To Get Life Back Into Politics, Take Politics Out of Life

Usually around election time, politicians stir up a debate about people’s disenchantment with politics as manifested in low voter turnouts, a general frustration with politicians and, in its extreme form, a passive rejection of the entire political system. Politicians warn that such an attitude could, in the long run, threaten our democracy and our liberty. Since they identify its chief cause as an image problem of politics, millions of dollars are poured into financing campaigns to politicize the citizens and to lure the young into political activism.

Politicians are right to fear that people’s disenchantment with politics will threaten the nation’s political health, but instead of offering a real solution to the problem, they only administer more of the poison that caused it.

Disenchantment with politics is a typical illness of a “mixed economy”, of a society whose government massively intervenes into people’s life and the economy by establishing ever more taxes, controls and regulations—i.e. by replacing self-determination of one’s own life by “democratic co-determination”. To an increasing extent, how to best live your own life—whether it be issues of education, work or health care—is not decided by yourself alone, but by political institutions, committees and government officials, who are elected by you as well as by millions of others.

Since your vote is only one among millions, this minimizes your control over your own life, and does so increasingly the more areas of life are permeated by politics. On the other hand, what is strengthened is the government officials’—the politicians’—power since they are the ones making the decisions that determine vast areas of your life. Since not many people have the time, resources or even the wish to actively engage in the political process or become politicians themselves (and this, essentially, is the cure recommended by politicians!), they become dependent upon the will of some bureaucrat elected by their neighbors.

As with all “collective decision-making” of a mixed economy, political decisions will always involve some sort of compromising between pressure-groups—who are just another product of the mixed economy—and these compromises will leave many people greatly dissatisfied. Government officials seldom decide the way you want them to, and often they will decide against what you perceive to be your vital interests, in important fields like health care reform, economic policy or foreign and security policy.

If such experiences of your most important interests being defied repeat itself over and over, and combined with the impression that you as a single citizen cannot do much about it, there likely evolves a sense of powerlessness and frustration, as evidenced in such typical expressions as “politicians will do what they want anyways”. If you cannot, due to circumstances outside of your control, achieve your goal—to lead your life according to the judgements of your own mind—then you give up striving after it: you resign.

Disenchantment with politics is a form of resignation with the mixed economy’s political system. Those who do not have the political pull in the pressure group game of the mixed economy, those are the ones who likely will become disenchanted with politics and dismissive of the political system. Those are the ones looking out for an alternative promising to remedy their sense of powerlessness, be it a new and rational philosophy giving them guidance how to win back their political and personal self-determination—or a Fuehrer pledging to “clean up the political pigpen”.

The problem’s chief cause is not the bad image of politics—which actually is just another symptom, a corollary of a deeper cause: The chief cause of people’s disenchantment with politics is the increasing politicization of vast areas of their life, which is so characteristic to and inherent in the system of the mixed economy. This politicization—the shifting of decision-making powers pertaining to all important issues of our lives from private citizens to political bodies, including the whole ensuing pressure group warfare—massively curbs personal responsibility and independence, and thus creates a feeling of personal powerlessness—of permanent social crisis—that fosters political discontent and disorientation.

What do politicians offer as a solution? Expensive image campaigns aimed at fostering public support and political participation, as well as recruiting the young for the further politicization of life and society. These measures will not solve, but only aggravate the problem.

The solution is not more politics, not more collective decision-making, but a drastic de-politicization of society—a retreat of politics from our daily lives.

Nota Bene. I wrote this paper for my OAC Introduction to Writing Course, and it accordingly is the property of the OAC. I reproduce the paper here with permission. This, however, does not in any way imply an endorsement of the views expressed in the above paper by the OAC or the Ayn Rand Institute.