The day after U.S. Senate Democrats stayed up all night trying to force Republicans to stop their filibuster of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the Austin-American Statesman hard-copy headline read, "Senate Achieves Gridlock." The Hartford Courant headline read, "Gridlock on Iraq." Similar words were used by media throughout the country.
For those of us who want the withdrawal of troops to begin now (this means most Americans), the impasse in Washington is frustrating. But beneath this frustration - and media coverage of the battle in D.C. - runs a contempt for the institution of Congress that presents a grave threat to democracy.
I am referring to the frequent portrayal of Congress as an inept community. Such a community is all-too-familiar from popular culture melodrama. Think of the community of Amity Island in the movie, Jaws. Their selfish ineptitude led to gruesome and unnecessary deaths. They had to be saved by a lone hero (Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody). Loneliness is a consequence of competence in the heroic myths that dominate our national culture. Amity, of course, means friendship. Friendship in these tales is often inadequate to the task. We want Bruce Willis' John McClane as he can be seen in the newest "Die Hard" sequel, Live Free or Die Hard. We want Gary Cooper back as Marshall Will Kane as we approach our own High Noon.
It is possible to tell heroic stories differently. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and movies are deeply engaged with the magical possibilities of competent communities. Harry's a hero, but his friends are more than the classical "helpers" familiar from traditional hero narratives. Rowling, unfortunately, doesn't cover Capitol Hill. And it is far too easy for journalists, attuned to the narrative habits of their American audience, to follow the storylines and characterizations of our traditional heroic myths. As I have written elsewhere, the dominance of heroic melodrama in our political storytelling has led to us from democracy to melodramocracy.
The melodramatic habit is just fine with presidents, who are quite happy to cast themselves as the lone competent in an otherwise inept community. That is just the trouble. The intellectually lazy and politically dangerous characterization of Congress as an inept community emboldens would-be tyrants. Progressives are often as guilty of this narrative sin as conservatives.
The Bush Administration has used the characterization to justify an unprecedented expansion of executive authority. Progressives should consider this before unthinkingly blasting a barely Democratic Congress for "ineptly" failing to reverse Bush policies in a few short months.
Most recently, Bush claimed Congress has no authority over the nation's military action, authority expressly given to Congress in the U.S. Constitution. At the Rockridge Institute, George Lakoff and I pointed out Congress is the decider. But when our popular culture and public narratives question whether a community of any kind can effectively decide anything, a power-obsessed President like Bush might even persuade Congress itself that his control is absolute. Progressives should not assist him in the argument.
Only twice since 1990 has public approval of Congress passed the 50 percent mark. Much of the time positive opinion of the federal legislative branch has languished below 40 percent. Today it is held in less regard than a president who is himself disapproved of by two-thirds of the country. The comparison, as they say, is odious, especially if it is taken to show something about the opinion of different policy goals of a Congress and a president. Still, the sagging reputation of Congress reflects a persistent and dangerous doubt about the legislative branch of government.
Our public narratives quite literally alter our brains. We learn to think, act, and build expectations with narrative forms and roles we learn as we develop. When these expectations are not fulfilled, we believe something is wrong. The Big Bad Wolf doesn't recall his own warm upbringing in a nurturant den and then decide not to eat grandma. Both narrative form and character would be violated. We become habituated to narrative forms and characters. In America, one of our most popular narratives involves the lone hero who saves the inept community.
This is odd in a nation that takes great pride in its democratic institutions. Odd, but not new. The constructed myth of Paul Revere erased the memory of the Revolutionary-era, Lexington-Concord early-warning system of more than 70 people, according to historian Daniel Hackett Fischer. The Revere story and other myths of lone Revolutionary heroes were consciously invented at a time when our young democracy was unsure of itself. A certain Calvinist pessimism and the self-justifying efforts of an early American elite class led to the invention of public myths of strong, individual leaders an inept community could depend upon. The stories are with us still.
But we are neurologically and physiologically made to work together, to seek and to feel rapport with one another. We admire teamwork, at the office or on the playing field. And it's not just an abstract or intellectual admiration. We feel, in our brains and bones, what shared intentionality and cooperative effort mean to us. Discoveries in cognitive science, anthropology and developmental psychology have uncovered the complex array of neuro-physiological qualities and cultural inheritances that make it possible for an infant to learn through mimicry and to very quickly join in cooperative communication with her parents. As we age, our cooperative abilities are enhanced. We are wired for empathy. As individuals, we are built to join hands.
In other words, as a species we are skilled at cooperation. If we weren't, it is unlikely we would still be around to mourn the shortcoming. If we don't stop characterizing the most successful deliberative political body in history as an inept community, we may yet prove that our cantankerousness is quite sufficient to our doom.
Of course, it would be as damaging to idealize the legislative branch as it is to hero-worship a president. Congress is not a team, it is a meeting place for competing teams, and so its actions are, by design, contentious and argumentative. In this context, it is supposed to produce "good enough" laws and inhibit tyrannies of either majorities or minorities. It should be responsive enough that all of us can consent to its decisions even as we might work passionately to overturn them.
The effectiveness of Congress must be continually monitored and reforms continually advanced. Congress is a human construction operated by humans. There will never be a perfect Congress, and a belief in the possibilities of collective action should never make us blind to deficiencies.
The political scientist David R. Mayhew suggested several attributes Congress should have to be effective in solving problems, keeping in mind that Congress has the additional complicating task of helping us agree on just what is a problem. Before the 1960s, for instance, many white Americans didn't see racial segregation as a problem. Among Mayhew's attributes are: transparency, independence, communality, diversity, understandability. Over the last several years, Congress doesn't score too well on any of these attributes. You can read his 2006 paper, Congress As Problem Solver, on his website.
Reforms are needed. Among those suggested by Mayhew are a greatly simplified budget process, non-partisan redistricting, and campaign reform. But none of these will be possible if American citizens believe the cause is futile because the idea of Congress is itself somehow flawed.
The media should stop its frequent characterization of Congress as an inept community. The temptation will always be there, because deliberative bodies are places of conflict and decision-taking. Congress' deliberations are public. The judicial branch is not typically described as inept, probably because its deliberations are private and the messy give-and-take that precedes opinions is seldom open for analysis. Media should cover the conflict as democracy-in-action, not as another example of community ineptitude. Media should also do their part to make the institution even more transparent, more visible to citizens. The rest of us should take seriously institutional reforms and press our representatives to pass them into law.
Framed as an inept community, Congress might lose its ability to stand in the way of ambitious tyrants who use our fondness for heroes and to weaken and possibly destroy our democracy.