E.g., Don’t hold your breath that the Democrats will save us. Or that anyone will. It might take something far more dramatic. Perhaps something revolutionary. But it’s going to require far more than sitting around watching our TV’s to make it happen.
Marty Kaplan is a really smart media-reform and political-reform guy who tells it like it is. In this recent piece in Huffpo, titled “Our Years of Magical Thinking,” [1] Kaplan worries that too many of us have the attitude that good things will simply happen. It is a pervasive and dangerous attitude. I agree with him. For the most part, good things take planning, sacrifice and hard work. Bad things often just happen. It takes a lot of effort to build something. On the other hand, mere decay and neglect can bring it down.
Politically, we now face many huge struggles but there is no indication that the key players (all of us are key players some of the time) are willing to do what it takes to effect real change for the better:
Today, magical thinking is the belief that a Democratic White House and a filibuster-proof Congress is all that stands between the country and meaningful political reform. Is it really credible that elected officials who got to Washington without making campaign finance reform and media reform their signature issues will risk their incumbencies to force the only kind of change that can rescue democracy from the dangers the Founders warned us about, no matter who’s in charge?
Why is “magical thinking” dangerous? It’s because people who believe in magic are lazy and naïve. They are all too willing to trust the next seller of political snake oil. As Kaplan writes: “What haunts me is the possibility that Americans will one day decide that there is something so inherently dysfunctional about our political system that rolling the dice on non-democratic change is the only hope to rescue it.”
I also agree with Kaplan that media reform and campaign reform are huge issues that urgently need help. In fact, without first addressing these two festering problems, it will be one hundred times harder to have the necessary national conversation to fix any other complex national issue (there are dozens–take you pick). Sorry to end this on this depressing note. Perhaps I’ve just been reading too much about what the candidates aren’t discussing . . .
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