The voters are furious at “Washington,” as they demonstrated once again in the recent midterm elections. It’s almost a tautology by now: People hate “Washington” because “Washington” has come to mean everything they hate. Washington is not the Lincoln Memorial or the Smithsonian. It’s the bitterness of the debate, the ugliness of the rhetoric, the stupidity of the political ads on television.

Of course, as many have pointed out, the bitterness, ugliness, and stupidity wouldn’t exist if the voters didn’t respond to them. And the bitterness, ugliness, and stupidity seem slightly, shall we say, unhinged from any particular complaint about what the government does and does not do. Americans have turned all their substantive complaints into one big procedural complaint: Washington (or Obama, or Congress) spends too much time bickering. But it takes two not to bicker. People bicker because they disagree, and the voters themselves are the ones who decide how much bickering they want. The politicians don’t bicker for exercise. They do it to please the voters, who have offered no sign that they are willing to give in on issues that are important to them in order to reduce the bickering.

What’s more, and not to go all spiritual on you, some of the bickering is within ourselves. Not only do all of us collectively want incompatible things from the government, we each individually want incompatible things from the government (more tax cuts and more social benefits, to take the most obvious example). The politicians bicker—and run ridiculous TV commercials about how awful Washington is—so please send them back for another term. They can bicker all day about whether two plus two is three or five. Anything, rather than concede that two plus two is four.

There is a media tradition that dates back at least to the Nixon administration. Before Watergate, Nixon was gaining some traction with the notion that the media were overcovering the bad news—hippies, anti-war marches, rampant sexual intercourse outside of wedlock. And the media allegedly were undercovering or even ignoring the fact that vast numbers of Americans were happy, productive, and conjugally faithful. In a famous speech, Vice President Spiro Agnew called Nixon-administration critics, many of whom were members of the press, “nattering nabobs of negativism.” The big media, always ready for a bracing round of self-flagellation, were cowed enough to send teams of reporters out into the countryside, looking for real Americans to interview. This was when terms like “Silent Majority” (Nixon) and “Middle America” (Time magazine) began their short journeys from fresh insight to tired cliché.

Reporters are still doing it, every election season. This year, The New York Times ran the angry-voters story on election day. (Headline: TO ANGRY VOTERS, WASHINGTON COMES OUT THE BIGGEST LOSER.) Some of the ordinary people discovered by the Times in places such as a Denver suburb called Wheat Ridge had views that were far from ordinary. A couple of them spoke eloquently about not having a job in the new economy (or about actually having a job in the new economy, which didn’t sound much better). Most of the opinions, though, were bizarre, ignorant, or contradictory. Sure, this is easy for me to say: I have a job and my job is making opinions. Put me on an auto assembly line and see how long I’d last. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help thinking: Golly, are these the best opinions an American can offer?