How Nickelback Explains Congress

It is one of the supreme political ironies of our time that an enormously unhappy electorate continues to return our representatives to office at historically high rates. Consider for a moment this extraordinary statistic - that the people who told public pollsters near election day that the country was on the wrong track by a 2-1 margin reelected more than 90% of their congressional representatives. So what gives? How is it possible for people who hate what their government does to continue returning the same government?

The emotional intensity of political issues makes it difficult to treat that question in an unbiased way. So, let's consider the analogous case of that Canadian rock band so many of us love to hate, Nickelback.

To state the obvious, Nickeback makes bad music. Their lyrics are an endless loop of drugs, meaningless sex, and borderline alcoholism that anyone who has seen Behind the Music already knows is more fun in songs than in real life. They recycle guitar riffs and song hooks more than every hair metal band put together. Many people boast that they are young at heart, but few would make Chad Kroeger's mistake in maintaining both the mentality and technical skill level of a 14 year old. Nickelback are geniunely, objectively bad at making music.

On the other side of that coin, they are also exceedingly rich. From 2000-2010 they were the 11th best selling musical act in the United States and trailed only the Beatles as foreign artists. Why, if they are most famous for making bad music, do they sell so very many records? The anwer is that they know their audience very well. The person who listens to Nickelback may be listening to same riff he's been listening to since Kurt Cobain was still alive, but thats the riff he wants to be listening to. Nickelback are rich becuse they don't pretend to make good music. They make the music they know a lot of people who don't care about the artistic novelty of their rock will buy.

That parable relates to Congress via the widely known phenomenon imaginatively called "Gerrymandering." For those unfamiliar with the term, it comes from the constitutional responsibility of state governments to draw the lines that define congressional districts after each census. Parties that control state governments regularly manipulate those lines to maximize the representation of their party in the national government, at the cost of preposterous geographical and cultural combinations. As the capacity for data analysis has increased with advances in computing technology, the ability to reliably construct "safe" districts has increased. In this way, politicians are permitted to pick their audience before the performance even begins.

This is where the analogy comes into its own. At this point, the incentive for the politician is to tell the constitutents they have chosen precisely what those constituents want to hear. What the people of any relatively small locality want to hear is likely to give rise to bad policy. How is one supposed to tell coal country that mitigating the worst effects of climate change requires them to change industries? Or an unemployed former factory worker in Ohio that her job is forfeit because more jobs are being created in Texas? Actual leadership and real risk is involved in tackling these subjects in an intellectually honest way with communities that are hurt by them.

Is it likely that a politician who has just been the beneficiary of a giftwrapped congressional district - and thereby very prestigious and rewarding employment more or less in perpetuity - will be willing to risk that gift by courting political controversy? I would suggest not. In other words, the incentive is to be like Nickelback, making creatively bankrupt music because you know a lot of people will still listen. Except in this case instead of two decades' worth of eye-roll-inducing radio hits, we get a government that refuses to even attempt solving difficult, long term problems.

Because our current situation handsomely rewards political short-sightedness, it is hardly astonishing that our leaders suffer from such an appalling lack of vision. Unfortunately, as is noted in the Book of Proverbs, where there is no vision the people perish. If we want better leaders, we need to alter the problematic aspects of how they are chosen. Certainly this process goes well beyond Gerrymandering, but I am of the opinion that it is the most significant obstacle to proper democracy in modern America, along with repressive voter ID schemes. If we are serious about changing the results we get, we need to seriously reform the process by which we get them.