AFTER a brief hiatus, the royal family is back in Washington, D.C. Now that coronation week is over and George II's seat on his father's throne is warm, we can step back from the situation to examine the lamentable trend he demonstrates - the gradually but steadily narrowing circle of political involvement. Fewer and fewer people comprise the political establishment.
President Bush has returned family control to his father's house after its brief occupation by a liberal intruder. In all fairness, Bush isn't actually a monarch or a tyrant. Rather, I exaggerate his position via the royalty metaphor to make a point about the return of the Bush family name to the White House mailbox, and what that means for the future of American politics.
My criticisms aren't of Bush by himself; I don't think he's some sort of weirdo or tyrant because his father was president. The point isn't that he is an aberration. Rather, the point is that he's not.
This last election serves as evidence that Bush is emblematic of a growing trend in politics toward smaller circles of control and the construction of boundaries between those involved in politics and everyone else. Bush is the son of an ex-president; his opponent, Al Gore, was the son of a prominent senator by the same name. Bush's brother Jeb is the Governor of Florida - the state on which the election hinged. Both families are manifestations of this growing political elitism.
Disillusionment with politics is the main culprit for this trend. In the three decades since Watergate, the American public has developed an increasing distaste for politics and political participation. "It's so political" has become a sharp criticism. As people find themselves disinterested or even disgusted with the state of the political system, they turn away. They shut politics out of their lives and stop caring. With enough people tuning out, the pool of potential politicians, bureaucrats and activists has shrunk.
"Politics is for everyone" could be the adjunct to Government Prof. Larry J. Sabato's famous maxim, "Politics is a good thing." These two things - how people view politics and how willing they are to participate in them - go hand-in-hand. As people have viewed politics more and more negatively, they have distanced themselves from it, increasingly seeing it as a job for someone else.
Many kids of our parents' generation would respond to the common elementary-school question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with the reply, "President." Kids don't say that much anymore. Our country used to take great pride in the fact that anyone born here could grow up to be president - it was a badge of our democratic, populist ways and we were proud of it. Now, we're not so sure anyone could be president, or whether they'd want to be. The only people left in politics are those who have developed an unusual taste for it - often because they grew up around it.
This trend has adverse consequences for the future of our political system. Fewer and fewer people want to be involved in governing, and this creates a tight circle of political families, interest groups and consultants. The average American is out of the loop. Once this narrowing of political society begins, it will accelerate - the well-known slippery slope effect. As the public perceives a separation between itself and the politically conscious, it will be even less inclined to try to break into that clique. This will isolate the world of politics even more. Government isn't the Marine Corps; the slogan shouldn't be, "The Few, The Proud, Congress."
The solution to this problem isn't a terribly satisfying one - we, as citizens, must recognize the widening gap and fight it from within the system by becoming part of the establishment we distrust and dislike. If we do not, we'll continue to allow our nation to move away from government "of the people, by the people, for the people" and toward a government of, by and for only a few.
The cast of our national political drama is shrinking as a result of general disinterest and disgust with the system. Carry that trend to its logical extreme, and we may be watching a one-man show sometime in the not-to-distant future. The only questions that remain at that point are whether the rest of us will notice, and if we do notice, whether we'll care.
(Bryan Maxwell is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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