Polls Show America Fed Up with Everyone in Washington

These latest numbers are a good snapshot and measurement of people’s disgust with our federal government and everyone in it. I posted recently on several polls that show Americans are at their lowest in terms of how they view their leaders, the direction of the country, and belief on whether the government is operating with the full consent of the people.

We are treading towards troubled waters when there is this much discontent. Clearly there is a divide between the elected and those who elect them. A few social and political scientists are speculating that America is in a pre-revolutionary stage. That sounds scary but what exactly does that mean? What kind of revolution, should there be one, would take place? A revolution, to me, is hard to imagine. A country as populated and wide as our own renders it incapable of any kind of revolution in the strictest use of the term. Instead, should the government lose its legitimacy; we would have isolated pockets of chaos and anarchy. Presumably, the most likely places would be in major cities where the majority depends on welfare and government assistance.

Of course, the most likely scenario is that our government will continue to struggle until reality grows heavy enough to force our leaders to make necessary reforms. Until then, our government, our economy, and our prestige will continue to suffer. But something has to give one way or another. Preferably, most Americans would like to envision a civic revolution where the people take back ownership of the country but even that scenario has its problems. There is no one direction or majority opinion on how our government should function. There are many with the main two being a socialists-welfare system, and the other being a traditional form of Republicanism.

The interpretation of our political culture is a battle between diametrically opposed systems of social order and governance. Ideology is no longer a justification for action than as a guide to action and away to separate friend from foe. Politics today centers less on conflict of interests between rivals for power than on a contest between opposing views and belief systems about alternative ways of life. Such contests allow no room for compromise, as they pit right against wrong, good against evil; diametrically opposed belief systems require victories and vanquished foes. Such an outlook virtually guarantees pure conflict: Intolerance of competing belief systems is rife, and cooperation or conciliation with ideological foes entails no virtue. Instead, our politics — just down stream from social life — views the contest in zero-term terms. One side has to win, the other side necessarily loses.

When a nation is divided between two competing ideologies, with equal discontent over the failure of each ideology dominating the other, the outcome is more likely to be a civil war as opposed to revolution.

At any rate, every scenario is unthinkable.