Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted form a book titled How Courts Govern America by Richard Neely (©1981 by Richard Neely)

Government is a technical undertaking, like the building of rocketships or the organizing of railroad yards. Except possibly on the local level, the issues which attract public notice usually involve raising money (taxes), spending money (public works), foreign wars (preventing them or arguing for fighting easy ones), education, public morals, crime in the streets, and, most important of all, the economy. When times are bad, or there is a nationwide strike or disaster, interest in the economy becomes all-consuming. However, the daily toiling of countless millions of civil servants in areas such as occupational health and safety, motor vehicle regulation, or control of navigable waterways escapes public notice almost completely.

Furthermore, even with regard to high-visibility issues, significant communication between the electorate and public officials is extremely circumscribed. Most serious political communication is limited to forty-five seconds on the network evening news. In days gone by, when the only entertainment in town on a Wednesday night was to go to the country courthouse to listen to a prominent politician give a theatrical tirade against Herbert Hoover, an eloquent speaker could pack the courthouse and have five thousand people lined up to the railroad tracks listening to the booming loud speakers.The political orator of yesteryear has been replaced by a flickering image on the tube unlocking the secrets of the government universe in forty-five-second licks. Gone forever are Lincoln-Douglas type debates on courthouse steps. Newspapers take up the slack a little, but very little. Most of what one says to a local newspaper (maybe not the New York Times) gets filtered through the mind of an inexperienced twenty-three-year-old journalism school graduate. Try sometime to explain the intricacies of a program budget, which basically involves solving a grand equation composed of numerous differential functions, to a reporter whose journalism school curriculum did not include advanced algebra, to say nothing of calculus.But the electorate is as interested in the whys and wherefores of most technical, nonemotional political issues as I am in putting ships in bottles: they do not particularly care. Process and personalities, the way decisions are made and by whom, the level of perquisites, extramarital sexual relations, and, in high offices, personal gossip dominate the public mind, while interest in the substance of technical decisions is minimal. Reporters focus on what sells papers or gets a high Nielsen rating; neither newspaper nor television stations intend to lose their primary value entertainment. Since the populace at large is more than willing to delegate evaluation of the technical aspects of government to somebody else, it inevitably follows that voting is a negative exercise, not a positive one. Angry voters turn the rascals out and, in the triumph of hope over experience, let new rascals in. What voters are unable to do—because they themselves do not understand the technical questions—is tell the rascals how to do their jobs better.Serious coverage of goings-on in government is deterred by the fact that government is so technical that even career civil servants cannot explain what is happening. In 1978 I attended a seminar on federal estate and gift tax, where the Internal Revenue Service lawyers responsible for this area frankly confessed that they did not understand the Tax Reform Act of 1976.Intricate technical issues such as taxation, arms control, and nuclear power are difficult to understand for professionals, to say nothing of the most diligent layman.That anything gets done by a political body at all is to be applauded as a miracle rather than accepted as a matter of course. When we recognize that in the federal government, with its millions of employees, there are but five hundred and thirty-seven elected officials, put into office to carry out the “will” of a people who for the most part know little and care less about the technical functioning of their government, the absurdity of the notion of rapid democratic responsiveness becomes clear. The widely held tenet of democratic faith that elected officials, as popularly selected and democratically responsive is largely a myth which gives a useful legitimacy to a system. In fact, however, far from democratic control, the two most important forces in political life are indifference and its direct byproduct, inertia.