Pylimitics

Someone, I forget who, was interviewed on a Boston NPR station yesterday in the wake of the election results. He was some sort of observer of US politics; not a participant. Journalist or pundit or something. Anyway, he pointed out that “politics is a pendulum; it swings one way toward one party then back the other way.”

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It explains a great deal, including why the US has been unable to accomplish many of the things that in every other wealthy, developed nation are taken for granted as table stakes for being a wealthy, developed nation. Transportation, health care, energy, infrastructure — the evidence shows that the US has no ability to address huge, national-scale projects. I think the pendulum is the perfect metaphor for that.

Everybody seems to have accepted and internalized the nonsensical idea that politics in the US has one axis. You’re left or you’re right. You’re Democratic or Republican. Liberal or conservative. Thus it follows that there must be a whole raft of issues you’re for, and another whole raft you’re against, because the issues, too, are piled on one end of the axis or the other.

Political power, which is an amorphous notion but for my purposes just means “making progress on national-scale projects,” swings pendulum-style along that one measly axis on a fairly regular basis. So one pile of issues gets some attention, but only for a while. Not long enough to accomplish anything, because these things take time and commitment.

In a system governed by a pendulum, neither time nor commitment are available in the amounts needed for real progress on major projects.

The root cause of all this might be education, which itself is a huge, national-scale project that I think has been deteriorating for decades. I mention education as the root cause because without enough of it, people might just accept the convenient-but-wrong pronouncement that there’s only one axis. After all, that’s what we’ve been getting from so much of the media, also for decades.

This week’s elections showed the pendulum effect with more than the typical clarity, which unfortunately probably just embeds the idea even more deeply. So now the issues on the other end of the axis will get attention, but history suggests that attention will probably not be sufficient or last long enough to accomplish much of anything.

I really despise this pendulum idea.