Recently, I was listening to one of the invited guests on a popular radio show. He was talking about the current deadlock in Congress. A caller asked why the Republicans couldn’t sit down with the Democrats and work in a more bipartisan manner. The invited guest responded by saying that there is absolutely no incentive for them to do so.
Most of my blogs have been about sports. But I would like to use this comment as an illustration of how the ideas that are at the heart of TrueCompetition.Org apply far beyond the playing fields.
Our political system, from local government through national politics, relies on candidates contesting for votes, and political representatives contesting over policy proposals. It is not surprising that commentators often use sport metaphors when talking about the games of politics.
Sports, at their best, are enjoyable quests for excellence. They are opportunities to excel, to push one’s boundaries, to experience the exhilaration and excitement of the contest. But they can also degrade into battles for bragging rights. They can degenerate into wars over who wins the spoils of victory. Because these are really two quite distinct ways of approaching the contest, we refer to them as competition and decompetition.
The same insights apply to political contests. Politics can be dedicated to pursuing excellence in public service or they can degenerate into entrenched battles over narrowly defined ideologies and personal careers. Debates over policies can be honest efforts to allow the best ideas to surface or they can be manipulated sound bites designed only to placate donors and voters.
The commentator on the radio indicated that the Republicans have “no incentive to cooperate.” No incentive? What about trying to accomplish something for the American people? We have become so cynical that we don’t even recognize it when we simply assume a decompetitive view of politics. Of course, the Republicans are not the only ones who play this decompetitive version of politics. Unfortunately, the true public servant is rare on both sides of the aisle.
A disgusted public often responds to the do-nothing Congress with a “throw the bums out” attitude. But this attitude fails to recognize that the problem originates not in Congress nor in corrupt politicians (though we certainly have some). We need to look deeper. More specifically, we need to look inward. We are all part of the problem. We have all become too enamored with a cut-throat approach to contesting. We have come to believe that it is the only way to seek victory.
Throwing one group of politicians out of office, replacing them with another, will do little good. Unless there is a cultural change in how we view competition, the new ones will quickly come to look like the old ones. The problem lies less with the specific representatives, but with the people they represent. We all need to embrace our own responsibility. The gridlock in Congress reflects a natural extension of how we have come to view contesting. Unless we learn to respect opponents, unless we learn to listen with open hearts to those who differ from us, how can we expect more from those who represent us?