The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

ACCORDING to the venerable Gallup Poll, over the past two years, forty percent of surveyed voters have consistently identified their political affiliation as “independent.” Roughly thirty percent said they were Republicans and a similar percentage declared themselves to be Democrats.

Are two Americans out of every five who vote really independent? We rarely hear a word from any of these millions of supposedly independent-thinking voters. Assuming that they seek the best from the two major parties in a kind of fantasy compromise, where are their voices to be heard in the deafening partisan din now rampant in Washington? It’s hard to notice them.

The guess here is that most of those forty percent of “independent” voters aren’t really independent at all. More likely, they’re undecided about how to choose between two flawed options, two flawed philosophies and two sets of often unpalatable candidates.

Let’s say you’re one of these undecided voters. How in the world do you make a choice that you are satisfied with between the two options on election day?

If you heard your parents talking at the dinner table about Republican policies, you may find you are sympathetic to traditional GOP goals and values such as a balanced federal budget; reduced government influence on peoples’ lives; lower taxes; strong military strength to deter foreign adventurism that can lead to wars; generally restrained social welfare spending; a broadly traditional approach to faith and organized religion, and a reverence for individualism.

You would not recognize today’s Republican Party. Over the course of the past fifty years, the GOP has lost its allegiance to the “sensible, practical” politics of such now-ancient figures as former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mitt Romney’s father and former Michigan governor George Romney. No one in the public discourse even mentions these two anymore. Largely forgotten with them are the politics of Republican moderation.

Why? For starters, you simply can’t get elected that way now. Look at what happened to Liz Cheney in her Wyoming primary election earlier this month. She got swamped by 113,000 votes to 49,000 in a state that has been almost a political fiefdom of her family for over fifty years. While no one paying attention would assert that Ms. Cheney is a Rockefeller-type moderate Republican, she looks positively sensible compared to the election-denier that routed her and will win easy election to the House of Representatives in November.

“People who should know better are making a hero of Liz Cheney, whose policies are largely inherited from her famous father,” one pundit wrote. “Those policies helped drive the U.S. into the ditch in Iraq, and tilted government influence so profoundly toward wealthy, shadowy elites and sinister corporations that the once-proud Republican Party now can claim only to represent white people who have come to fear the consequences of their democratic form of government and, in their resulting desperation, follow the lead of cynical plutocrats seeking only to enlarge their personal fortunes.”

Would an independent voter dispute that characterization? Maybe. But there’s some truth in it.

Are the Democrats any better? Party leaders have been boasting for weeks about Joe Biden’s collection of “landmark legislation” enacted with narrow, partisan majorities in both the Senate and the House this summer. Achievements ranging from climate change mitigation to modest gun control measures are being hailed as major advances in mankind’s pursuit of a more healthy, sustainable relationship with the earth and humankind.

It’s hard to keep track of all the government spending this current Congressional bunch has authorized, but it exceeds $10 trillion and counting. Despite Biden’s claims, most Americans think the nation’s economy is in a rut and while gas prices are starting to ebb somewhat, they’re still high. Inflation is a big concern for most voters. As the old saying goes, “It’s still the economy, stupid.”

What are the party’s bright young leaders pushing? How about Medicare for all, which is just another way to describe socialized medicine, and that is a concept that generally still makes Americans cringe. An influential Democratic senator proudly proclaims that he is a socialist, and he has accumulated a lot of political power in his party.

National insurance is called social security in the U.S. Like in The Bahamas, it’s supposed to provide a reliable government-managed pension scheme that can cushion the economic vagaries of retirement for workers. But if you ask almost any American under the age of 30, they’ll tell you they have no realistic expectation that they’ll ever collect a dime from Social Security. They all think that the system will be broke and broken by the time they are eligible for benefits. The money that is taken out of their paychecks every month goes to support their parents and even grandparents. Few say they believe anything will be left for them 40 or 50 years hence.

Many people will eventually blame this year’s lavish government spending and the rising national debt for deficiencies in basic safety net programmes like social security. But the Democrats are positively proud of all that government spending. For them, it is something to boast about. They hope it will carry them to victory in November.

The Dems don’t look too good on education either. Tethered as they continue to be to the powerful National Education Association’s public school teachers’ union, the Democrats often oppose innovation and new ideas like charter schools, even when they appear to raise standards and results in some of the poorest and least well-served of American school districts.

Most American employers well recall the last year as one of their most frustrating, and a big reason is the big federal government handouts to most Americans. Designed to help voters weather the storms of the COVID pandemic, severe recession and the shuttering or scaling-back of countless small businesses, these payments also had the effect of persuading millions of workers that when the economic climate improved, they could make more money by eschewing a return to the work force and simply sitting at home on the sofa, watching television and cashing their government cheques. Why work when the government would pay you for not doing so?

Government spending seems out of control. Schools and education policy are a mess. Real socialist ideas have entered the American political mainstream, like free community college education. It isn’t too unreasonable to anticipate that any independent voter might recoil at this cocktail of policies.

So what are the supposed forty percent of Americans supposed to do about this? What should they think?

For these millions of undecided citizens, the sad, dispiriting state of policy options and the legislative decisions of both major political parties may well lead undecided voters to either vote for candidates they personally dislike least or simply not vote at all.

We’re not seeing democracy’s finest hour in America right now.

Remembering Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev died in Moscow on Tuesday. This veteran Communist operative, 91, rose through party ranks to become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR over the course of a relentlessly upward-directed career spanning nearly 40 years. He was the last president of the USSR for six years from 1985 – 1991, and some historians have described Gorbachev as the most consequential political figure of the last half of the 20th Century.

He implemented policies in Moscow designed to restructure a Soviet economy sagging under the immense weight of a hopeless arms competition with Ronald Reagan’s defense-happy United States. He sought an openness in Russian society that permitted freedoms hardly experienced by most Soviet citizens at any point in their lives.

Gorbachev’s reward for this ambitious, courageous creativity? The USSR lost the Cold War to the U.S. It lost virtually all of its non-Russian speaking empire as over a dozen newly independent nations rose from the Soviet ruins. Russians experienced some of the benefits of a comparatively free-market economy in the 1990’s, but by the end of the decade, they found themselves back in a historically familiar position under the political yoke of a powerful autocrat.

That autocrat was, and is, Vladimir Putin. And his Ukraine war shows that the Russians, like the Americans and others, simply cannot compel themselves to apply the lessons of their own political and military past. Observing the current direction of his beloved Russia, Gorbachev could hardly have passed away peacefully.