You're not alone, Geegee, and it's the same across the Atlantic...
From the Telegraph, London (
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/10/08/ixopinion.html):
Corrosive cynicism is destroying politics
By Janet Daley
(Filed: 08/10/2003)
I can't remember a time when politics has been so depressing. The former foreign secretary accuses the Prime Minister of deliberate deceit in the run-up to war. The main opposition party is sunk in poisonous conspiracy against its leader. The media slaver over every detail of betrayal and machination.
This is not just the usual atmosphere of rancid cynicism: it is beyond cynical. It is a form of corrosion - politics is consuming itself in a frenzy of mordant viciousness. Then we wonder why such a large proportion of electors cannot be bothered to vote, and an even larger proportion refuses to watch the bear-baiting spectacle that is known as current affairs television.
How much longer can this go on? Despair at the intractability of the country's problems grows in direct correlation with the discrediting of the personalities who must be trusted if those problems are to be addressed. If the individuals at the top of the existing parties are seriously unsatisfactory, then clearly they must be replaced.
But the suspicion grows that, in the current climate, no political leader could ever be acceptable - almost by definition. To be ambitious politically is to be inherently irredeemable, flawed in a way that makes exposure and calamity inevitable.
Interestingly, the one party leader who is largely spared by the media at the moment is Charles Kennedy, perhaps because he is so scandalously and embarrassingly inadequate that to attack him would seem like an act of grotesque inhumanity. As a result of this bizarre fit of soft-heartedness by the media, the most grossly unfit political leader in living memory is seen by the public as blameless, and thus climbs in the polls. It is a tragi-comedy worthy of Brecht.
But in the real world, democratic politics itself is being discredited. Serious policies are decried as shams before they have been examined. The content of argument and ideas are scarcely considered before they are buried under hostile opposition from axe-grinding pressure groups whose own vested interests are never examined.
An entire generation now has almost no criteria for evaluating the substance of political discourse because the terms in which possible solutions are discussed are so overwhelmingly negative. There is never an open and generous debate entitled, "What does this proposal (on healthcare, education, taxation, whatever) have to offer?" There is only: "Why this can't possibly work - and what nefarious motives does this particular bunch of scumbag politicians have in proposing it?"
At Blackpool this week, three shadow ministers have put forward some of the most genuinely radical policies seen in Britain since the 1980s. On education, Damian Green has proposed "better schools passports", which would present a quite breathtaking new scale of opportunity for children in deprived areas.
Liam Fox has argued for a healthcare system, still financed by the taxpayer, but free of political manipulation by government. His proposals would dismantle the absurd ideological barrier between public and private health provision in a way that is already commonplace on the Continent, but that would be revolutionary in Britain. Oliver Letwin has dared to suggest that local communities should have some say in how they are policed and that the control of crime should be a publicly accountable matter.
These are policies that - whether you agree with them or not - should be of interest to anyone who cares about the way we are governed. The very discussion of them would be illuminating and healthy in terms of making the public feel that something - anything - might be done about the state we are in. How much airtime do you suppose they will get? And how much of that will be taken by the organised Rent-a-Gob lobbies of always available protesters who see any change in the existing arrangements as a threat?
What is more, these particular initiatives fit into a larger picture that is, in itself, a daring venture: nothing less than a systematic challenge to the whole post-war settlement of big government as the answer to all social and civil problems.
The Tories are beginning to think in the larger, more philosophical terms that were a feature of Keith Joseph's time. The argument that they wish to open could not be more seminal.
Would individuals, rather than governments, making their own choices produce a fairer society and better services for everyone? Can centrally controlled and distributed services ever meet the infinitely varied needs of individuals? On a wider ethical plane: are the values of community and individuality incompatible?
There is a division in political life now between big and small government, between centralised control and local accountability, that is really worth discussing. It will be a crime against democracy if the public arena (which is to say, the media) does not provide a proper platform for this discussion in which the possibilities are not pre-judged, tendentiously packaged and doomed from the start.
Of course, there is a sense in which everything I am saying here is very naive. Who will dare to be the first television interviewer to take a politician's words and motives seriously? In a world of sophisticates, who wants to be the ingénue who actually believes that at least some politicians go into this business because they care about the country and want to change things for the better?
Cynicism is seductive. It makes you feel that you know something about life that other people do not. No one wants to look as if he knows less than his fellows, even if what he prides himself on knowing is deeply unpleasant and inclines him to think that the game to which he devotes his professional life is scarcely worth the candle.
geegee
