Merdecracy.

• Author: Montanye, James A.
• Position: REFLECTIONS - Corrupt legislative practice - Essay

The strategy and tactics that propelled healthcare legislation through the United States Senate unashamedly exposed the worst aspects of Congress-'s inner workings. The legislative process long has been likened to sausage making but, until recently, concerted cries of "fraud" and "corruption" rarely arose from within the beast. Then again, never before have the power of lobbies and the self-interest of individual politicians been on such ostentatious display. Ordinary Americans who can still believe that their government is "about them" simply aren't paying attention.

The public-choice program in economics identifies and quantifies the private, entrepreneurial incentives that have transformed into a rent-seeking miasma a government that once was described glibly as being "of," "by," and "for the people." But no single term aptly characterizes today's distorted form of government.

I propose a neologism that characterizes the vulgar essence of fraudulent and corrupt legislative practice--merdecracy. Merdecratic government is defined with reference to the three legs of a metaphorical "milking stool" (allusions intended). One leg is bullshit, whose precise meaning has been defined. The other two legs--horseshit and chickenshit--have lacked analytical meaning until now. The metaphor's overall reach extends far beyond this essay's limited context.

Bullshit

The moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt has ascribed analytical meaning to the term bullshit. It now characterizes the sort of assertions that lack a "connection to a concern with truth," reflect an "indifference to how things really are," and yet are not grounded "in a belief that [what is said] is not true, as a lie must be.... Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which [the individual] might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself" (2005, 33-34, 61-66). According to Richard Rorty, bullshit also can be described as being employed whenever "the idea of truth as correspondence to reality [is] gradually replaced by the idea of truth as what comes to be believed in the course of free and open encounters" (1989, 68). Bullshit is related to eumerdification, a term coined by the philosopher Daniel Dennett to characterize "impenetrable nonsense" (2006, 405 n. 12). It is only distantly related to...