The Cicada: Is Democracy Better Than Monarchy or What Kind of Choice Is This Anyway?

I am like a political cicada. My interest in all things electoral emerges periodically, then abruptly disappears. For awhile I am passionate about my views; I make predictions, learn all I can about the candidates and the issues, until I realize that political events supercede my control, while outcomes confound my understanding and frustrate my will. My interest, which arose out of some unconscious need, recedes.

This cycle of interest arousal and loss is partly biological. At times, I awake from social hibernation, I look around me with blinking eyes, am disquieted by what I sense, and feel an urgent necessity to take interest in the world; I suspect that some of this interest is manufactured out of temporary boredom with my own life and preoccupations.

However, the more immersed I become in the political spectacle, the more tedious, repetitive, and inaccessible the action and verbiage become. By comparison, my own life seems more interesting. At least it is unambiguous and I have some control over it. Of course, interest in politics might be more abiding if my presidential preferences were occasionally reflected by electoral outcomes. This never happens.

In all the elections I have seen, my favorite candidate has never even made it to nominee. It is an ignominious record of selection futility. And of course, I believe that the best candidate has never even run for president. So when elections come, I am always in the booth between the levers of two evils, agonizing which is the lesser.

This kind of participation grows tiresome . It is like trying to support one of two teams in the Super Bowl when you are indifferent to both. Fortunately, I have liked more football teams that made it to the Super Bowl, more teams that won the World Series, even more hockey teams that won the Stanley Cup (and I rarely follow hockey) than I have presidential candidates who made it to the general election. Otherwise I would have neither sports nor politics to comfort me.

Some would say my election ennui would metabolize to excitement if I became more involved. But I think this would only make it worse. It is emotional quicksand--something makes you sick, so you do more of it? This is tantamount to advising someone who likes their wine too much to switch to hard liquor--so their inebriation will be more efficient. My problem is both chronic and acute. It drives me beyond cynicism, beyond iconoclasm, all the way to apostasy. I actually begin to contemplate whether the democratic presidential election as a leadership-delivery system is so great a political improvement over monarchy.

I wonder if the primitive African tribes that made their chieftain candidates run a brutal gauntlet were not more prescient than primitive. (If the candidate survived, he won!) Will mankind in 3000 look back and determine that democracy was not all that? That is no political improvement overall, but just the desperate flailing response to a few bad monarchs? When taking all the authoritarian and democratic leaders into account, will elections prove a better modality for selecting leaders than the divine right of kings or the mandate of heaven? I can't presume to know.

What I do know is that a least with monarchy, you don't go through the motions of believing you have a real choice, that is someone you really like or trust or believe in, or that you are deciding between two disparate individuals. The king or queen are who they are--they are rich, they are pampered, they are lucky--and you accept them or ignore them. Whereas, in our system, you're always stuck with two strangers with two different faces that you have choose between, like two different faces, but always on the same coin.

This charade of choosing a president in our system is exemplified by the risible uproar over Senator McCain's senior moment about how many houses he owns. Chances are he has never even lived in all his homes. Like the rich man in Satyricon who cannot be bothered to look at financial records that are six months old, McCain has more important matters on his mind than his precise wealth. And so, for that matter, should the Democratic leaders, who are also far wealthier than the electorate. Senator Obama is a multimillionaire, who resides in a multi-million dollar home and vacationed in The Bahamas and Hawaii in the past five months. Do the Democrats expect us to vote for their candidate because he is rich, but not as rich as his opponent, and thus more sensitive to the problems of the poor and middle class in coping with the present economic conditions?

The same presumptuousness infects the Democratic Party as a whole Democrats tout themselves as being better equipped to fix the economy. But with the exception of The New Deal and the Great Society, when have the Democrats or their government model created jobs? And even when the jobs were created, were they jobs that most Americans would want, or were they the kinds of jobs that are government-made and disappear as soon as budget cuts are required?

My sense of our two-party system is that the Republicans believe in a system that works for very few people. But at least they are honest about it. The Democrats, meanwhile, pretend that they want to help and can help the many people for whom the system rarely if ever works. And then, of course, even when they are elected, they fail to redeem their promises...always blaming someone else for their failure. (We didn't get affordable federally subsidized health care in the 1990s and we haven't gotten out of Iraq since the Dems took over Congress in 2007). At least with the Republicans, you know as a voter what you are getting and where you stand. The Democrats are like smooth-talking insurance salesmen who sell you a phony policy. Or like the fraternity brother who is supposed to catch your stiff body when you fall backwards in a game of trust and then lets you fall down a flight of stairs.