| In these days of transparency as buzzword, I don't hear a lot of argument that "transparency is a bad thing in general." What I do tend to hear is that "we just can't do X, Y, and Z if we're that transparent, and that would cripple the ABCDE agenda."
Kevin Drum crashed into this recently after some posts on education suggesting that suburban parents might not be as altruistic as progressives would like them to be. In response, another blogger wrote:
But because that transfer occured in the context of an immensely complex formula understood by less than half a dozen people and negotiated in a back room long after the official hearings had finished and the press had gone home, nobody really got upset by it, because nobody knew exactly how much money they were losing, and we were in no hurry to tell them....
Sometimes it's better to hide the true extent of people's contributions to the common good. Otherwise they'll start asking questions and from there it's a slippery slope all the way back to every family huddling alone in a cave and foraging for fruits and nuts.
Kevin's reply boils down to something pretty simple:
Lying to parents just isn't a long-term strategy.
At the national level, we've watched the Republicans indulge in this conceit for decades. Rich Republicans want to lower taxes for the rich, but the country is a lot less excited about that prospect. The answer? Well, lots of lying, actually, plus some backroom deals. Fight like hell against anyone who wants to find out what's going on, cast your opponents as elitists who just want to bore people with facts, and build a theology of executive power that makes it hard for anyone to challenge what's going on. (See Jonathan Chait's The Big Con for a good telling of this story, if you can stomach it.)
At the state level, unfortunately, both parties fell into similar attitudes in defense of their own agendas. (The minorities in both legislative houses, for some reason, tend to support much more transparency than the majorities.) Many Democrats are watching the State Senate to see if its members actually learned the value of transparency while they were in the minority, or if it was just talk, and the same goes for our Governor, who seems to have forgotten his old speeches.
A lot of the reason that voters today are angry is the growing realization that they've been lied to, on a tremendous scale. The extreme right and left have always had that sense, but there are a lot more angry centrists out there than I've ever seen. Even (maybe especially) if they aren't political junkies, they're complaining that they just aren't getting the straight story, especially about finances but also about everything else.
If you need to lie about policy, odds are good that you've gotten ahead of the voters. For better or worse, democracy isn't about getting your platform enacted - it's about responding to the will of the voters. The Republicans pushed as far as they could before the whole structure started coming down on them. I hope we can learn from their disaster, and push back against their lying ways, not just the details of what they lied about. |
