Whenever I find myself thinking about how bad our government has deteriorated, how dysfunctional Congress is, and how little chance of change appears on the horizon, I realize that I am, almost implicitly, hoping for improvement. All of us, as citizens in this country, are prisoners of this hope. We want it to work, of course. Hope, said Jean Kerr, is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent. It is certain that if our present Left vs. Right impasse is permanent, then the Founding Father’s Grand Experiment will have failed.

Will Rogers once offered that “the more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.” It is my opinion that the GOP is the more obstructive, intransigent, and retarded of the two parties, but others may differ. The upshot is that nothing constructive or important gets done, we careen from crisis to crisis, and special interests sit upon the shoulders of the pols counting their money.

Lewis Black has his unique take on the situation: “What is the difference between a Democrat and a Republican? A Democrat blows, and a Republican sucks.”
I like P.J. O’Rourke’s take on it: “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass from your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

As a voter, I have suffered from resignation for years. My feeling about my participation in the democracy is that “participation” doesn’t mean what it used to mean. From such resignation flows apathy and many of us are guilty of this. If we think there is nothing we can do, then we do nothing. The mountebanks win. Democracy, said G.B. Shaw, “is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” With respect to what we are getting now, we are all of us downwind.