Missing In Inaction: Why An Opposition Party Matters

America would be a lot better place if it had an opposition party. That's how democracies are supposed to work, after all.

Oh. What's that you say? We already have one, called the Democratic Party? Gosh, I didn't notice. I've been watching them this last couple of decades and I long ago concluded that their job must be to assist the Republican Party in running the country into the ground. Guess I missed something, somewhere. Like maybe that whole opposition part of being the opposition party.

I have recently been engaged in the process of 'debating' politics online in a circle of email correspondents - some progressive, some regressive - that I fell into somehow. Boy, has that been an education, particularly concerning the tools employed by the Dark Side to fight their otherwise completely hopeless policy battles.

And I was reminded in the course of these rants about the real significance of an opposition party in a democracy.

There are many reasons why such parties might be important, but their most significant raison d'être is one which could be described as epistemological in nature - that is, concerned with the nature, foundations and presuppositions of 'knowledge'. In short - what we 'know', and how we come to know it.

This particular opposition party function is so crucial in part because the American public continues to be so radically uninformed and intentionally misinformed about political issues, and because the public - generally unmotivated to educate itself on these questions - is forced to depend instead on cues from sources it has previously determined to be credible and compatible. If all you know about politics is that the Democrats seem vaguely closer to your political preference set (assuming, of course, you happen to know what that is), you will be inclined to take cues from Democratic leaders and require others to jump several additional hurdles before you'll accept their arguments. Likewise, if Rush Limbaugh is your version of a credible political source, anything that comes out of the mouth of Hillary Clinton is extremely unlikely to strike you as being true. (In that particular case, Limbaugh happens to be miraculously spot-on, though for all the wrong reasons. As a matter of fact, nothing Clinton says actually should be trusted, but that's the subject of a different essay…)

Anyhow, this information-processing-by-association approach can serve as an acceptable shorthand informing political participation, and is perhaps even inevitable short of a miraculous change in the quality and levels of participation in American politics. Though not a preferred modus operandi, such a system can be functional, especially given sufficient time for better choices to be made. It must be said, for instance, that recent events have proven the wisdom of Lincoln's proverb about fooling the people. Regressives fooled almost all the people for a while, but that has ceased being the case for almost as many years now as their legerdemain was effective. Americans largely 'get' the right today (though at the deeper levels of kleptocratic motivation and scope of the tragedy they remain mostly in the dark, no doubt unable to face the magnitude of that horror). That is, most Americans think Bush and his policies are foolish and incompetent, but they don't understand how deep the problem runs, and they see regressives as fools and blowhards rather than thieves and murderers.

This is where the epistemological function of an opposition party becomes crucial. There are political landscapes - realities - that can be accepted because they are within the realm of what is considered legitimate, and there are those which are not. For many people not paying close attention to politics, much of what moves a particular discourse or policy idea from the latter category to the former is the articulation of those notions by some trusted authority source.