Were you sick of the proliferation of negative campaign ads this election season? Do you long for the good old days when there wasn't so much negativity? What would the founding fathers think of our current system? What about how journalism has fallen into the competing agendas of Fox News and MSNBC--what happened to objective news?
Other than the increase in money that allows saturation of the electronic media, the tone of campaigning has not changed much since the beginning of our nation. As the video below demonstrates, using actual words from past campaigns, politics has always been a full-contact sport. Thomas Jefferson called John Adams "a bald, blind, crippled, toothless man who wants to start a war with France." Jefferson went on to say, "When he's not busy importing mistresses from Europe, he's trying to marry his son off to a daughter of King George."
Somehow, we have this idealized and sanitized view of what democracy is. A government by and for the people is a messy thing. People make mistakes. People are uninformed. People vote based upon emotions and perceptions. If you are a Democrat, you find the most recent election proof of that. If you are a Republican, you saw that proof two years ago.
The objective journalism of the past, is partly a myth. I have been reading a book from the 1970s, The Powers That Be, by David Halberstam. Did you know that the Los Angeles Times refused to even cover Democratic candidates in the paper? That Time Magazine's founder felt it was his obligation to champion the conservative viewpoint in news stories?
I believe that part of our dissatisfaction with our political system is that we are taught this romanticized version of the past. Whereas the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution were brilliantly conceived documents, the Founding Fathers were still flawed human beings. They did not envision democracy as being open to everyone--they assumed the upper class (white men) should make the decisions.
Rather than focusing on a past that was not as cleanly glorious as we like to think, perhaps we should focus more on appreciating that democracy is a work in progress, with steps forward and backward. The amazing thing is that it works at all.
