Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Gangale
Mark Twain once said, "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself."
Are politicians really idiots? In order to prove that proposition, one would have to subject a statistically significant sample of them to IQ tests, and of course, they would have to be idiots to comply with such a testing program. It is better to be thought a fool than to actually be proven one.
But they really do appear to be idiots. Write a letter to one sometime and see if you get a response. Chances are you won't, but if it's your lucky day, you'll receive a bland acknowledgement that in no way addresses the issue you raised in your letter. In fact, you'll wonder whether they actually wrote to you or they misaddressed their unresponsive response that was intended for some other hapless constituent.
A former senator, cabinet secretary, and national party chair asked me last week, "Do you really think people read their mail?" Stupid me! No, I think their staffers read only enough to figure out what the issue is according to some vague metric, then they weigh all the letters they receive on that issue on a postal scale. Below a certain weight threshold, it's not an important enough issue, so they do nothing.
Now, repeat the experiment. Write another letter, but this time include a $2000 check. Of course, the change in response isn't proof of intelligence... even a plant turns toward the sun.
The tragedy is that most politicians start out as moderately intelligent, well-intentioned people. Then they get into power, and over the years they have less and less contact with their constituents and more and more contact with big donors, lobbyists, fellow politicians, and staffers. They forget that they were once constituents themselves. The arrogance of entrenched power seduces them into a belief in their own omniscience and that of the others in the "in" crowd. But in this closed-loop information system, the same old stale ideas get passed around and around, and through this process of increasing insularity, the best and brightest degenerate into idiocy. There is no better evidence of the unintelligent design of the universe than the devolution of politicians.
But we can reverse devolution. We can turn unintelligent design into intelligent design. We can be the evolutionary force that transforms politicians.
Write your politicians. If they don't write you back, write them off, and write yourself in at election time. This will accomplish several things.
First of all, you can be confident about your choice. When you vote for yourself, you know you're not voting for an idiot.
Second, although you won't win office, you'll take market share from the professional politicians. They'll really hate that. No politician wants to be forced into a run-off election. And, suppose neither runoff candidate wins a majority. You can make this happen simply by voting for yourself again and again. Your victory is to deny them victory. Your power is in disempowering the powerful.
Third, the more who people write themselves in, the more it will stuff up the electoral system. Election officials have to count each write-in ballot by hand. Each election could take weeks to sort out. If you don't like the two-party machine, throw sand in the gears until it grinds to a halt.
Finally, the cumulative effect of all of this will be to transmit a loud and clear message of voter disgust over politics as usual.
Let's retire these 20th century dinosaurs. Either transform them back into constituents, or force them to evolve into more nimble and more responsive life-forms for the 21st century. In the long run, you'll be doing them a favor. After all, no one wants to be an idiot.