At least part of the premise of representative democracy is that a majority is probably right about most things. They’re probably right because, hopefully, they have some passing familiarity with the most basic facts, or can learn them rather easily when it becomes necessary in a given case. We know the majority can sometimes become overwhelmed by transitory passions and we deal with that by having civil rights protections, a separation of powers, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary. All told, it works fairly well, and better than any other extant alternative. Our particular system has strengths and weaknesses compared to other representative systems, but it still works on the same basic premises as all “free” societies. However, our civil protections are clearly weakening, and out electorate may simply be too uneducated and disengaged to make our system work properly. We rightly complain constantly about how powerful, mostly corporate, interests have too much power in our system, and that’s true. If we can’t fairly ascertain the opinion of the majority, or if that opinion is shaped by a debate-landscape completely dominated by one side, then we’ve lost the premise. The majority in Congress has no relationship to the majority of the citizenry. But the other side of the coin is that we’re a nation of morons whose opinion on anything is almost by definition uninformed crap. For example, how many Americans can find Libya on a map? How many know exactly what Planned Parenthood does? Who understands how the Social Security Trust Fund works or knows who is lying about it and who is telling the truth?
It’s not like the majority used to be so much more enlightened. But there has to be a cost to the performance of a representative government when the people who are being represented are functionally operating with a sixth-grade knowledge of public policy and world affairs. That’s why a commitment to public education and civics is an essential component in an open, representative system.
They used to talk about “virtue” in revolutionary days. No one knows when they meant these days. But who can talk about civic responsibility and virtue when our debate is about birth certificates, death panels, and whether biology and plate tectonics should be taught in schools or if that violates people’s right to be uniformed jackasses and pass along their ignorance to their children?
“All told, it works fairly well, and better than any other extant alternative.”
I think I disagree with this premise. I don’t disagree with the majority of what you wrote though.
Worth noting: our “better than any other extant alternative” has been attacking working people and public education for decades.
what part are you disagreeing about? Because I was trying to be clear that our particular system probably doesn’t work best, but that the overall system of representative government works better than any known alternative.
Sorry, misunderstood. I thought you meant our particular approach to reprsentatvie democracy, not representative democracy itself.
I’m a fan of the canadian/british parliaments.
I am a fan of Australian elections.
just did a search. compulsory voting. I actually like that.
what are their campaign laws (assuming you’re not being snarky, it’s hard to tell on the internets).
I like how in england, the campaign season is very very short.
Compulsory voting is obviously the ideal of civic virtue, but I like preferential voting very much, and it would do wonders for our country.
Wiki
This is how I understand Fukuyama’s End of History.
Representative Liberal democracy is the final evolution of government. It needs tweaking and it needs maintenance–it can go backwards–but the broad ideas are the pinnacle of human governance. We cannot evolve this form of government.
My caveat to that is that post-humans will have a better system but post-humans are not in fact human.
Liberal democracy is a principle, not a system. As a principle in a society of people who are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, any system that implements it will have its own dynamics and will face scale problems. The United States Constitution implemented a system called “checks and balances” and “representative government” and “separation of church and state”…to implement the principle of liberal democracy. Now we find ourselves having to consider implementing a system of separation of corporations and state in order to preserve liberal democracy.
I think people aren’t really any dumber or smarter than they have for the bulk of the history of this country. I think what’s going on now, which makes things so dysfunctional, is that McConnel and other GOP obstructionists have essentially hacked our Madisonian institutions. The truly innovative part of our democratic institutions was the madisonian concept of competing institutions (3 branches, two houses) that would have to work together to get anything done. Nothing gets done unless there’s compromise and consensus, and while that’s frustrating, over the long haul its probably served us well since when things do get done, there’s a lot of buy-in from diverse groups of elites. McConnell understands this all quite well and by obstructing legislation and nominees, our government really can’t function that effectively. The side that decides to sit on its hands and refuse to play along with Madison’s game, has a huge amount of leverage.
Obama and his political team are still wrestling with this- they lost the house because they didn’t understand this dynamic and they may lose the Presidency if they can’t overcome it.
But its important to understand that this obstruction is probably the biggest problem in American politics today. And the result will be a constitutional crisis if Obama can’t change the dynamic.
The founders, especially Hamilton and Madison as shown in the Federalist Papers, were well aware — almost paranoiac — of the dangers of what they called ‘faction’ and we would call partisanship.
What they didn’t foresee was the rise not of an ordinary faction, to be kept in check by other factions in a struggle of balanced and opposing forces, but the rise of a revolutionary, royalist party.
A royalist party in a parliament has no real interest cooperating with the small-r republican parties in governing. Their sole purpose for being is to shut the government down, or at least neuter it, until there can be a Restoration.
Once the king comes into his own again, there will be places, and favors, and monopolies and governorships for his courtiers. Parliament is reduced to voting the King their thanks, and money for his wars.
The weirdest transformation of political terminology hasn’t been what happened to the word ‘liberal’ since John Stuart Mill — it’s what happened to the word ‘republican’.
Never really thought of it that way- very insightful Although I don’t think the modern GOP wants a monarchy so much as an aristocracy.
To add further to these reflections on the failure of our presidentialist political institutions, the conditions which created this was the extinction of moderations from the GOP party. From 1945-1980 there was buy-in from some Republicans on big picture stuff like the shape of the welfare state, civil rights, regulatory state, etc. The GOP is now controlled by the movement conservatives that NEVER signed off on any of that stuff- so we now have a dynamic of the GOP as the revolutionary party and the Dems as defenders of the status quo. Predictably, this political arrangement leads to very volatile electoral results, as we’ve now had back to back to back aligning elections.
Thank Paul Krugman. He was struck, reading Kissinger’s book on the Congress of Vienna, A World Restored: that the modern Republican party was essentially a revolutionary party, one that didn’t accept the fundamental legitimacy of the existing regime.
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From Krugman’s The Great Unraveling
We’re not too dumb to function as a citizenry. We are too distracted. A huge proportion of the population is putting its head down and working long hours to make ends meet. People are distracted by what it takes to raise kids today. And then there is the political media that specializes in distraction.
Bad information produces bad decisions. And even the MOTUs have been taken in by their own propaganda, which drives the economy and politics further into the ditch.
And representative government? The fundamental fact about government at the local, state, and federal levels is that the representatives represent the money, not the people — from rezoning decisions to tax breaks to subsidies.
For better or worse, money is the measure of value in a
democracycapitalistic society…One dollar, one vote.
I agree with the general sentiment, with one exception. I think you’re being too harsh on the American public. A segment of the American public is not only staggeringly ignorant, but willfully and proudly so. But that segment is currently dominating the agenda in our political system all out of proportion to its actual size.
If you look at public polling, solid majorities of the public want us out of Afghanistan; either supported ObamaCare or objected because it was inadequate; don’t want Social Security privatized; and on, and on. The bigger problem, it seems to me, is that there’s a massive disconnect between what a majority of the public wants and what their alleged representatives vote for; and that a vocal minority has been encouraged which is just loud enough to provide plausible cover for that disconnect. (I’m oversimplifying, of course; among other complications, people don’t always vote for reps that share their opinions, and our constitution distorts the influence of rural, often less worldly voters.)
As others have noted above, our minority of idiots has always been around, and it’s present in a lot of other countries, too, in various, usually nativist forms. What’s broken isn’t our public; it’s our representative system. And looking at that, it’s hard to get away from the role money now plays in politics, at every level. That same money, basically, goes into whipping up the vocal minority, too.
It’s all of a piece, and to blame the ignoramuses is to miss the point. Yeah, it would be nice if more of us were more educated and engaged; but a lot of us already are. The more basic problem is that it usually doesn’t matter any more.
I agree with everything said by Booman and Benen, but one of the key pieces is missing. People can’t be knowledgeable about current events if the information distributed sucks. How could the NYT have helped panic the country into invading Iraq? Why weren’t politicians challenged more by “journalists” when they told whoppers like Saddam being responsible for 9/11?
Benen quotes someone saying that too many Americans are watching mediocre TV. Well I say most TV is mediocre or worse – purposefully misleading. Don’t get me started about cable news/analysis shows.
Voters can’t get educated if the information services available to them are crap. And for people who have been fed infocrap a long time, it takes a long time to find a way out of it if your main focus are your kids, spouse, first job, healthcare for you parents, etc.
And yet the demographic groups most beguiled with rightwing idiocy are not the young, but their elders, in almost direct ratio to age.
If only. Anyone who had studied any sixth-grade civics or history book would have known the answer to most of the questions in the poll. Our ignorance is not primarily a failure of education, but the effect of generations of bombardment from media of every variety. The political dumbing down is excruciatingly obvious, but the more subtle aggrandizement of ignorance in product ads and “entertainment” programing probably works even better to promote intellectual laziness and demonize any tendency to critical thinking.
The promotion of ignorance runs through every aspect of what we’re saturated with every day from our radios, TV, and much of the print media — from the idiot wifey and her idiot hubby and children rhapsodizing over the wonder of the latest crap-in-a-box dinner, to the “self-help” bullshit from Oprah, Maury, and the various “gurus” who pollute PBS during its interminable pledge drives, to the 30-second “news analyses”, to the comedy and “action” shows that hinge on sociopath-level self obsession.
I don’t care very much if lots of people couldn’t find Libya on a map. The real disease is the overwhelming success of a decades-long campaign to deify “feeling” over thinking and consumption over consciousness. Which makes it all the more vital to celebrate and support the near-miraculous saving remnant that still pops up somehow in places like the Wisconsin legislature, the occasional public media segment, and local activism across the country.
Hard to imagine that a country that celebrated intellectual achievements could ever have elected W.
The fact we also elected Obama is a source of continued wonder to me.
Some would argue that we never did elect W…
True, but he came too close.
I agree with Tarheel. It’s not that people are dumb. It’s that they have no engagement with government beyond inchoate emotions. And the even bigger problem is that our governing institutions are driven by Big Money.
The corporate media treats it’s audience like easily frightened and enraged animals who like shiny objects and can barely imagine a country beyond america or a time before the last two weeks. And in fact the media is constantly congratulating itself for how sophisticated it is in communicating with it’s chosen audience.
I agree in full with BooMan’s theme and the title. Yes, other commenters have correctly pointed out many of the various causes to why things are the way they are, but at some point the frustration just boils over.
I mean, simple binary question: did Obama raise your taxes or lower them? Simple answer to anyone who paid even the slightest bit of attention to the news or the paycheck stub: they were lowered except for very few at the top, where it remained flat. Hell, he campaigned on a tax cut for the lower 95%, it was a prominent theme of the campaign, and it was a key element of the stimulus package — it’s not like this was done in secret. But 75% of America thinks taxes went up.
When a supermajority of the country gets a simple True-or-False question wrong — one that directly impacts their paychecks — how can we expect them to get the complex stuff right?
Yes, it is made worse by the Big Bright Green Wingnut Media Machine, but that’s not the entirety of the problem. As a society we simply are no longer able to deal with our most important problems effectively. And, I would argue, that in the middle of the 20th century we did have that ability.
Yes. As a society we are too dumb to function.
RTFO
And we need to have some serious strategizing of how to keep that from becoming a permanent condition. If it is a paycheck question and they get it wrong, something is overriding powers of observation and self-interest.
If it is a paycheck question and they get it wrong, it’s probably safe to assume that their life will rapidly become solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short…
I haven’t yet looked into it, or why it happened, but my grandmother’s federal pension actually decreased due to increases in taxes. Not sure how or why or what changed, but stuff like that could influence stuff.
Could be state taxes, or could be some other reduction in federal pensions I’m not aware of. But the federal income taxes did not go up under Obama.