing vote. Because on the Supreme Court, the swing vote — whether as “weakest conservative,” “weakest liberal” or “weakest whatever” — is of course the strongest voice: the one who gets to write the controlling opinion.
Democracy fetishists (and their incestuous siblings, the political fetishists) tend to forget that “politics” is nothing more than “politicians” — all of whom seek, to the greatest extent possible, to maximize their own power, prestige and influence. If being (or acting) “weak, dumb and venal” works to that end, then few if any politicians will hesitate to do so.
Furthermore, a system that is rigged to pull both partisan extremes to the political center will inevitably maximize the power at the center. But what is “the center” but the weakest partisans? The system encourages weakness; the system rewards weakness. To be weak can be extraordinarily powerful.
So stop acting surprised when you see “weak, dumb and venal” politicians all around you casting “weak, dumb and venal” votes.
(Part One here.)
Filed under: Activist Legislators & Nanny Statists, Gay Rights and Issues, New York City & State, Politics, Society, Religion, Culture Wars
I'm not giving up on Obama advancing gay rights. I'm giving it one house term though to see progress. I never expected gay rights to be the first thing on his agenda. That was always going to be the economy and healthy care.
If DADT is not repealed by the end of 2010, I will concede that you're right. I also expect to see ENDA passed this term. DOMA was always going to be harder. I don't expect to see progress on that front unless Obama gets a second term, although I do think they will try to chip away at pieces of it.