There is substantial agreement across constituencies that America’s political system is broken. That’s where the agreement ends; who you blame for the dysfunction will depend upon your political orientation and the source and degree of your disgust.
Wherever your finger is pointing, it is becoming increasingly clear that the toxic nature of our politics is threatening to turn off the young people who will be needed if we are ever to improve the system.
A couple of professors recently shared some troubling data in the Washington Post: high school students they had surveyed would rather do anything other than become involved in politics. They don’t want to run for office. They don’t want to be Mayors or Councilors or Governors. Serving as a Member of Congress was their dead-last occupational choice.
As the professors wrote, the fact that they do not want to run for office
“cannot be divorced from their perceptions of the political system. Eighty-five percent of our survey respondents did not think that elected officials want to help people; 79 percent did not consider politicians smart or hard-working; nearly 60 percent believed politicians are dishonest; and fewer than 30 percent said they thought candidates and elected leaders stand up for their convictions.”
There are more than 500,000 elected positions in the U.S. Given the attitudes of these young people, we can only imagine who will run to fill those positions.
As the writers concluded, it’s easy to blame young people for a lack of civic engagement, but this time, “the fault lies with a political system and political figures whose behavior has turned off an entire generation.”
This expresses in detail not only the views of young people; it also expresses the views of many senior citizens who remember “back in the day” when we had more trust in elected officials. Trust that was usually justified. Both segments of society are looking for quality; politicians are looking for quantity…and of course MONEY. What is the percentage of voters in both age brackets? I have become so fed up with all of them in office, with their back-biting, back-stabbing, finger-pointing tactics and the Talking Heads spouting personal views and few facts that I rarely bother watching MSNBC or local political news. The political situation in Indianapolis and Indiana does not lend itself to trust or believing “our lying eyes” regarding their antics. And they are antics, not action. I fully understand the views of young people regarding our so-called “leaders” but will continue to vote, hope and pray that better days are a-comin’.
With all due respect to the author we could use a few more like Andy Jacobs.
The truth of the matter is that we simply put minimal emphasis on it throughout the enter educational process. High school seniors in Luxembourg know more about the U.S. political system than do U.S high school seniors. I say thank god for Toronto’s mayor Rob Ford because his shenanigans has prompted the most attention the U.S. press has ever paid to Canadian politics. We not only do not educate our children to our own system we do an even worse job of educating them to the world political system.
People like us look at this as our lifeblood and take our involvement in the process very seriously and because of that I think it is easy for us to assume too much. That is to say we all to easily think that a person states a position after some level of pragmatic research and are loath to think that a decision would be made on a 30-second soundbite, but that is indeed most times the case.