Deborah Cupples’ IT IS ABOUT YOU: How the Government Works and How to Help Fix It begins by differentiating US government from many other governments preceding it. Previous governments, particularly the despotic ones from feudal times, rested on a proposition referred to as the Rule of Men, a system whereby a subject’s life was at the whims and mercy of duke or a king. In contrast, the US government developed as an antidote to the capricious dilemmas posed by Rule of Men, establishing in its place the Rule of Law. While the book isn’t really a sophisticated political science treatise per se, it builds upon this fundamental underpinning of American government, plotting in deliberate steps the basic schematics of our Founder’s vision for America.
According to Cupples, this vision, while it wasn’t really shortsighted, left many matters for future debate, yielding a morass of problems that are still being ironed out and which are still a source of inherent vexation.
In the next part of the book, Cupples, with less political theory, outlines the basic structure and development of the three branches of US government. Cupples minces few words in her exposition on the subject, and one can feel in her practical treatment of the subject that she genuinely wants to clarify the voting process so that voters can clearly comprehend the complex system in which they might feel mired. Interlaced with very common facts about the government are also some lesser known ones, such as the addition of numerous amendments to the Bill of Rights after 1791 and very new and pertinent questions about the extent of free speech on the internet, something which the Founding Fathers never addressed.
After outlining the basic framework of government, Cupples delves into the more difficult debate of how to improve on the system in place. She begins, not by assaulting the government and its plethora of committees and layers of bureaucracy, but by pointing out in a matter-of-fact way the failings of the media, which, she claims, is responsible for a host of ills in terms of swaying public opinion. A key component of educated voting, she argues, is examining multiple sources of media to arrive at a defensible political voice. Another part of her diagnosis of government revolves around discriminating between what a political party says and what it does. “To get a feel for what a party stands for, look at its actions, not its words,” she writes.
In saying this, Cupples seems to be implying that voter education is the key to fixing the system of government in place. But in doing so, she also steers clear from explicitly condemning voter ignorance. This is perhaps a result of the sacrosanct regard many hold relative to voting and democracy. People are often hesitant to question democracy’s effectiveness vociferously, even though the Founding Fathers once worried about the dangers of an uneducated voting population.
For her part, Cupples treads lightly around such delicate issues, as well as partisanship or excessive blame, and situates most of her focus squarely on the topic of spelling out lesser known facts about our voting apparatus. While her solution really isn’t so groundbreaking as the book’s title might suggest, she delivers a lucid and clearly realized map for understanding our government and the forces that undermine it.
~MP Gunderson for IndieReader