Contemptible U.S. Senate Exposed by George Packer and David Broder ─ American Republic’s Looming Failure Captured in a Nutshell

© 2010 Peter Free

 

05 August 2010

 

The nation’s institutional malaise could kill our nation as a workable entity

 

Our country’s malaise is due the combination of plutocratic control of the institutions of government and the absence of a counterforce leadership that exhibits genuine intellectual and moral stature.

 

George Packer’s essay about the Senate shows us the maggot eating our nation’s core

 

Our institutions, especially the Senate, have worsened Government’s “can’t get nothin’ worth doing done” trend.

 

George Packer brilliantly exposed the Senate’s misuse (and non-use) of power in a series of savagely incisive vignettes that comprise his New Yorker article.

 

Anyone interested in avoiding an unpleasant fate for the United States should consider his essay required reading.

 

As David Broder states (below), Packer’s overview of the Senate is the best we have ever read.

 

(If the Packer essay is too long for your patience ─ read from the beginning, until you are bored, then skip to the end for his closing thoughts.  You will its point.)

 

Citation

 

George Packer, The Empty Chamber, The New Yorker (09 August 2010)

 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all

 

David Broder adds the leadership element to Packer’s insights

 

David Broder focuses on the absence of leadership as the reason the Senate gets away with its vacuous-minded, noodle-spined nonsense.

 

Packer does as good a job as I have ever read of tracing the forces that have brought the Senate to its low estate. But he does not quite pinpoint the crucial factor: the absence of leaders who embody and can inculcate the institutional pride that once was the hallmark of membership in the Senate.

The Senate was designed not as a representative, small-d democratic body, but as a deliberately minuscule assemblage, capable of taking up the most serious national challenges and dealing with them appropriately because of the perspective and insulation provided by its lengthy terms and diverse constituencies.

Its best leaders have been men who were capable, at least on occasion, of rising above partisanship or parochial interest and summoning the will to tackle overriding challenges in a way that almost shamed their colleagues out of their small-mindedness.

 

© 2010 David S. Broder, The Senate, running on empty, Washington Post (04 August 2010)

 

 

Conclusion

 

We will begin to move our country forward, only when a large number of us occasionally raise ourselves out of personal petty-brained-ness-es.

 

We can then insist that the most significant among our leaders do the same. 

 

Today, we have the “do-nothing, while pretending to do something” government we probably deserve.

 

Our leaders’ governing and moral failures reflect the constant “go nowhere as a group” myriad squirmings of the public’s always warring closed minds.

 

A military drill instructor would not tolerate this sort of mission-killing incoherence.

 

Neither should we, when our survival as a functioning republic is at stake.