ASSESSING ALBANY: The Futility of Moralism

Certain kinds of analysis of recent events in Albany-- political coup, weeks of insider ‘politiking’ while shutting out democratic transparency, shuffling the deck chairs of the Albany version of the Titanic, and finally, seemingly, things returning to where they were at the beginning of the Republican coup-- are as politically useless and unproductive as the events themselves. They are moralistic and one-sided, leaving little room for possible change and hope of transformative renewal.

For example, LC Scotty over at Buffalo Pundit says in response to the Pundit’s call for abolishing the State Senate,

“The folks in the assembly are culled from the same political cesspool as the senators.”

Scotty doesn't really tell us what he understands by the 'cesspool' source he talks about. We should consider that those “political cesspools,” by the way, are our communities. What else would they be except possibly a new class of professionals serving the interests of the state and servicing the needs of mega-capital to influence government to write laws favorable to privilege and profit.

Another contrasting example of useless moralistic political ‘analysis is Robert Harding of the Albany Project who points to Pedro Espada as the fly in the ointment who

"represents everything that is wrong with our legislative process and everything that is wrong with politics and governance in New York."

Harding doesn't really explicate what exactly Espada represents politically and governmentally. Is it moral decrepitude and lack of political integrity that he points to? Possibly. But this kind of political analysis amounts to holier than thou moralism that leaves things at the status quo.

So, whereas LC Scotty doesn't really tell us what he thinks constitutes the "cesspool" from which we "cull" our elected officials, and Harding doesn't clarify how such an individual as Espada embodies our political decadence, we are left with business as usual in local/state political analysis. These two types-- let's say macro-political and micro-political -- of political analysis of the problem as originating socially from a "pool" of people or as arising in individuals themselves is a blame game that doesn't describe let alone explain what might be going on let alone how to extract ourselves from the dilemma.

LC Scotty and Harding are both right and both wrong. Their kinds of analysis are equally one-sided and equally abstract. Communities are in a cesspool-like state of decay and most individual politicians have little concern for a moral consistency that properly informs their political activity. Transparency and accountability to real community interests are just something they try to make people believe actually exists. But it doesn't. It's smoke and mirrors, illusion and sleight of hand. Practicing an ethical politics is impossible for professional legislators because their morality is no longer rooted in their identity with and loyalty to an authentic community. Nor is there any transcendent universal ethics that exists that could obligate and inform their behavior. Moreover, on the other hand, ethics committees in legislative bodies are more useless than the fox guarding the hen house.

Throwing out all of the state senators is a wasted suggestion, should we try to start all over again. The community as it is would simply recreate the same type of candidates in the Assembly.

Endlessly moralizing in condemnation of this and that individual senator is equally useless. Possibly once a politician has played the game long enough to qualify for state office, they have been sufficiently conditioned to know how to promise the people of the community everything and deliver very little besides a little pork-payoff trickling down to the Party faithful in the 'community.'

Also, the politician/candidates have more or less sold their souls and minds to the bureaucratized party duopoly, the Republicrats, who operate and think more and more like a self-interested autonomous social class. For all practical purposes they are a social class effectively no longer accountable to, for the most part, an effete, indifferent and powerless community. The party leviathan vitiates community and eviscerates the little left of the individual politician’s moral integrity.

The solution is turning back to community to reconstitute the foundational autonomy of polity as a self-sustaining entity. The community must reconstitute those things such as education whose substance has been eviscerated by state bureaucracies, both at the pseudo-federal and state levels. Education must be education for citizenship and therefore for an individuality which enables critical thought and self-understanding of what the community is and what is in its interest. Such reconstitution is also a matter of extracting from communities corporate incursion into the socialization of individuals who they turn into mindless consumers of the culture industry. Corporations have colonized community and commodified consciousness.

In short, our essentially depoliticized, disempowered and uneducated communities ARE political cesspools sending their scum to Albany. But the solution still lay in the community not in playing mental checkers and chess with the media events in Albany as another form of the culture industry’s colonization of consciousness and character. We can play imaginatively at politician all we want in trying to shuffle the chairs on the deck of the Albany Titanic, but short of re-appropriation of individual political consciousness and community sovereignty, the centralist bureaucratic regime of Albany will wax on, continuing to sell their soul/minds to the state-party mechanism, while a few aspire to even higher office in Washington, requiring of course that they compromise their loyalty and belonging to community even more egregiously than they already do.

Mega-businessmen like Golisano will continue to weasel their way into power through people like Pigeon as people like Espada will work their way up through the corruption of community and muscle their way toward careers of personal self-aggrandizement.

The Community must reconstitute a social individual who actually belongs to community. Without out that pre-condition representation is meaningless. Without a community of citizens who believe in and belong to their community how can they be represented at all? Without community we will remain aggregated macroeconomic statistics on the spreadsheets of corporate-owned state and national politicians.

An aggregated constituency artificially engineered through media manipulation and party domination of local political discourse does not make a community nor a polity of citizens who can claim democratic power. The faithful, true-believers, who consume the platitudes and procrastinating propaganda of the machine wait on and on for the professionals to change their lives. And they do not.