Alternative Title: Your Political Party Will Not Solve The Issue That Wins Them Your Vote

I have become very disenchanted with national politics in the United States in the last decade. If you know me, that is no new revelation. Specifically, the last presidential election cycle and surrounding melodrama has forced me to reevaluate my relationship to our political parties. I know I’m not alone in that.

I have never neatly fit into either major political party. I have never registered for one party or the other. Each election, I try to take the issues in question and evaluate the candidates individually. It’s more work than just picking a party and supporting their candidate, but I have never been comfortable going “all in.”

That said, I have overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) supported Republicans in most national elections, and for what for me are moral and theological reasons. Generally, I have taken on conservative principles because I believe better account for human sin (because they count on it) and prevent the worst cultural evils. I want very much to believe that a utopia is possible, but I have seen too much corruption to trust people (especially politicians or capitalists) to do the right thing. The issue at the top of the list for me has been abortion. I know it is a sensitive subject, but I am persuaded that abortion (however understandable) is a moral evil, and I have given it high importance in my prioritization on the issues which matter to me. Given my passion for that particular issue, perhaps it is not surprising for you to hear how I have often ended up voting.

About 5 years ago, I began to have some misgivings about my voting for Republicans because of their platform about abortion, when I began to notice that the issue was never finally addressed at the Congressional level in any serious way. (That is not to say individuals didn’t suggest things, but rather that the results of these efforts rarely leads to passed legislation of substance.) What’s more, I realized that the national discussion about large and prevalent cultural and social issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) seemed to neatly coincide with election campaigns. Said differently, I noticed that the cultural discussion around these issues was loudest during political campaign seasons, and that once the election was completed, the discussion around the issues ended and we returned to the status quo. It smelled fishy.

As I started to look backwards at the cycles surrounding these big cultural dogfights and the politicization of them over the past decade and a half, I came to a startling realization: the parties have only rarely taken a serious attempt at addressing these hotly divided issues when it comes to matters of actual governance. Often, it was state legislatures that were offering the legislation which has been tested in the Supreme Court, not the US Congress. I think, given the way that law is made in the United States, this is not surprising. But in the next breath, the realization forced me to reevaluate how I vote in national elections.

Here is what I finally realized: in the current cultural climate, there is almost no motivation for either of the major parties to actually solve any of the major problems for which people so often go to the ballot box. And the reason they are demotivated to solve them is precisely because they bring people to the ballot box.

If you are a politician, and your interest is in retaining your own seat or power or winning your next election, and you know that you can summon an issue, election after election, which will motivate a significant number of people to vote for you, regardless of your other positions, why on earth would you solve it? You may need it in an upcoming election to ring Pavlov’s proverbial bell to make your preferred electors come out and drool vote for you.

There it is, in short: your favorite politician, or the political party you support, has a vested interest in NOT addressing the issues that make you go to the polls and vote for them. If a state legislature in one state does a thing which ends up provoking national change, the party takes the victory regardless. Why would the national politicians make any attempt to solve the problem, when there is a lucrative career in not solving it?

That said, most of the issues which are currently dividing Americans have a real solution that no one wants. The solution is unwanted because it would require people to compromise once their biggest ideological issue was addressed. People would have to stop arguing big ideological points and actually address detailed conversations about the specifics of policies. The culture war, now fought through politics, would be significantly demilitarized. And all it would take is a populace that demands their core issues be addressed to stop the war. But who wants that? Even if we did want that, would we be prepared to do it? Are we prepared to have substantive conversation in this era in which discourse is dead?

I have suggestions about a few of these Solutions No One Wants (SNOWs), and I will be suggesting them in this blog interspersed with other things I have in line to write. If you see an entry with SNOW in the title somewhere, and you don’t want to hear anything political from me, I suggest you skip it.

For now, if you’ve made it this far, if you want to actually affect change, the rules remain the same: engage real people, and don’t put your faith in a politician you’ve never met. If you want to handle things politically, get involved locally—the policies made there are the ones more likely to affect your daily life.

Christian friends reading this: it’s time to rethink why you vote as you do. If you’re voting to change the world so that it will match your theological convictions, it’s time to go back to the drawing board–you’re being used by your favorite politicians. There is good news for us, though: our faith was never (or should never have been) in a politician! Just stop staffing out the work of cultural change to a politician!