Urbane Sprawl

Yom Kippur is always an introspective time for me, however lacking I may be in observance. (Most Jews go to services and fast; I generally do one or the other, figuring either way I’ve got my atonement covered.)
 
As I ruminate on my moral failings from the preceding year, I’m always fascinated by how much more inclusive of sin is my religious moral sense than is my secular moral sense: behaviors that I wouldn’t normally think of as wrongdoing still set off my religious alarm as atonement-worthy.
 
Take gossip. During the year, my borderline-unhealthy obsession with ethics and etiquette keep me pretty primed to speech and actions I find objectionable. Still, I generally don’t have any qualms about talking about people behind their backs.
 
I’m of course more comfortable gossiping about people I don’t like than people I do, and I don’t like rumor-mongering or judging people too harshly without thinking deeply about their perspectives and circumstances. But, I think trading insights with friends about other friends and acquaintances is anthropologically interesting, socially bonding (and entertaining), and important for staying apprised of our friends’ emotional states and for strategizing collectively about how to help each other out.
 
At Yom Kippur, though, palpable guilt washes over me. Judaism strictly forbids gossip — in a prohibition called lashon hara — and though my secular ethics alarms aren’t set off by gossip, I’m always sure during atonement that G-d doesn’t want me to be talking about anyone behind their backs.
 
This dissonance raises an interesting point: is it morally okay to gossip? If not, why not?
 

Lying and Our Negative View of Gossip
 
The knee-jerk reaction is to say that, though we all do it all the time, gossip’s a vice we should try to curb — something to make resolutions about come New Year’s. For support of this position, we can see religious proscriptions like lashon hara.
 
The proscription is supported by our sensible distaste for lying, often tied up in gossip that entails propagating rumors we’re not sure are true. We are commanded religiously against bearing false witness; lying ranks as a top-ten sin, showing its select place as a more blameworthy subset of gossip more generally.
 
It’s clear even from a secularly ethical standpoint that slander is blameworthy. One’s good name is an essential part of his social identity — to sully someone’s name without giving him the opportunity to defend himself could be a violation of his sovereignty, just as scarring as a physical violation of his person. Both will cause pain and impair the victim’s ability to function successfully in the world.
 
We’ve institutionalized this idea in the law by requiring that defendants in civil and criminal trials be able to face their accusers (or, as the sixth amendment reads, the right
“to be confronted with the witnesses against him”). And we see it in reality shows every day when Hannah or Sheena demand that if you have something to say about them, you should say it to their face.
 
From an evolutionary standpoint, scientists have highlighted the importance of reputation for group cooperation. From a Times article describing Harvard studies of cooperation:
 
“People who gain a reputation for not cooperating tend to be shunned or punished by other players. Cooperative players get rewarded.”
 
We’ve evolved to help each other out rather than to only fend for ourselves — cooperation is essential to building complex societies; we can achieve more collectively than we ever could each on his own. And when working collectively, we need mechanisms to demonstrate to the community that we will not screw others over for personal gain when given the opportunity. It’s dangerous to have bad things said about you behind your back.

 
The Instrumental Importance of Gossip
 
 So, slandering someone’s reputation, lying about them, or generally charging them with fault without giving them the opportunity for rebuttal is bad — atonement-worthy. But, as I said above, slander is just a small slice of gossip. When my friends and I talk about a third party, we’re not spreading lies — we’re doing analysis. What do we think of this person? Are our judgments just? Why does he behave in a certain way? How should he behave?
 
In a sense, exchanging ideas about a person is the way we determine whether our personal conceptions about him or her hold up to scrutiny. It makes me think of a wonderful Louise Glück poem called “Birthday.” The key stanza reads:

That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one’s ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

When we don’t share our ideas about people with others, when we keep our conceptions and judgments to ourselves, they are untested — we have to gossip to know whether or not to revise our opinions and to reach better ones.
 
Think of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Gossip is instrumental in Elizabeth’s learning more about why Darcy behaves with such stoic coldness, and in her discovering why Wickham’s ostensible charm is not proof of an unblemished character.
 
Think also of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Habermas argues that the public sphere — where we discuss ideas and challenge each other’s ethical and political views — is essential to the maintenance of a successful society, because the testing of one paradigm against others (through communication) is how those paradigms are refined and brought closer to the truth.
 
If I have one opinion about X based on my interactions with her, and my friends A, B, an C have other opinions about X — each, of course, influenced by A, B, and C’s own prejudices and epistemological immodesties — coming together around a coffee shop table and talking about X is how we realize that our individual opinions are not monolithic.
 
Discussing this question earlier today with my good friend Kara, I was struck by a good point she made: usually, when we’re talking about X, we’re not just talking about X — we’re talking about our relationships with X. Whether X is a friend, family member, or significant other, we are implicated in this relationship ourselves. Isn’t it unreasonable to expect us not to openly discuss relationships of which we are a part? Are we violating X’s right to privacy in doing so?

And this begs the question, is talking about X a violation of his or her right to privacy? Or some other right? Let’s say John is talking to his friend Tom about his other friend Mary. Mary overhears and becomes offended — does she have grounding to be? Yes, Mary is being discussed behind her back, but in essence John is seeking advice from Tom about his own life, and naturally his life is bound up in his relationships with people like Mary.
 

 Gossip and Etiquette
 
Let’s step back from ethics. Is it rude to talk about someone, i.e. Mary, behind her back?
 
Etiquette, like religion, is more inclusive of wrongdoing than is a humanist ethics. It’s rude to ask an acquaintance his salary, but it’s not a moral wrong. It might be rude not to send a thank-you note after receiving a gift, but it’s not grounds for sanction.
 
The function of etiquette is indeed to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable. Though we lack a moral obligation to prevent discomfort — such an obligation would be impossible to uphold and would be unfairly contingent on each person’s idiosyncrasies of sensitivity — it’s nice and socially lubricating to prevent discomfort and to show each other respect, thus not asking about salaries and sending thank-you notes.
 
Indeed, etiquette is not about what forks to use — it’s Hippocratic: First do no harm. A gentleman, as Cardinal Newman said, is one who never inflicts pain. And, as Slate’s review of Laura Claridge’s new Emily Post biography reminds us said, Emily Post “often said etiquette had much more to do with ‘instinctive considerations for the feelings of others’ than with using the right fork, and she herself was famous for putting her elbows on the table.”
  
But talking about a friend behind her back doesn’t inflict pain or hurt anyone’s feelings. Indeed, the problem with John being overheard by Mary is not the speech — it’s the being heard. Being aware of being talked about makes Mary uncomfortable. It’s not ungentlemanly to talk about someone behind her back; it’s ungentlemanly to get caught.
 
Yes, it’s unpleasant to think of your friends or girlfriends/boyfriends talking about you behind your back, but can you blame them? Do you want them to leave their own lives unexamined? The unexamined life, we know, is not worth living.
 
Still, it’s a foggy question that leaves us ambivalent. Kathy Griffin says she’s uncomfortable when the subjects of her comedy tell her to say it to their faces. “I was raised right,” she says. “I talk about people behind their back. It’s called manners.” We laugh because we think she’s copping out, but a deeper analysis suggests that maybe she was raised right after all.

The English have an unhealthy obsession with celebrity (and, in their case, royal) gossip that shames even our American fascination with the private lives of Britney, LiLo and Sam, Katie and Tom, Madonna and ARod. TMZ, Page Six, and Perez pale in comparison with the British broadsheets that carry gossip as news — Paris Hilton is no Princess Di. At the same time, though, the English have an uncommon (in our brutish American eyes) preoccupation with politeness and reserve.

There’s a fascinating book called “Watching the English” by anthropologist Kate Fox, a book that in essence is an anthropology of Englishness for the lay reader. It’s a bestseller in England and highly entertaining to American readers who like to laugh at those different from them. (And don’t we all?) I encountered it yesterday while browsing for books, and it got me thinking about the social importance of gossip.

Fox highlights how reserved the English are: at a party, for instance, it’s considered highly inappropriate to go up to a stranger and introduce yourself — names are too intimate for a first encounter. Instead, one must drift into conversation and, at the end, say, “So sorry, I didn’t catch your name?” Indeed, talking about oneself or expecting to hear details about someone else is strictly out-of-bounds.

As a result, neutral “grooming-talk,” as Fox calls it (referencing monkeys that groom each other as a form of social interaction even when grooming is unnecessary), takes center stage in English social life. It’s why conversations about the weather are so central to English interaction; weather is an easy, uncontroversial, shared topic that allows for the kinship of agreement (“Yes, it is cold!”) and thus social lubrication.

Fox points to two possible explanations for the English national obsession with gossip that relate to the phenomenon of English reserve. First, she says that English reserve makes indulging in gossip illicitly thrilling. Second, she says that private information is highly valued because it is generally so scarce.

But, skimming through Fox’s book, I was surprised that she left out the most obvious reason why celebrity and royal gossip is so important to society. It’s not because English reserve makes it illicit or highly valued — it’s because English reserve keeps almost all other possible topics of conversation off the table.

Gossip serves the same purpose as weather talk. Unlike talking about one’s personal life (off limits) or, say, politics and world affairs (too contentious), mentioning the latest tidbit or scandal from the royal family will be familiar to everyone with whom you’re interacting and will let you reach an easy agreement: “Shocking, isn’t it?” “Indeed.”

Americans, too, need common cultural currency with which to interact, so we can start a conversation by saying, “Did you hear that Lindsay and Sam had a big fight on an Acela?” But, importantly, we have fewer problems with crossing social boundaries and engaging in possibly contentious conversation, so we’re just as likely to start a conversation with, “Did you see Sarah Palin on SNL?” even though that path will definitely lead to a political, possibly controversial place.

We’re also content to talk about ourselves. The other day, a cashier asked me what I did for a living. When I said I didn’t have a job, she asked how I paid the rent. Gauche for sure, but not out of the realm of American conversation you’ll encounter every day.

Just walking the streets of New York, my mother makes half-a-dozen new friends every day. This weekend she chatted with the girl behind the counter at the cupcake shop about how business is great but exhausting because she works seven days, well two days here and classes five days a week, yep she’s studying at Manhattan Marymount, etc., then she left the shop and stated chatting with a woman on the street about her beautiful flowers, but they’re heavy, and yes it is hard to find a cab at this hour…

Bottom line: in America, our penchant for celebrity gossip is kept in check because of our readiness to talk about anything from our personal lives to politics. We demand celebrity gossip stories from our news media, but we also demand more contentious news; and our demand for all news is checked by our primary fascination: ourselves.

But no matter the culture, celebrity gossip serves as an essential social lubricant. I can meet someone from across the country who shares none of my political, religious, or social views, but we can still talk about Madonna and ARod.

Well, not really, but the similarities are uncanny…

From my September 26 post, Climate Change and The Winner’s Curse:

…the research on the rate and reach of climate change, even if it’s all done by good scientists using sound data-collection and analysis, is likely to result in findings that fall along a distribution. But while the truth of the matter is likely found in considering the distribution as a whole, the findings on the ends are going to be the ones that stick out to journal editors as the most interesting to prospective readers….

Let’s say there’s an auction of a good with an objective but unknown value (think fields for oil drilling, not a painting that each prospective buyer will value differently). Each buyer will estimate the value differently. Maybe they’ll each hire someone to professionally survey and appraise the good. The real value is probably around the mean estimate, but it’s the buyer with the high estimate who will buy the good, thinking the others suckers for passing on such a valuable purchase. But that buyer will almost certainly have over-valued the good. In an auction like this, you don’t want to be the winner.

Similarly, science journals are buying the articles that most highly estimate the costs of climate change — but they might be overpaying.

From an article in the current issue of The Economist, Publish and be wrong:

IN ECONOMIC theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.

The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.

More accurate, perhaps, than saying “The Economist Stole My idea!” would be to say “The Economist reported on scientific findings that support ideas I discussed!”

Imagine you have ten friends. They all have interesting lives, go on adventures, think deep thoughts. You love to get together with each one and hear everything they have to say.

But then the friends slowly start to change. They realize that it’s expensive and tiring to go on adventures and think deep thoughts.

Let’s say two become story filters. They’ve heard everything that the remaining eight friends are doing, and they tell you the coolest stories and deepest thoughts. You don’t have to talk to those eight people anymore — you can just talk to these two!

But then three more convert. They become commentators. There are five people left still doing stuff; the commentators look at the stories the filters are talking about and reflect on them — snidely or thoughtfully. It’s easier for them to talk about what the OTHER friends are doing than to actually DO stuff themselves.

Indeed, filtering and commentating is so easy that more and more of your friends convert. Five, four, three… now only a fraction of your friends are doing or thinking anything! But, the few things left being done and thought are getting a lot more organization and dissection.

What’ll happen? Eventually, perhaps, there won’t be ANY original adventures or thoughts.

Of course, this is what’s happening with online media.

This week saw the launch of The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s new web venture. (Which, incidentally, is already having some problems.) The site’s tag-line is “Read This Skip That,” and it’s premise is that it “curates” the web into what is “provocative and essential,” according to managing editor Edward Felsenthal.

The Beast has very little original content, instead offering a “cheat sheet,” which highlights the big stories on the web each day, and a “big fat story” section, which attempts to illuminate all angles of the day’s biggest story with links to a dozen or so links from different sources.

The Daily Beast is just more evidence that, increasingly, the A’s and B’s of the web are outweighing the C’s. Here’s what I mean.

A is for Aggregators:
Aggregators like The Daily Beast or Digg or Real Clear Politics just compile and “curate” the articles on the web and/or organize them in new ways. For instance, Digg is all user-based: readers vote articles up or down, and so the most popular articles are at the top. Real Clear Politics is all editor-based: the website presents the most interesting (in their eyes) political stories of the day. The Daily Beast does a little of both: its cheat sheet sums up the biggest stories of the day, then lets readers vote them up or down on the cheat sheet page. These are your filter friends.

B is for Blogs
Blogs are all about linking to other stories, and so they are in a way aggregators themselves. But they produce more original content. This content, though, is just reflection on, jokes about, judgments of, etc., other sources’ original reportage or rumination. Paradigmatic example: Gawker links to a New York Times article and then says something snarky about it. These are your commentator friends.

C is for Content
Original content. Like a New York Times article. Or a conventional-wisdom-challenging opinion piece on Slate. These outlets require paying reporters or writers and then editing their work. Much harder than aggregating or commentating. These are your remaining doers and thinkers.

So, the apparent trend of C’s to A’s and B’s: Good or Bad thing?

The Slate article about The Beast’s launch said, in response to Brown’s claim that the site isn’t just an aggregator:

Brown protests too much. Aggregating carries no shame: Sites that exist primarily to link to other sites embody the Web in its purest form. Linking is the soul of the Web, and the companies that recognized this early have seen enormous success. (Yahoo was a thriving Web directory before it was a corporate tragedy.) The online-news business came to prominence on the back of outbound links—you may have first visited Matt Drudge’s page for unsourced Clinton administration gossip, but if you kept coming back, it was for his irresistible tabloid eye. …

Brown is correct that all aggregators are as much about what they omit as what they include. Omission, indeed, is their primary feature—you go to the Daily Beast or BuzzFeed or HuffPo because they’ve already scanned through the news, gossip, funny videos, games, and assorted ephemera that hits the Internet each day and will presumably give you just the good stuff. In this light, “Does the world need another aggregator?” is as silly a question as “Does the world need another map?” The answer is always yes—different people need different guides for different purposes. And as the Web expands, with more people posting ever-stupider stuff each day, we’re only going to need more, and better, aggregators.

So this view of web media says that you’re not losing your doing and thinking friends to aggregation; you’re just making NEW friends who are commenting on the adventures and meditations of your original ten. And since The Daily Beast is a brand new site, it does seem that we’re just making a new friend, getting a new map, or [insert your metaphor of choice].

But this optimism ignores our sneaking suspicion that there is only a finite amount of media out there to be distributed amongst aggregation, professional blogging, and content creation — there are only so many readers, so there is only so much money with which to pay a finite amount of writers, editors, etc. Put simply: you only have ten friends.

Instead, the conversion hypothesis is supported by other recent events. Take this story from Gawker about a prominent group of Alt Weeklies switching from doing original criticism to blogging and aggregation:

Eason wants his alt-weekly writers to spend all week writing for the web—being bloggers, in essence—and then, at the end of the week, somebody pulls the best bits from the website and puts them together to create the print edition.

Problem: These cities don’t need any more bloggers. There are already too many of us! What they need is more original content. Otherwise the bloggers just end up talking about each other, which is the most boring thing in the world. Shit, how much original content is left in Atlanta, anyhow? In DC, the City Paper has already stopped running cover story features. Is it raining pigs? I believe it is.

Again: we don’t need more bloggers. Content is really much more worthwhile. Invest in it. Any asshole can blog, shit. You have reporters. Use them!

Which is it? Will we, someday soon, lose our original content altogether?

Blogging and aggregation are obviously the dominant strategy for new and existing publications. They’re cheaper, easier, and very popular. Original reportage and criticism are harder and more expensive.

But I’d argue that it’s impossible for this trend to continue to its logical conclusion. Instead, there will have to be an equilibrium. If there’s nothing to blog about and aggregate, it will become worthwhile to shift (back) to original content creation, to fill the vacuum.

Still, this equilibrium might leave us with many fewer content creators than would be optimal for how collectively informed and thoughtful we are.

But we need content: it wouldn’t make sense just to have the “AB’s of Web Media,” would it?

I was intrigued today by an item from Details Magazine‘s “Know and Tell” page — basically, their attempt at a Harper’s Index.

The item was on contributions to presidential campaigns from “U.S. troops deployed abroad as of June 30, 2008, according to campaign-finance filings released in August.”

The three amounts shown in the Details “infographic” are:

– $60,642 for Obama
– $45,512 for Ron Paul
– $10,665 for John McCain

The clear implication is that troops abroad prefer Barack Obama to John McCain — and even prefer Ron Paul to John McCain. This is supposed to be surprising given the stereotypical alignment of the GOP and our armed forces and given the supposed Republican advantages in matters of defense.

But these implications are suspect.

Most importantly, these numbers reflect contributions from the primaries, not the general race. So really all we’re seeing is that servicemen and women overseas were more engaged in the race for the Democratic nomination than in the race for the Republican nomination. And, really, who wasn’t?

Moreover, there were many more serious candidates on the Republican side — McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, Ron Paul — while the Democratic race was really a two-way contest, or three if you include John Edwards. So, it makes sense that contributions from trops for any given Republican candidate would’ve been smaller than for any given Democratic candidate.

An important number we’re missing is contributions to Hillary Clinton. If that number is near Obama’s receipts, than we know that these numbers really just reflect greater engagement with the Democratic race.

Also, let’s do a thought experiment: say these contributions were from after the nominees were determined. Would that mean that service-people actually preferred Obama to McCain?

I’d argue that the answer is no.

It’s possible of course that a majority of troops support Obama. But more giving to Obama than to McCain might only reflect a lot of giving from a still-minority segment of troops abroad who are Democrats or who support Obama.

How could this be? Maybe there are economic differences between troops who lean Democrat/Obama and troops that lean Republican/McCain, making the former group more able to contribute to the candidate of their choice.

Or, more interestingly, maybe, for Democratic service-people, contributing to their candidate is a salient way to express their Democratic identity in a milieu where the men and women around them all prefer Republicans.

In any case, that’s all thought-experiment speculation. What’s important is that these numbers don’t really tell us anything.

For the third week in a row, Saturday Night Live opened with a sketch featuring the brilliant Tina Fey as the less-than-brilliant Sarah Palin.

It’s getting to the point that we all wait breathlessly for Saturday night to see how they’ll lampoon the events of the week, so we’ll finally know exactly how to feel about them. It can be a difficult wait. Of all the emotions I felt watching the sketch — mostly mirth peppered with pangs of depression — the most palpable emotion was relief.

I was relieved to see the SNL sketch just like I was relieved to read the New York Times editorial waking us up to the reality of Palin’s poor performance — both gave voice to exactly what I was feeling about the debate, showing that not everyone was watching the win/win event the pundits saw.

Before that, I was frustrated by the media’s reflecting a reality that I wasn’t subscribing to, but I had no outlet for that unarticulated frustration until reading the Times editorial and then, come Saturday, watching SNL.

I bet a lot of other people were feeling the same frustration I was. But many more of those people probably saw the SNL sketch than read the Times editorial.

I think people are turning on SNL in record numbers not just because the sketches are funny, but because they fulfill an essential social role: The Fey-as-Palin phenomenon — now Palin wants to appear on SNL impersonating Tina Fey! — has me reminded just how powerful pop culture can be as our collective voice — in this case, establishing by Sunday morning the accepted narrative of the preceding week’s events; and, in general, reifying to society as a whole what each of us might be feeling and thinking.

Indeed, SNL was so powerful in shaping the narrative of media’s biased coverage of Obama during the primaries that Hillary Clinton actually started sounding like Amy Poehler’s parody.

I talked about this phenomenon already in one my Crimson columns, here, and identified it — with the help of Steven Pinker — as akin to the boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. When he laughs at the naked emperor, he is vocalizing the unarticulated knowledge of everyone too shocked and nervous to speak up about their leader. As Pinker writes in “The Stuff of Thought”:

Crucially, the boy was not telling a single person anything he didn’t already know. But his words still conveyed information. The information was that all the other people now knew the same thing that each one of them did.

SNL is speaking up, laughing, telling the emperor she has no clothes — and telling all of us that it’s okay to laugh along.

The vice presidential debate last night was the closest thing to event television we’ve had since the American Idol finale, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I think many people did.

Beyond the unsettling post-debate punditry that gave Governor Palin props for speaking in semi-coherent sentences — even when those sentences had little content and blatantly ducked the questions asked, questions on topics about which she was clearly uninformed and inarticulate — I was put off by the very fact of the debate’s “event” status.

We kept hearing Brian Williams and the others say that this was the most highly anticipated vice presidential debate in modern times. (Of course, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more pressing vice presidential debate in “pre-modern times,” whatever those might be.) But the vice presidency really should not be so important, and its candidates should not be so distracting. John Adams was right when he said that the vice presidency was “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

Really, the essential role of the VP is to be able to assume full responsibility for governance in a time of national crisis (after the death or assassination of a sitting president). This idea was summed up expertly by Nate Silver of The New Republic.

It’s obscene how much time and energy the media — and the electorate — spend thinking and talking about the VP. The choice of a VP nominee is the ultimate horse-race, all about personalities and electoral maps, little about policy substance, and so of course it’s exciting to talk about around the water cooler. But the media ignores the solid social science that assures us that no one votes for a candidate because of their VP; when election day comes, it really doesn’t matter whose name is below the nominee’s.

So, the vice presidency isn’t really important, it’s distracting, and — as Joe Biden said of the current administration, in which the VP seems to hold more ideological sway over the course of policy than the president himself — it can be dangerous. What do we do?

The answer is actually elegantly simple. We can add meaning and purpose to the office of the vice presidency while also restoring it to its proper place as topic of minimal concern during elections and position of minimal importance during administrations.

How? Repeal the twelfth amendment.

If you’ve forgotten, that’s the amendment that makes us vote for a president and vice president as a ticket. In 1804, that system replaced the constitution’s original design that made the second-place finisher in a presidential election the vice president of the United States.

If we repealed the amendment now (with just a 2/3 vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 states), then come January we’d have either President McCain and Vice President Obama or President Obama and Vice President McCain.

It might sound absurd when you first think about it, but after a little reflection it makes perfect sense:

Our winner-take-all electoral system is institutionally designed to breed rage. Just think: 49.99% of the electorate can vote for a presidential candidate and still see their man or woman lose — resigned to a simple Senate seat or, gasp, public life. Hell, a majority of voters can elect one candidate (Al Gore) and be left with nothing when the Supreme Court gets around to deciding the winner.

It’s no surprise that RAND reports rising partisanship or that there’s an increasing resentment that accompanies the in-party/out-party polarization: Gallup reports that only 26% of Americans have confidence in the presidency and a pathetic 13% in Congress.

With the twelfth amendment repealed, half the nation would still get to see their party represented in every administration, albeit with a role that would surely be diminished with respect to policy design and implementation. But that’s the role as it should be — the president has tons of advisors and staff; the vice president is symbolic and is only meant to be able to take over in a crisis.

Surely that’s what the founders intended: who better to be next in line to take over the presidency than the person who almost half of Americans think is ready to be president? Why allow someone plucked from obscurity, who gets no vetting by the American people, be — as they say — a heartbeat away?

Historically, the twelfth amendment is seen as having been a necessary solution to adapt the electoral system to the party politics that sprung up around 1800, surrounding the fierce race for president between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (Before that, George Washington had been elected unanimously — twice.)

I’ll spare you the full history, but suffice it so say that after Adams won and Jefferson became vice president, Jefferson’s ideological distance from Adams made him unwilling to play any role, and so he walked away from the office completely. By the time 1804 rolled around, the parties were using de facto tickets in which men clearly meant to be the vice presidents for the major candidates (again, Adams and Jefferson) had their names entered into consideration for president, with one elector on each side dropping his vote for the VP candidate to make the intended ticket finish one-two.

A historical fluke — someone forgot to drop their vote for Jefferson’s VP pick, Aaron Burr, and so the two men tied for the presidency until the House of Representatives finally anointed Jefferson — sprang Congress into motion to create the amendment which has ensured that such a snafu never happens again.

So, really, the amendment served only to reify the nascent partisanship in the country — not to address it. Rather than forcing us to throw representatives from different parties into office together and heal their wounds, we have an electoral system that gives a big stamp of approval to the fierce separation of parties that now seems unbridgeable. And, indeed, as Arthur Schlesinger so clearly articulated in 1974:

The Twelfth Amendment sent the vice presidency into prompt decline. The first two Vice Presidents had moved on directly to the presidency. After the amendment was enacted, the vice presidency became a resting place for mediocrities.

What would change for the worse if we got rid of the twelfth amendment? Not much, I think.

We wouldn’t have to think about the veepstakes, and we could focus on the men and women at the top of the ticket. We’d know that no party would suffer a total loss on election day — with their voices totally shut out from government — because the nominee from the losing party would still hold office.

Sure, there’d be pundit chatter about how McCain and/or Obama is really more suited to the vice presidency because of X, Y, or Z — but likely that wouldn’t change anyone’s mind about who they wanted the true leader of the nation to be. The VP could become a national symbol for bipartisanship, put in charge of non-partisan initiatives that they have expertise in — for example, VP Obama could rally youth to service, while VP McCain could be the face of services for veterans.

Of course, it would be a job that no one really wanted. But, that’s how it’s been for over two hundred years.