“> Mark Franke
Since I am unemployed and unemployable, I am blessed with the luxury of deciding how I spend my time. That is not necessarily a good thing as I am a soft target for church- and community-related volunteer jobs. It’s my own fault, so I won’t blame anyone else for the fact that my days are usually filled with meetings, volunteer work jobs and non-degree graduate school classes.
One obligation I have gladly undertaken is a monthly meeting with a group of like-minded thinkers who meet to discuss the significant issues of the day. By like-minded I don’t mean automatons in ideology but rather others who wish to have considered, polite and intellectual discussions without any need for winning a debate or achieving one-upmanship.
Normally our discussions are focused on a predetermined prompt, called a “provocation” in our group, which ideally will focus our discussion. We are committed to the Socratic method, one that elevates questions over answers and theoretically leads us to a conclusion.
Sometimes that works better than others. For example, last month the provocation was to use the Socratic method to develop questions to be asked of candidates for office that would commit them to a particular policy directive. It worked, sort of.
Consider these questions to be asked of candidates: What motivates you to serve in public office? How do you prioritize the needs of your constituencies over your personal opinions? What are your philosophical principles about society and government?
Now let’s flip the coin to its other side and ask a question of the voters. How can we feel confident that our officials are trustworthy? How can we hold them accountable to their campaign statements?
Do you see how these questions are jointly harnessed to the same question of qualification for office-holding in our republic?
Our presumption, perhaps better described as our conceit, is that campaign questions tend to be softballs and the answers the same. It seemed to us that every candidate answer was a pre-scripted, 20-second meaningless recitation of vapidities, devoid of any specificity or commitment to a policy position.
How do we get past that to force the candidate to actually make a position statement for which he could be held accountable? And from the voter’s perspective, how can a complex issue be distilled enough that the answer would be understandable to the average voter?
We should have chosen an easier provocation, but there it was.
As we fearlessly sought to take this on, one of our group asked an inconvenient question. Can someone of principle be a politician?
Uh …
When in doubt, look to Ronald Reagan. We are conservatives, after all.
Reagan’s advice was to have a core set of values and use them to inform all policy-based decisions. He was a principled man, one whose philosophies of life and government were finely honed over decades of public speaking. Even those who disagreed with his principles learned to respect his genuineness in applying them to the issue at hand.
Perhaps the 1980s were when we completely lost what remained of our innocence. Reagan’s “morning in America” morphed into the dusk of cynicism as we taught ourselves to mistrust all politicians and institutions. Or did we learn this mistrust from the politicians and institutions themselves, particularly a biased, unprofessional media? Whether it is the chicken or the egg, we find ourselves in a dysfunctional, dystopian society. The pressure on our republic as a government of the people, by the people and for the people is ratcheting up quickly.
Is the trend irreversible? Can we return to our perception of past Edenic innocence with mutual trust between politicians and voters?
Our monthly discussion group decided that it is possible, yet the task is daunting. For all the faults we see in our politicians, we as voters continue to reward their faulty behavior every election cycle. Until we become better informed as a citizenry, and this requires hard work on our part, we are in no position to demand more of our elected officials.
Rational ignorance rules. Too many don’t really care until they personally feel the hurt. That’s why grocery store inflation will be a key issue in the next election and the federal deficit will not, although even a superficial analysis would show the two to be interrelated.
Here is the conundrum: Why would anyone of deeply held principles run for office when there is no public forum to have a considered discussion of those principles and their reduction to specific policy actions? The more specific the candidate becomes, the more the opposition will collect points for negative advertising. Why risk it?
My group isn’t giving up on this problem. At our December gathering we will consider it from a different perspective with the objective of developing a path forward. Time will tell if we find that path.
Mark Franke, an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Send comments to [email protected].
