Politics is Messy, But We Need It to Solve Problems

Every so often, I jot down a list of the things that discourage me about our country. There’s the widespread disregard for our core values of tolerance and mutual respect, for instance. Or our declining national optimism. There’s wage stagnation, income inequality, a high poverty rate, failing infrastructure, inadequate health-care coverage, a dysfunctional Congress … You get the idea.

This is not really a list of failings. It’s a to-do list. How do we make progress on it? Well, I’ll tell you: politics.

American politics can be an inefficient, noisy, messy ride. But be careful before you condemn it and its practitioners, because alternatives like a chaotic anarchy or the brutal efficiency of a dictatorship are far worse.

In other words, if we’re going to attack the problems that concern us, we need politics: otherwise, our government would grind to a halt. The institutions of politics — the rule of law, elections, city councils, legislatures, and Congress — are the way we make operational a government of, by, and for the people. They are how we work together.

At its heart, politics is about searching for a remedy to a problem and building support behind that remedy. This is not to say that our system is even close to perfect. The list of things we need to fix is long.

Yet I worry that our disdain for politicians and the howling criticism aimed at our democratic institutions in recent years has so undermined confidence in the system that people have lost their trust in their fellow citizens, their elected representatives, and their institutions — in other words, in the very people, organizations, and core values that can get us out of this mess.

For all its fits and starts, its horse-trading and negotiating, and raw give-and-take, politics is also how we try to provide equal rights, civil liberties, and a fair shot at opportunity for all. Sure, we fall short of the ideal. But in a representative democracy, it’s the mechanism we possess to try to create a more perfect union.

It doesn’t do much good just to talk about the ideals or shared values of America. You also have to try to realize them on the ground, to pull them out of the complicated — and often self-contradictory — mass of popular longings and opinions and translate them into policy and law. For better or worse, politics is how we do this.         

Lee Hamilton is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, representing a district in south central Indiana.