Hooray for Gridlock

When political decisions become difficult the system is always the easiest to blame. Like children screaming about not eating happy meals every day, politicians always turn to the system as the reason for why nothing works like they said it would and as the sole reason for why they can’t ‘fix’ things in a way that will completely absolutely work. This tactic is a close cousin to the assertion that when a political ‘fix’ doesn’t work as advertised that the reason was that it was either not implemented by the right people or in the right way.

What exactly is this nefarious ‘system’ anyway and how is it making life difficult for politicians anyway? It takes many forms, for some it’s the ‘democracy’, and for others it’s the ‘two party system’, and for others it’s the ‘intransigence’ of Republicans. This country isn’t completely a democracy in the strictest of definitions; it’s a representative republic with democratically elected representatives. The ‘two party system’ seems like a pain but any political system is a pain. There is no example of government with more than two dominant parties, such as Great Britain, where the political system is any less messy. Self government is messy and is better than dictatorships; totalitarian governments fool useful idiots into thinking that their governments aren’t messy because they control what is known. Freedom allows people to complain and when government does too much favors are always part of the deal and with a too-big government picking winners and losers the winners want to maintain their status and the losers aren’t going to be happy. Lastly, the technical definition of intransigence is the refusal to moderate a position. Blaming Republicans (or even democrats) is entirely subjective on this count. In many political decisions there is no moderate position. If a person honestly believes that their government absolutely should not be doing something it is not intransigent to refuse to accept the government doing less of something it should not be involved in. For those obsessed with the idea that everything has gray area this doesn’t make any sense but they’re wrong, there are plenty of binary decisions with no middle ground.

The system of government that our country employs was designed to be limited and resistant to change. Blaming the system is nothing more than a crutch for the impatient who don’t really do anything but assume that the government is more insightful than the citizenry. But they neglect the fact that we are a self-governed people and that the government is by, of and for the people. History has reflected the fact that freedom fosters real solutions implemented by free citizens. In that vein, two cheers for gridlock, the less government does the better.