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We must look beyond politicians and parties, and examine their ideology

Commentary: Dear Sage: Am I crazy for thinking that my elected representatives want to kill me lately? -Antsy in the Agora.

Dear Antsy, your elected representatives do not wake up in the morning gunning for you personally. In electoral politics we have always had a mix of self-dealing rascals and sincere public servants, and they inhabit both our dominant parties. Among Republicans and Democrats alike we have elected rapacious scoundrels serving the powerful and seeking rewards, but also some who truly care for the working class and the vulnerable, but have differing ideas about how best to serve them.

What is valid about your fear is that bad policy can kill. When the President cuts off the subsidies that make mediocre health insurance affordable for millions of people, sickness and death will follow. The 2014 decision by an unelected fiscal manager to switch a Michigan city’s municipal water source to the Flint River killed people and remains unresolved. Poor emergency preparation and management kills people, as we are now seeing in Puerto Rico. Turning away from diplomacy and embracing perpetual warfare destroys lives and leaves cities uninhabitable; and expending so much wealth on military might and so little on civil society, as we do in the U.S., impoverishes us at home while we export death and inflame terrorism around the world. These are only a few current examples, but the problem is nothing new.

Bad governance, corruption, and social violence by the powerful have always been with us, but the consequences are intensifying and touching more people who once were insulated from the hazards of capitalism and our structures of power. A better analogy than thinking our politicians are hostile to us is to think of ourselves as on a plane with the wings falling off while the majority of the flight crew believes everything is fine, wings aren’t necessary, and navigation is overrated. Some members of the flight crew know better, but they are overruled as the plane breaks apart over the ocean. What are the ideas that led us to this predicament?

It is not enough to hold politicians personally accountable and send them packing at election time, although we need to do a lot more of that. (We have this backwards: it is difficult to defeat an incumbent, instead of it being difficult for an incumbent to keep their seat.) We would do well to look more broadly than party affiliation, as well. We need to address the framework of ideas from which our policies emerge. Those of us who work in the media could help by framing politics less as a clash of personalities and more about ideology.

If the analysis and commentary by our major media and the questions pollsters ask are representative, there appears to be little public conversation about ideology. When we discuss it at all, we use worn-out words that don’t mean what they once meant. People are branded as “conservatives” and “liberals” but these labels don’t convey much about what people truly believe, and there is little conversation between the two in any case.

A goal of this column is to engage ideas rather than the horse race of politics, but maybe this columnist could do a better job. Come back next week, Antsy, and this column will attempt a non-academic, non-jargonized explanation of neoliberalism and the human damage it causes.

The silver lining is our ability to examine ideas, and the liberty (for now) to engage in political struggle and fight for a better idea.

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Algernon D’Ammassa writes the Desert Sage column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News. Share your thoughts atadammassa@demingheadlight.com.