There’s no shortage, I realize, of ways of detecting falsity in contemporary politicians, but I’ve come upon one that I find most helpful. The more politicians use the phrase “the American people,” I believe, the less they are to be trusted.
The phrase has been cropping up with an impressive regularity in recent months. From the Democrats we hear that “the American people” want to have an unredacted version of the Mueller report, that “the American people” need the past six (or is it 10?) years of Donald Trump’s tax returns made public, that “the American people” deserve to have former White House counsel Don McGahn, former special counsel Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr testify before Congress.
Across the aisle, the Republicans confidently inform us that “the American people” aren’t interested in any of these things, that instead “the American people” are interested in health care, the economy and immigration—the bread and butter, the really serious issues of the day.
As an American person, I have a difficult time believing that Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy have their fingers on my, so to say, American pulse. None speak for me, and I find it hard to believe they speak for the vast congeries of my confreres who go by the name of “the American people.” I feel confident that as far as this American person and most of the rest of us are concerned, the politicians in both parties could not give a flying you-know-what about what we want, need, deserve or are really interested in.
What each of our two parties is chiefly concerned about, and has been over the past two years, is putting down, degrading and humiliating the other party. Since Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election, the Democrats have been seeking a way to nullify Mr. Trump’s victory. He and the Republicans, meanwhile, have done all they can to ensure that the Democrats are never viewed as anything other than pettifogging, obstructionist, malignant—to use one of our president’s favorite words—creeps.
Politics, which Aristotle defined as the practical science for making citizens happy, just now are about little more than intramural squabbling, and appeals to “the American people” are little more than a cover, a shield, a phony justification blithely used by both parties to keep this dreary game going.