OVER THE weekend I had the misfortune to find myself watching CNN on a grainy public television in a crowded Midwestern airport terminal, waiting for a connecting flight back to Charlottesville. The anchor was droning on about democracy in Iraq and no one was paying much attention. But when the topic switched to the Michael Jackson trial, an interesting thing happened. First, I heard some of the obligatory guffaws and derisive comments about sensationalism and the increasing triviality of media coverage these days. But then the room grew noticeably quieter. People stopped their conversations, put down their books and magazines and looked intently up at the screen as the dethroned King of Pop sashayed out of his limousine in a suit of silk pajamas.
I'd never seen a better illustration of the strange fact that the only thing people seem to love more than complaining about gossip-heavy news coverage is watching it. People just don't have the attention span for hard news these days. As a result, our government makes decisions every day which impact the lives of hundreds of millions of American citizens who are completely ignorant of how and why these decisions are made. There are lots of people who are distressed by this state of affairs and who run around in a panic trying to think of ways to get the American public more engaged in "the issues that matter." A more productive strategy would be to stop Congress from making its agenda so extensive and convoluted that it requires such rapt and extended public attention.
The concept of rational ignorance is not one that's familiar to many people outside of economics departments. But the idea is roughly this: Most individuals are rightly concerned primarily with their own private interests -- their families, their jobs, their hobbies, etc. But in order for these people as voters to hold their democratic government properly accountable, they need to expend a certain amount of time and energy paying attention to the political process. As Congress becomes more and more involved in passing complex legislation, however, the cost of paying attention and trying to understand this legislation begins to increase. Eventually, in some areas of policy, the cost of being informed for most voters can easily exceed the cost of being ignorant.
Think about it. If you wanted to have even the slightest chance of being truly informed on the merits of all your elected officials' decisions, you would have to spend an inordinate amount of time doing political research. And if you're like most people, this would be an enormously high cost, because perpetually doing serious political research isn't exactly your idea of a good time. You'd rather give your attention to your family and friends.
The more Congressional legislation broadens in scope and deepens in complexity, the higher the cost becomes for citizens to stay politically informed. Given the hyperactive, complicated Congressional sessions of today, this cost has grown incredibly high. This has resulted in a large degree of rational political apathy on the part of voters.
At this point, the question becomes: How do our representatives act when they aren't held fully accountable by their constituents? What do they tend to do when they vote on laws that most of us don't understand or even know about? If they voted with our best interests in mind, after all, the situation wouldn't really pose such a problem.
But the evidence suggests quite the opposite. At the end of the day, our elected officials act just like everybody else: with their own private self-interest in mind. As James Madison once said, if all men were angels, no government would be necessary in the first place. Any honest analysis reveals that our government today is overrun with harmful protectionist policies, pork-barrel legislation, outrageous subsidies and other special-interest handouts. All of these things impose dramatic costs on our economy and hamper the lives of most citizens significantly. But because Congressional business has become so obscure, the costs required for voters to prevent these things have become all but unbearable.
The bottom line of all of this is that we are faced today with a fundamental breakdown in the accountability mechanism upon which our representative democracy is assumed to rely. Everybody knows that accountability in government is of the utmost importance because it minimizes the degree to which private citizens can get screwed by selfish politicians. But politicians in the last century have made their business so expansive, complex and impenetrable it has become practically impossible and even irrational for us to hold them accountable for much of what they do. And so just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, we're left watching Jacko parading around the courthouse.
Anthony Dick's column usually appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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