Dealing with the "Fix"

-- By HelenMayer - 27 Feb 2009

As a casual observer of politics, I am always fascinated by the idea of the “fix.” The cycle, call it a play even, goes something like this: an issue arouses the public conscience and a popular call for action results. After Congress passes legislation addressing it, commentators spend a week reviewing each player’s performance and wrapping up the story on the Sunday shows. The issue then slips off the front pages while politicians take a curtain call. Everyone considers the problem “fixed” until a blue ribbon commission of experts publishes a report reminding us that, in fact, the problem still exists. Then comes the “reform effort,” more legislation to quell the resulting popular outcry, more curtain calls, and so the play continues. We see this phenomenon all the time. We “fixed” the Nation at Risk with No Child Left Behind legislation and now are schools are accountable. We “fixed” the problems of our country’s working poor by raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. We “fixed” children’s health care by extending SCHIP and now millions more have access. I think this tendency has a simple, but potentially intractable source. Political action follows this pattern for the same reason that the ultimate decision of guilt or innocence is left to twelve people locked in a blackbox, and for the same reason that people turn to religion to assuage their fear of death – to provide a comforting resolution to problems people feel otherwise powerless to cope with.

The traditional explanations for society’s response to major problems are often structural. We are told that these things take time to work, that it will take years to measure their full effect – if it is possible at all. Until then there is no sense in Monday morning quarterbacking. But I for one have heard enough talking heads debate how much is left in the TARP fund or whether capital projects are really “shovel-ready” to wonder if we as a public are even interested in the answers. Others blame the media in general with its penchant for flash over substance. The only way the networks can even approach profitability is to be the first on the scene of the next big crisis – no time to cover yesterday’s news, let alone its after effects! But I would argue these explanations are little more than symptoms of this same human tendency to convince ourselves that the problem solved whenever possible.

We are familiar with the players in this drama of politics, and their actions belie their underlying motivations. In the opening act, a problem hits the front pages - today it might be the economic collapse or violence on the U.S.-Mexico border. Ordinary people play their part as outraged citizens clamoring for resolution to these problems because it seems too difficult to deal with personally, just as it seems too difficult to address the problem of the subjectivity of facts in a trial or the fear of death in the human psyche. So, Congress and the President are cast in the roles of “fixers-in-chief” with the television networks serving dual functions as microphone and narrator (ironic is it not, that in this nation that hates paying taxes and claims to hate government interference in our own lives, that our first response to the problems of others is to demand government intervention?). When these “fixers” develop a solution, we may not be able to grasp what it means for a country to spend $634 billion on health care reform, or to home in on $2 trillion in budgetary savings over the next ten years. But passing the law or developing the way forward alleviates the uncertainty we feel about these problems. Once the “fix” portion of the play reaches its conclusion, we can return to our steady state of contentedness while telling ourselves that although it was not a perfect bill, such a thing does not exist. At least we as a society “dealt” with the problem, and for pity’s sake next time we should remember not to watch how laws or sausage are made. We remain in this cognitive state until the blue ribbon commissions and “outside agitators” lead us to clamor once again for a solution (this time with lessons learned, of course) and the play begins anew.

Admittedly, this is a discouraging portrait of how our laws are written. And in focusing on the public’s role in encouraging a “fix” I have not touched on the undercurrent of competing interests that lurk just below the surface. This is not to say I do not recognize the existence of that element as well. Indeed, when all the check-writing attendees at a fundraiser with John Murtha, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations, attach business cards from Boeing, Lockheed and Northrup Grumman these players are brought into stark relief.

Instead, I focus on other parts of the play because only by understanding what actually motivates individuals will we be able to dismiss ineffective solutions. In fact, the idea that reforms could change a process which is perpetuated by the human inability to cope with uncertainty might be little more than an act of the drama itself (see ethics reform, for starters). I think a better metric for evaluation when there is a popular clamor for a fix to the latest problem is whether the proposed solution will further our values on the whole. So to take an example from class, when we expand SCHIP with a cigarette tax increase we should ask whether, knowing that this is our only chance to tackle children’s health care for several years, we prefer their health over the liberty of citizens who are smokers. Of course, if we are really good, we might even become the people who start the public outcry in the first place!

• This essay is very strong for three quarters, but it wanders a little towards the end. I think you could strengthen it by tightening structure: rewrite the first paragraph to state the thesis, the idea you are explicating, and tie that tightly to the conclusion you arrive at. If you mean to adopt the point of view stated in the present last paragraph, that the result of all trials is the consequence of uncertain exposure to subjective accounts impossible of producing certainty as to facts, you would need to ask how a much larger, fuzzier and more influenceable process such as legislation could ever produce laws tightly correlated to the intended social result. It's the very possibility that the truth about complex social occurrences can be descried that makes modern legislative process worth pursuing, as you say. So I think some relatively precise but unsparing editing is called for, and then I think you will have an excellent work to show for the effort.