And although it sounds like a dire and ominous characterization of American politics, it is ironically comforting in that it relieves voters of the pain of confronting the real culprits in our country's predicament - us. We, the citizens of this country, are the ruling class. The government we have is the government we chose. Unfortunately, we are every bit as corrupt and incompetent as the shadowy figures haunting Mr. Schlicher's dreams.
We are corrupt because our votes are for sale. It is commonplace for politicians to brag about how they will direct public funds to some local project whose major, if not only, justification is the dumping of money into the local economy. Others promise free stuff paid for by the taxes confiscated from our fellow citizens. Still others stroke our vanity or envy by punishing behaviors we find objectionable even though they impinge on no one else's rights.
Some twenty years ago I was talking with a co-worker about Bill Clinton's numerous misdeeds including the perjury that got him impeached. I asked him how he could support someone so obviously corrupt. "My 401(k) is doing great." he said. His reaction was typical. Clinton's defenders never denied his crimes. They couldn't without looking completely foolish. Clinton himself could quibble over the meaning of "is" with a straight face. He might have even made himself believe it. This, after all, is a man who takes moral instruction from George Costanza.
But normal people can't deny the truth staring them in the face without feeling completely foolish. So instead of proclaiming Clinton's innocence, they insisted his crimes didn't matter. "Everyone lies about sex." "The French are so much more sophisticated than we are. After all, Mitterand's mistress and wife attended his funeral together." "Ken Starr is on a witch hunt."
This attitude, when applied to the federal government, becomes even more insidious because we trample our constitution for our own personal gain. Most of the giveaways, for which we reward politicians, are simply outside the scope of Congress' legislative authority. But we deliberately jettisoned the Constitution back in the thirties in the fear and panic of what would become known as the Great Depression.
People were suffering through an economic downturn and they decided that giving more power to an arrogant coterie of social engineers was the way out of it. Ironically, the misery of the depression had already been enhanced by short-sighted government attempts to fight it, such as the Smoot-Hawley tarriffs. But the voters shit-canned one of the greatest political documents ever produced, a work of genius by an assembly of statesmen the likes of which we are likely never to see again, for some newfangled, and frankly absurd, ideas about bureaucrats manipulating levers of economic power to control an economy as large and complex as that of the United States. Like Esau in the Bible, we sold our birthright for a bowl of stew.
We are incompetent because we fail to do the work of vetting our candidates before they are elected and holding them accountable afterwards. We take political speeches, and even advertisements and bumper stickers, at face value as if the people behind them don't have actual records and actions that can be evaluated.
And this kind of research isn't even that hard. We live in an age that the citizens of earlier days could not have dreamed of. An untold wealth of information is available right at home. In days not too long ago, in depth research of candidates and issues could only be done at a public library. And even there the information available, when measured against the worldwide sum of information, was frustratingly small. Now there is virtually no fact that cannot be researched almost instantly. But still I hear registered voters discuss candidates and issues in terms so trite and superficial it would be pure flattery to call them cliches.
So don't blame George Soros, the Koch brothers or anyone else. The architect of our present predicament is staring back at you from the mirror. As Pogo says, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
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