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VIEWPOINT - Pundits, commentators, analysts, elected officials, reporters and, by extension, the rest of us consistently focus on “gaps.” There’s a wage/income gap, a cultural gap, an information gap.
There are left, right and center gaps, urban/rural gaps, gender gaps and generational gaps. There are gaps between Black, white and brown citizens, and gaps between the entire spectrum of religious creeds and practices.
For all that, there is one gaping gap which screams to be closed. Every single voter in America is completely and consistently separated from those elected to represent us. That chasm poses a threat to our Democracy far more dangerous than all the others combined.
There is overwhelming evidence that the disconnect between voters and elected representatives is massive.
While Congress and the President wage a furious – and now deadly – war on immigrants, polls consistently find that upward of 80% of Americans believe that the U.S. benefits from cultural diversity.
Anywhere from 53 to 60% believe that we are headed in the wrong direction.
While no more than 34% of us believe that we have any business unleashing troops to depose an elected official in another country, our leaders (the President and a lap-dog Congress) blithely overthrow the government of Venezuela and threaten to invade Greenland.
61% are certain that ICE’s campaign has “gone too far” at the same time that agency is incarcerating a 5-year-old and killing U.S. citizens.
The President’s approval ratings and, by inference, his daily actions and pronouncements, are consistently no higher than 40%; 60% of us do not support his machinations but Congress persistently enables him to run up our deficit, destroy our institutions and turn our system of justice into a weapon of mass destruction.
And, perhaps most shocking, a huge majority – 80% of us – favor legislative compromise. Ignoring that rational approach, the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate and the President and his cabal spit on cooperation at every single opportunity all day every day, month after month, year after year.
It is a matter of absolute fact that, with rare exceptions, there is no connection between what we want and what our leaders do.
That fact has spawned a new category of voters: independent voters who have grown ever more disgusted with a two-party system which serves only those who hold power and wield that power in a fashion entirely out of touch with what the majority of us want. That segment of voters appears to be surging in large measure because younger voters have had enough of business as usual.
Those voters have a chance to close the representation gap. If they recognize and mobilize their growing capacity to force candidates to actually listen to, and promise to act on, the will of the people, maybe, just maybe, “representative government” will no longer be an oxymoron. They may well be our last and only hope.
(David M. Hamlin writes for CityWatchLA in addition to novels and short stories. Learn more about his work at www.dmhwrites.com.)
