As 2022 draws to a close, The Fulcrum has invited leaders of democracy reform organizations to share their hopes and plans for the coming year. This is the first in the series.
Weichlein is the CEO of FMC: The Former Members of Congress Association.
In a 2022 survey by Zety, which offers career advice and an online resume builder, over 1,000 Americans ranked “politicians” as the least respected profession when given 20 job titles to choose from. I’m guessing politicians would have come in last even if there had been 30 or 40 choices. Politicians were ranked lower than reality TV stars, social media influencers and TV reporters. Moneywise went through a similar exercise in 2019, asking Americans to rank professions based on how much they respected them. At the very bottom of a list with almost 30 choices: members of Congress.
I cannot vouch for the scientific soundness of Zety’s poll, nor do I know how participants were selected or how questions were phrased, but there’s enough corollary evidence all over the internet to suggest Zety may be on to something: Americans don’t like, trust or respect their elected representatives as a whole. Yet every two years, those of us who vote reward a candidate of our choice with one of our most precious possessions: our vote. And we all apply some sort of benchmark or analysis as we decide which candidate to vote for as our standard-bearer in Congress.
Whatever litmus test we all individually applied, the 2022 election is over and a new Congress will be sworn in on Jan. 3, 2023. The voter’s job now is to hold our elected representatives accountable over the next two years as we gear up for the 2024 election cycle. The candidate you selected is your chosen standard-bearer, and your responsibility as an engaged and educated voter is measuring their performance leading up to the next election. If they are your standard-bearer, then what are your standards?
Digging a little deeper into the Zety survey, there are clearly common themes we as a society value: integrity and strength of character, for example. Might the top five most respected professions give us some indication of what we wish we would see in our representatives, regardless of party and no matter whether a state legislator, a candidate for the White House or a member of Congress? Let’s take a look.
One of the essential characteristics that make for a successful teacher (No. 5 on the list) is preparation. Members of Congress wear many different hats on any given day, but it is through their committee work that they can have the biggest impact for the good of the country. However, committees can only be productive if the committee members feel an obligation to study and understand the subject matter, make attending their committee meetings a priority, and use hearings and expert testimony to examine a challenging question, rather than wasting everyone’s time scoring cheap shots to increase their Twitter following.
Firefighters (No.4 on the list) are asked to do what most of us could never do: run into the fire rather than away from it. When I think of the tragedy of 9/11, I also think of the extraordinary courage displayed by New York’s first responders as they raced up the stairs of the crumbling towers of the World Trade Center. Courage for politicians comes in many shapes, but at the core is the willingness to put the greater good above self-interest. Of course, being reelected is the paramount survival skill of any elected official, but there are times in every member’s professional life when they are asked to follow their conscience and make a choice that may cost them personally. That is the type of “Profile in Courage” that President John F. Kennedy highlighted in his 1956 book.
Successful farmers (No. 3 on the list) need to work as part of a team in order to survive in one of the most challenging and demanding industries. Teamwork makes or breaks farm life, because there is simply too much to do for any single individual and too many required skills for just one person to master. As one of 435 House members or one of 100 Senators, those legislators who actually want to move policy forward need to build relationships, earn the respect of colleagues, and accept that they are part of a greater whole rather than the soloist garnering all the attention.
Good scientists (No. 2 on the list) observe and analyze data and are open-minded. They let the evidence lead them to a solution rather than the other way around. Our elected representatives are our voice when it comes to finding solutions that will benefit our society as a whole. When political bias eliminates even the possibility of working together, then we are succumbing to the tyranny of the majority that so concerned our Founding Fathers. Our representative democracy is built on conflict and gridlock, so that a vigorous clash of ideas leads to common ground and compromise, but this is possible only if voters reward healthy partisanship over hyper partisanship.
There are certainly many important characteristics when it comes to your physician (No. 1 on the list), but how many outrank trustworthiness? You expect your doctor to give you straight answers and truthful information on which you can base life-altering and life-saving decisions. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, only two in 10 Americans say they trust the government in Washington and our political leaders, whereas the first time Pew conducted the same study, in 1958, that number was more than seven in 10. While the number ebbed and flowed over the decades, since 2007 the share of the public saying they can trust the government always or most of the time has not surpassed 30 percent. We have created an environment where facts are called into question based solely on the messenger’s perceived political leanings. If the truth doesn’t align with our politics, then by default it cannot be true. What we should reward and expect instead is for elected officials to say what they mean and mean what they say.
I know that the solutions to our country’s many challenges cannot be reduced to bumper stickers. I also know that there are nuances and consequences that I cannot grasp, and I need to entrust those who represent us to make decisions and cast votes that require more thought than a tweet. I place greater value on character than 100 percent adherence to any political ideology. These are the standards to which I will hold all members of the 118th Congress, regardless of party or whether I voted for them.
Are they prepared? Do they have the political courage it takes to do the right thing, even when it is unpopular with their party’s base? Do they work together with their colleagues across the aisle and across the Capitol to benefit their districts and the American people? Are they open-minded and willing to incorporate new information into their decision-making process? Can I trust them? As you evaluate your representative or senator as your standard bearer, what are your standards?
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.