America's Disingenuous Political System by Matias Bulnes, NYC

I have yet to hear an explanation of Ms. Palin's potential contribution as vice president of the US (and, let us not forget, possible president). All I hear is “women will vote for her,” “she is a hockey mother,” “it’s a smart move given the Democratic primaries,” etc. If we focus on her political credentials, the picture is rather unflattering. She has some political experience at the middle administrative level and none at the high level. Her academic training is far from impressive and she acquired her first passport a few months ago. As a result, she seems to be notoriously unprepared on international politics and diplomacy. Why would anyone think that she can be a good vice president? Except for a few million voters I suspect that nobody thinks she would be a good vice president. In fact, I should suspect that not even republicans believe so, on pain of disrespecting their political acumen.

But despite my suspicion the media has mostly welcomed Palin’s nomination (fortunately with some exceptions). Everybody seems to be celebrating the cleverness of the McCain campaign in making this move. And yet I can’t help the feeling that there is something deeply wrong with decisions like this. In this article I will explore what possible justification can ground a decision that by all informed standards jeopardizes the future of the country. I want to pay special attention to the insincerity of decisions such as McCain’s where the politician who makes them knows that they won’t benefit the country. I do not intend to mount a critique of the Republican Party in particular since I believe democrats acquiesce in the same logic—though perhaps with some more scruples. Ultimately I want to invite reflection on what kind of democracy can be built upon such a disingenuous political system and whether it is worth having.

Rightly or wrongly, making political decisions on purely instrumental grounds is widely condoned in the American media and, derivatively, by American society. It is, for example, assumed that politicians care more about winning elections than about principles such as authenticity or sincerity. Journalists and political analysts would not talk about the “real motive” underlying a political move ever so lightly if it wasn’t routinely accepted by the audience that politicians are usually insincere about their real motives. But as much as authenticity and sincerity are normally considered values, the obsession with winning elections has been justified in the liberal tradition in terms of a consumer-based conception of the political system (sometimes also called interest-group politics). According to this view, voters are consumers and political parties are suppliers of political projects designed to fit their preferences. As a consequence, the real motives of politicians are irrelevant; what matters is that their projects satisfy the consumers, hence that they win elections. This view of the political system relies on the hope that by pursuing politics in this market-like way the best optimum will be achieved—and moreover, in a way that doesn’t required a debate about the good.

But I doubt that McCain’s decision (as many others from all parties) can be justified in terms of this consumer-based model. For it would be analogous in an economic market to the case of a supplier selling a defective product to a costumer that he knows wants it out of ignorance or confusion. McCain should know perfectly well that Ms. Palin is hardly qualified for the US presidency in times of an unmanageable war, a looming economic crisis, an empowering China, etc. But instead of warning American voters of their crucial mistake he is happy to use it in his own benefit. Even raging liberals should agree that there is something deeply problematic about economic relations with such a crucial disparity in information.

One way in which the liberal could reply is by setting the responsibility on the Obama campaign to overlook McCain’s decisions and expose their flaws to the public light. Hence, should McCain’s choice of Palin be ultimately harmful to the US, the political system will react to it and eventually punish McCain with a defeat. But like with so many liberal arguments, their faith in the control power of the market is based on an ideal of social organization that is rarely instantiated in reality. In practice, this blind faith has earned the US 8 years of an erratic political leadership that has brought a previously healthy country to a state of tremendous economic and political uncertainty. But more important for the purposes of this essay is the observation that the political agents themselves know that the consumer-based model is at best a rough approximation to reality and bet on its imperfections. There can be little doubt that if the McCain campaign did after all choose Palin for instrumental reasons, they were aware of her profound political deficiencies and banked on the fact that the Obama campaign will not be able to turn the public attention to them in the short time before the general election. Not only doesn’t the political system guarantee an optimum outcome of the democratic process but politicians exploit the naïve expectation that it will.

The alternative to the liberal conception of political systems is unsurprisingly the social democratic one. The contrast between these views is usually brought out in terms of two opposite conceptions of political freedom introduced by Isaiah Berlin. But McCain’s decision can also make for a good illustration of the contrast. I suspect McCain chose Palin knowing that to be an overall bad decision for the country but based on public acclaim. This could be deemed acceptable only if we see the job of the politician as being the representation of the people’s preferences. But in the social democratic conception, rather than the people’s preferences, the job of the politician is to represent the people’s interest. In particular, making a political decision that goes against the interest of the nation but that has public approval is a violation of the duty of the politician. This together with the inevitable feeling that McCain is patronizing the people of the US, is perhaps what explains my discomfort with the choice of Palin. A democracy where politicians carry themselves in such a disingenuous way and voters are treated like means to seize political power sounds to me like a sham or, in any case, like a democracy not worth having.