I finally got around to reading my dead-trees copy of James Fallows’ “How America Can Rise Again“, the cover story in the Jan/Feb. Atlantic. It’s an excellent article, which deserves to be read in its entirety — especially since the online version actually makes use of all those intertoobz goodies, like embedded video and links to the books and websites discussed in the article itself.
That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.
The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation…
Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”We are now 200-plus years past Jefferson’s wish for permanent revolution and nearly 30 past Olson’s warning, with that much more buildup of systemic plaque—and of structural distortions, too. When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.
The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.)
And to forestall anybody squawking before they click through, no, Fallow’s answer emphatically does not involve a constitutional convention.
Cat Lady
One party can’t govern, one party won’t govern, third parties are structurally untenable, and there is no citizenry – only foam fingered consumers with grievances and resentments.
We Are All Mayans Now.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
This is the way the nation ends. This is the way the U.S. ends.
Not with a revolution,
But a filibuster
(apologies to T.S. Eliot)
NobodySpecial
There is another option, as Bruce Catton wrote about in 1965 when discussing ossified politics of a hundred years earlier.
DecidedFenceSitter
I love the article because I agree with it; but his solution is “Feel goodism” – “Let’s feel good about all the things we do and muddle through.”
It would be nice, but he just spent the previous six pages noting how fucked our population balance to representation is. Where 3% of the population has veto rights over the other 97%. That means that muddling through only works if that minority can be brought on board – and fuck if it can.
Dave Fud
I have hoped that the states would lead the way by asserting states’ rights. However, to date, very little of that has been seen, and only as a crypto-teabagger protest. California used to be that source of progress from the states, but they have been upended by the negative consequences of direct democracy and an uneducated public.
It seems that no matter which way we turn on this, the kleptocrats have figured out how to win. And when only one group wins, you can pretty much guarantee that there will be some really hard times coming. Not what we have been complaining about before, but truly hard times.
liberty60
I read Fallows piece and enjoyed it tremendously.
One thing I think progressives forget is that the business world is not entirely composed of short sighted Goldman Sachs types;
During the New Deal Era of 1933 through the early 1960’s businesses learned that government could be an effective partner in creating infrastructure, churning out talented and skilled employees, providing research, and so on.
I think that case can be made again; in my field of architecture, organizations like the Urban land Institute and American Institute of Architects are enthusiastic promoters of green sustainable design. Not for its moral or poltical ramifications, but because when viewed in the long run, sustainable design is more cost effective.
One of GM’s major problems was the cost of its health plan; and they are not alone.
I think the case can be made that a single payer health care system would be a benefit to the business community, even if you factor in higher corporate income tax.
We just need to be bold enough not to cringe when somebody shouts “Taxes”.
DecidedFenceSitter
How will we get that bold? Because I thought of something when I read Dennis’ piece,
I’m 30. I’m a politically aware, occasionally active 30-year old. I believe that the premise “Government can be an aid”; but in my life I’ve [never/rarely] seen it be anything other words. No one is implementing this – and combine that with the double Santa Claus theory, and I don’t see a solution that doesn’t involve first we destroy everything.
Bad Horse's Filly
@Anne Laurie: OT. Thanks for posting the menu this weekend. I have not gotten to any of your threads in a timely fashion. So I’m late in my thanks.
liberty60
Small businesses are as much a victim of the supply side, privatization worship as anyone.
They buy health insurance for their employees, they require government infrastructure, they demand skilled educatated workers.
Small businesses are a pool of potential allies for the progressives. In my company, last year we paid more for our health insurance plan than we did for our corporate income tax. A GOP promise of a tax cut would pale beside a promise to remove our health insurance costs via single payer. The added tax of single payer would be at most a fraction of the savings.
We get depressed a lot hearing about how working class people vote against their interests, distracted by the siren song of culture wars.
Businesses are resistant to that; they do understand their interests, if someone were to make the case.
Check out Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpets, who has made his corporation embrace sustainable proactices; he is not an anti-business hippie, he is a capitalist.
Sustainability involves looking at environmental matters from a long view, examining things with regard to their total life cycle cost, not short term cost.
This thinking is the bread and butter of accountants and businessmen.
Poor schools and infrastructure is great in the short term; but will kill American business in the long term.
Oh by the way- that link came to me by way of a weekly email I get from the National Contractors Roofing Association, about as far from a tre hugging hippie organization as you can get this side of Wasilla. And yet they are embracing this thinking, Obama or no Obama.
tazistanjen
For the first time I am reading that Senators (at least Tom Udall) are talking about the problem with the filibuster and what can be done to change how it operates (as opposed to the rest of us). Even with their humongous egos, the realization may be starting to creep in that not passing anything isn’t going to be a good career move.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
There is a simple but very, very unpleasant solution to breaking the gridlock of contemporary American political life. First, the core of the problem is that our elites don’t give a shit. “I got mine, fuck you” rules at the top of the food chain. The solution is to make them care what is happening in the lower decks of the Titanic.
Unfortunately it appears that the only way to do that is to blow shit up and kill people. Kidnappings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, all targeting the folks at the top. Put IED’s on Wall St. It worked 100 years ago – the circa 1900 reforms were incentivized because anarchists were throwing bombs at rich people and killing them on a regular basis, and nobody at the top knew who was safe any more.
I don’t want to live in that kind of world, nor do I want that for my children, but seeing as how they refuse to budge in response to gentler pressures for reform, apparently our elites do want to live in that kind of world. And that is where we are going to end up if they don’t wise up.
pandera
“anchor-pod”, “spousal unit”, “dead-trees copy”. Please stop Anne. I cringe. It’s like hearing my dad say “don’t be such a turkey” thinking he’s being hip and with it. Your regular words are just fine….
Bad Horse's Filly
@pandera: Anne – I like the way you write, personally. Also.
sglover
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I think that one difference between then and now is that the wealthy, and certainly the hyper-wealthy, really don’t **need** things like police forces. Oligarchs in Russia, Brazil, Mexico have been paying for their own mercenaries for years now. On the whole they seem to be very effectively isolated from any immediate physical threat. As far as I can tell, the folks at the very top don’t need **anything** that the public sector provides, at least on a day-to-day basis.