A G K Y R A

One of the first questions Gwen Ifill asked Joe Biden and Sarah Palin at the 2008 Vice Presidential Debate last night was about the polarization between parties in Washington. It’s not just Washington that has been polarized, it’s ordinary Americans too. I’ve been on the streets of Manhattan trying to gather support for the McCain-Palin ticket, and while lots of people like ‘em, the ones who don’t genuinely hate them and hate anyone who supports them — including me. I’ve been yelled at, cursed at, called filthy names, and seen people who otherwise appear to be decent respectable folks turn into hideous venom-spitting monsters right before my eyes. I have no doubt that some Obama supporters have experienced the same thing from McCain partisans, though I wish I could believe otherwise.

What is behind the polarization? The void left by religion in our culture is being filled with political programs and promises, or politics-as-religion, to borrow a phrase I heard my wife use the other day. That’s a big story, and I’ll save it for when I get back to more theological writing after the election is over.

But lobbying is the other big cause. And I don’t just mean registered lobbyists representing big bad corporations. I mean you, as a voter, lobbying government to give you goodies. Isn’t that what you’re doing when you ask the candidates to help you out? If voters weren’t lobbying, we wouldn’t have any touching anecdotes for campaign rallies and debates! Whose health care proposal will help me and others most? Whose energy plan will lower my bills? Whose tax plan will benefit me? Whose education ideas will meet my and my children’s needs?

If Americans accept that all the ideas being tossed around by the candidates are legitimate for consideration, that they should even be on the table for us to consider, then they will have brought American federalism to an end, for all important purposes. The states will more and more be creatures of the federal government. If not legally or constitutionally, at least financially. The federal government is more and more where the money and the power will be concentrated, and that means the spoils for whoever controls the federal government will get bigger and bigger, leading to corruption, wasteful oversight and investigation motivated either by partisan acrimony or the need to forestall it, and less productivity.

Democrats are at the vanguard of raising the federal umbrella over every area of American life. More money and more responsibility for our health, safety, and economic prosperity, means more power and more control over us in those same areas. You can’t be responsible for someone if you can’t control them.

When all that money and power gets concentrated in one place, the most ambitious and greedy people will swarm to it like ants to honey. When the spoils get big enough, people will resort to all kinds of corrupt and evil things to get what they covet: true no less in government than in Agatha Christie stories.

The big spoils lead to more corporate lobbying, more extravagant promises by candidates, more Utopian expectations of their government by a naive electorate, more disappointment when those expectations don’t materialize, and a nagging sense that somebody else must be getting all the good stuff I’m not getting. Enter the blame game: corporations, CEOs, Wall Street, Dick Cheney, the religious right, the wealthiest. The next decade, new candidates set the table and ladle out the stew of disappointment, envy, and suspicion all over again.

That’s why Americans are so polarized. The stakes could hardly be higher. If McCain wins, some liberals say they’re moving to Canada (they always say that, and they never do). If Obama wins, I just might move away!

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Our federal system of government was well conceived. Consider these two facts: smaller communities tend to be more homogeneous, and an individual voter has more power in local elections. If we concentrated power in state and local government, rather than at the federal level, these two facts have four important ramifications:

1. You yourself, individually, would have more political power at the ballot box and influence over your elected officials. A representative in the U.S. House has nearly one million constituents. A state legislator has far fewer.
2. Since political power would be distributed rather than concentrated, it would be harder for corporations or special interest groups — whoever it is that you’re afraid of — to get their way. They would have to expend a lot more resources in far-flung efforts, only to get less results than they do now, when the wealthiest is, in reality, Congress.
3. There would be less polarization and strife simply because smaller groups are more homogeneous, and tend to share values. That’s why there are such things as red states and blue states!
4. If you didn’t like the way things were going in your state or county, you wouldn’t have to move to Canada. You could move to the state or county next door. How much easier would that be!

If Americans are going to come together as Americans, then we’ll have to go back to an earlier way of thinking about our federal government, the way the Constitution was originally intended. If Americans are going to be united, the government that envelopes all of us — the federal government — can’t be asked to do more than what we all agree that it should do. And that amounts to only those things that the private sector and state and local governments cannot or will not do: interstate commerce, national defense, and diplomacy.

Until we agree to restrict the federal government to the lowest common denominator — the way it was envisioned — we’re going to be divided against each other as a nation. But there’s no reason blue states or blue cities can’t implement the programs for themselves that they want so badly from the federal government. If the people who keep demanding the federal government do more would just relax maybe all of us could.