The Constitution established different term lengths and election cycles for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President. The president serves for four. Senators serve for six, and the terms are offset so that they don't all turn over every six years. Poor congressional representatives have to reapply for their jobs every two years. This should mean that senators and the President can work on actually governing more than campaigning to retain their positions. In a perfect world perhaps...
Partisan conflict became increasingly toxic from 1980 onward. It really went back to the Nixon years, at least in its most recent iteration, but in the 1970s and early 1980s you might actually find a Republican who supported things that were good for planetary survival and the ordinary taxpayers of this country. Think of Nixon and the EPA.
Regardless of how we got here, we're here now. At the national level, everything runs to the frantic hamster heartbeat of the House of Representatives and their two-year terms. This means that at any level a party in power has perhaps a scant year to show results that they can sell to voters who are fired up and opinionated regardless of whether they really understand any of what they've been primed to be angry about. Between the representatives competing to be the most appealing to their districts -- whatever that might mean in each case -- and the senators who happen to be up for renewal, every two years brings a bunch of people kicking the table on which delicate things have been piled.
Shakeups appeal to citizens who don't look deeply at the challenges of governing. "Throw the bums out!" That'll teach 'em! Perversely, voters will also choose to retain someone who has consistently been very bad for them and the nation as a whole -- think Mitch McConnell -- because of good advertising paid for with large amounts of shady funding.
It's hard for an ordinary working person to keep track of all of the card tricks and shell games being played to manipulate elections. The internet has made lots of information available, along with reams of expert analysis to help you out. That's only made it more confusing. The tangle makes quick, destructive solutions even more appealing than they already were. Or voters check out and don't bother to take part at all.
Election reform is going to be tricky. While corporations are not people, money is speech. This can't help giving rich people more leverage unless campaign advertising is pinched down to a strict minimum, but even then, can the government forbid a private citizen from buying an ad to express an opinion? Not only would that invite a trip to the Supreme Court, any law to close all the potential loopholes would be too long for anyone to read and too dense to enforce effectively.
Even limiting the length of campaigns is hard. If someone wants to use their free speech to talk about an issue or a political candidate they like, can they be censored if they happen to talk about it outside of an official 6-week campaign span?
See how liberty undermines itself? Because the fledgling United States had to measure itself against the yardsticks already established in European civilization, this country had to come up with a way for its luminaries to look good compared to the kind of authoritarian figures they had defied in the war of independence. A so-called meritocracy is still an -ocracy. It's still a hierarchy that creates powerful winners who can boss around the more numerous losers. Those winners can establish generational advantages on top of the social advantages conferred by being a free white male.
Civics was just another class when I was a kid. It was not presented as the most crucial aspect of being an adult. The most crucial aspect of being an adult was earning a living. Academic success could help your standing in the search for employment after you finished school, whether it was the high school diploma that was presented as the basic working class credential or various levels of college education to move you forward in white collar and technical fields. Civic involvement was elective. You might have to serve a hitch when there was still a military draft, or show up for jury duty if you had the bad luck to get that summons. It was considered a duty to vote if it wasn't too inconvenient.
Certainly you can't participate in citizen government if you're a destitute drifter. So of course you wanted to find whatever education or training suited your temperament, to secure an income. At the same time, throughout my lifetime, and the era of the Baby Boomers in general, health care was improving, and leisure options just kept expanding. Life was good, and provided plenty of distractions from the grind of routine government functions.
There have always been political observers and analysts keeping an eye on the inevitable percentage of people attracted to government. There has always been that percentage of people attracted to government, for reasons both noble and base. We counted on the observers to report, to help us guide our choices for when we could be bothered to vote. Big targets are easier to see, so reporting can be much sparser on candidates below the state level. Also, the more likely you are to actually know a person and deal with them on a daily basis, the harder they might be to confront over a political issue. Think about tensions at family dinners when people attending have conflicting political opinions. It's just as weird when maybe its a longtime customer in your bike shop, or a guy who lives down the road from you.
Because elected officials make decisions affecting hundreds, or thousands of lives, including future generations, maybe you can't agree to disagree and remain friends.
The stakes keep getting higher because each election builds on the pile of kicked cans from the ones before. Voters are angry, anxious, and confused. No wonder that a solid percentage of them is ready to hand off to a dictator. They've been trained out of thinking for themselves over generations. The hierarchy of needs goes from survival needs to sensual gratifications. Civic responsibility isn't even a category. It can get lumped in with social connection, but you can find plenty of social connections that demand less of you and feed you mental and emotional comfort.
Campaigning has already begun for 2026. Fundraising never ends. Governing takes a back seat to public image building. Elections have become a constant distraction from actually running the country.
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