The duality of democracy

      Comments Off on The duality of democracy

[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Sometimes, insights into one’s own thought processes arise in unexpected ways. Like, for instance…

  • …that time when a pedestrian, partisan Twitter argument with someone who was Wrong On The Internet turned into an extended, detailed articulation of my Grand Unified Theory of #PANIC about the direction of the country.
  • …or that time when listening to a Colorado Public Radio podcast inspired me to put forth the thesis that “the world is such an interesting place, full beyond measure with the incredible richness of human experience. And yet people read Politico.” (This bit of 538-bait was promptly RT’d by Nate Silver.)
  • …or that time a rant about partisan tribalism, capped by a Lord of the Rings joke-tweet referring to my erstwhile “Third Party Christie” fanboyism (haha, yeah, that part didn’t age well, did it?), somehow transformed itself into a broad defense of rationalism over dogmatism.
  • …or that time my popular rant about how media-created outrages du jour often are none of your damn business & you don’t actually care about them was launched by my idle pondering of the obsessive news coverage of Rachel Canning. (Remember Rachel Canning? No? Exactly my point.)

Well, anyway, it sorta happened again yesterday – introspective insight unexpectedly arising, that is – so, at the risk of engaging in the bad-form practice of contemplating my own former eloquence, I thought I would share.

On Monday night, something inspired me to re-watch JibJab’s brilliant election satire videos from 2004, This Land and Good to Be in D.C., and from 2008, Time For Some Campaignin’. Having discovered that they’ve aged remarkably well (even as JibJab itself hasn’t; they haven’t made anything of a quality or hilarity that even approaches those videos in 7+ years now), I of course had to tweet about it:

I also posted something similar on Facebook, writing: “What ever happened to JibJab? Their election satire animations in 2004 and 2008 were so damn good. I was re-watching last night. Still hilarious.” My friend David commented in response: “The first two were amusing but after they just weren’t as clever IMO. One (two?) hit wonders?”

This is where the “unexpected insight into my thought processes” comes in.

In the course of responding at (excessive and overanalytical) length to David’s comment, I came up with the most concise and spot-on description I’ve ever written of how I, personally, feel about our election system – i.e., the conflicting thoughts that I hold simultaneously in my head about it. I wrote:

On the one hand, there is a sense in which voting for president is truly a very grand thing, a quadrennial expression of the awesome power of democracy in action, and yet on the other hand, there’s an incredibly seedy, cynical and depressing side, in which the process is captive to money and false promises and a two-party system that limits our choices and is, in many ways, at least partially “rigged.”

Yup. That. (Can I say “This x1000” about something I wrote?)

Here’s the full context:

Jib Jab duality

People who know me, or follow me on social media, know that I’m an very patriotic guy (yes, conservatives, liberals can be patriotic too!), and that my patriotism is never expressed more fervently than at election time. For example:

I always feel deeply, genuinely inspired and uplifted by participating in, and observing, the process of We The People expressing our will at the ballot box, and thereby governing ourselves. I love voting. I love elections. And I’m trying to raise my young daughters to feel the same way; hence, things like the #LoyFamilyElectionChart and the balance of power chart and #GiantThermometers and electoral puzzles, as well as encouraging my eldest daughter’s #RomneyCrush even though I’m a Dem. Because elections are awesome. I’m the type of person who can feel genuinely inspired by witnessing the passion of people at a Sarah Palin rally or a Dan Maes victory party, admiring their earnest desire to improve our society, and the extent to which they care and are involved in the civic process – even if I utterly disagree with their substantive beliefs.

And yet… and yet. At the same time, I see tremendously deep, intractable and possibly unsolvable flaws in our system. Some of them are structural or procedural, but many of them are caused by human nature itself – by We The People – as I tried to explain in the aforementioned Grand Unified Theory of #PANIC. Therefore, as inspired as I feel when I contemplate the good things about our system, I feel equally depressed when I contemplate the bad things. If my relationship with our (representative) democratic process had a relationship status on Facebook, it would be “it’s complicated.”

And I figured out how to articulate all that in a single sentence while critiquing a seven-year-old Internet cartoon in which Obama rides a rainbow-pooping unicorn and McCain runs him over with a tank. Go figure.