Talk to Me Now – Ani DiFranco
John Dickerson posits that Congress could be improved if its members were forced to play a cooperative ‘escape room’ game, like the one he played earlier this week:
This week, I volunteered to be locked in a room with 10 other people to play an escape game. It was fascinating and great fun. In the United States Senate this week, they were also playing a locked room game. Senators were trapped in a spite-fest that kept them in rare marathon sessions, through the night. In our attempt to get out of the room, we cooperated, spoke only when necessary, and focused relentlessly on progress. In the Senate, they were doing the opposite. Perhaps they could learn something from our experience.
Okay, he’s obviously being a little facetious here, but the general point is still being made earnestly. And that goes as follows:
What if Democrats and Republicans were broken into little bipartisan teams and forced to play our game? The urgency of the task would force them to put away their speeches and focus on progress and accomplishments.
The problem here, of course, is that Democrats and Republicans both already want progress and accomplishments. That’s pretty much their sole motivation. The reason we have a problem is that they genuinely disagree with one another about what constitutes progress.
This dream that everything wrong with Washington could be solved if everyone just liked each other stems from a rather fundamental misunderstanding of effects and causes. Everyone hates each other because they want radically different things, and on any question of significant importance owe about 10,000% more to their party than they do to their colleagues. This means that there is very little value in cultivating good working relationships with the other party. Because those working relationships – the shared ability to ‘get things done’ rather than focus on securing your own objectives – is liable to get a Tea Party challenger rumbling against you in the primary.
If you want a more functional Congress you either need to make sure both houses are run by the same party (preferably with a president, too), or change our actual institutional structure. And, to be honest, even that might not get it done if that party is the current Republican Party. So your actual best bet for fixing things is to vote against the far right candidates and communicate to the ‘establishment’ Republicans that they might someday be allowed to function as a political party willing to trade goals in order to achieve positive sum results. Right now, the Republican Party is motivated almost exclusively by the overwhelming fear that anything the other party likes even a little bit is unacceptable. For them, that’s the definition of ‘progress.’ Until you can convince them that ‘progress’ means general improvements in the good for people across the spectrum of political opinion, well, no amount of hang-wringing about ‘people in Congress just can’t seem to get along’ is going to accomplish much.