How to Lose Friends & Influence No One

Game-Changing the Conversation of Politics

My favorite coffee shop is my favorite because the coffee is good and nothing weird ever happens there.  Now I’m going to have to find a new one.  Yesterday morning, two of my fellow regulars who appeared to be old friends, changed the subject of their friendly conversation and went through a rather theatrical transformation. 
 

• One levitated and began croaking like a demon. 

• The other’s head began to spin and vomit pea soup.

Naturally, the topic the subject had changed to was politics.  When finally un-possessed, neither of their positions had changed an iota but they had managed to throw cold water on their normally warm relationship.  The exorcist transformation they experienced is completely typical of what happens between the closest of friends and family.  Small wonder that “never discuss politics” is so high on Miss Manners’ etiquette list. 

One of the reasons The End Run Project exists is to reframe and challenge the idea that we-the-people should be unable to calmly discuss and analyze what our elected officials and public employees are doing.  It is our civic duty is to hold public servants accountable for how they spend our money and how they wield the force of government with which we have entrusted them.  Yet it has become the nature of politics that instead of evaluating their performance we are constantly turned against one another, gnawing, stabbing and belittling each other over the latest media hysteria or meaningless, politically generated “issue”. 

• Obama misspoke when he referred to visiting “57 states” and therefore he’s a Muslim. 

• Mitt Romney’s dog took a kennel ride on the roof rack. 

Really?  That is the kind of trivial, brainless excrement that we are supposed to concern ourselves with?  At the risk of sounding paranoid, I suggest that it is in the best interest of politicians and their parties to keep us focused on such rubbish so as to distract from their very real shortcomings as legislators and administrators.

 

 

 

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

--  H. L. Mencken

 

 

The idea that we can achieve civility in our political discourse is not a pie-in-the-sky impossibility.  Future posts will describe a methodical approach that anyone with a scarecrow brain can learn and use.  The pay off will be our ability to focus clearly on our employees’ performance in Congress and the bureaus of the executive branch.  If we don’t care enough to hold them accountable, they will use our political system to further their own ends.  Here’s how we put our collective foot down:  disrupt the dialogue with an end run.

“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems.  They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two.  Whatever is number three is far behind.”

—Thomas Sowell.

 

 

Upcoming Posts: 

• The Method of Civil Discourse

• If They Can’t, We Will.  The Rise of Private Initiatives

• Meet the Cronies