Our
current system seems to be doing worse and worse on this criterion
(partly due to Constitutional constraints such as checks and balances
and the separation of powers, partly for other reasons), and I think
it's creating a worsening democratic deficit in national government.
This deficit makes the system more vulnerable to people like Trump by
undermining the electorate's confidence in the ability of the political
system to address political problems.
Fundamentally,
the public needs to be to vote for something in one election; bring the
people promising it into power; and then, next time around, if they're
not happy with how things have gone, throw the government out and vote
someone else into the chair sitting under the sword of Damocles. In our
current system, we never get to hold any party responsible for failure
because every part of the system is so interdependent with all the
others. There's a smaller and smaller scope for actual policymaking, so,
in lieu of democratic government, we're stuck with a permanent election
campaign.
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Yeah the irony is that we are in 24-7 campaign mode, yet the incumbents win 95% of the time, and occasionally we get the macro cycles of "boot the bums out" every decade or so (or every recession/fiasco: Iraq led to the Dem majority, financial crisis led to Obama, and then Obama - racism/panic over what Obama represents IMO - led to the TP and GOP resurgence).
As
you said, what is the point of elections and representative gov't if
they don't reflect the wants of the voters? When candidates are
generally limited to the insider/oligarch class (incl. Trump), obviously
that doesn't represent most voters. But with Citizens United and other
structural realities of our system, how can that change? If anything, it
will continue to change for the worse as you said. Good times.
Another
problem is that voters get so fed up with the corrupt, apathetic elites
that they want reform/revolution, but then opportunists like Trump, Le
Pen, Hugo Chavez, etc. ride the angry populist wave, even though they
are in it for themselves & may even make things worse.
---
As
far as how to change it goes, I see it as a problem of institutions
more than anything else. Our institutions don't provide clear signals to
voters and this contributes to viciously perverse incentives for
politicians.
To
think of it as an analytical problem, election platforms are hypotheses
and actions in office are experiments. Our problem is that our
experiments are poorly controlled and rife with confounding factors, so
we can never disprove any of our hypotheses. (Obviously, even under the
best of circumstances, it's hard to identify intraterm success metrics
for politicians, since many effects may lag their causes by years or
even generations; but we're a very long way from this being our biggest
problem.) The effect of this phenomenon is that we have a calcified set
of hypotheses that become quasireligious totems ("lower taxes",
"universal healthcare", "school choice", "gun control", etc.) and almost
totally monopolize our political discourse, in large part because they
can't be meaningfully tested.
To
tip my hand a little bit, I'd point to the UK. Their system has a
number of weaknesses, but it hasn't suffered much from this particular
problem. Margaret Thatcher remains a deeply divisive figure in the UK,
but no one is confused about what she did. Likewise Clement Attlee; you
may love the NHS or you may hate it, but there's no question that
Attlee's government is responsible for it. I want that kind of agency
and clarity for American governments.
I'm
personally not all that concerned by the fact that politicians
disproportionately come from the upper classes. There's a long and
(mostly) honorable tradition of aristrocrats who find a constituency
outside the aristocracy, from Pericles to the Gracchi to Lafayette to
Asquith to Kerensky to FDR to Stevenson to Trump. (Kerensky and Asquith
weren't quite as aristocratic as the other names on the list, of course,
but they both came from classes whose interests were not the main
beneficiaries of their platforms.) As long as the people are the sole
source of political power, anyone who wants to wield that power will
have to cater to the interests of the electorate, even if it might go
against the interests of the class into which they were born. History
shows us that there are plenty of members of the upper classes who will
cheerfully oblige.
That
being said, I'm conceding in advance that my prediction "We won't be
taking about Donald Trump after Super Tuesday" is not going to come
true. I still wouldn't give him much better than even odds of winning
the nomination right now, but, on my estimation, his odds have been much
more improved than worsened in the last couple weeks, and the break in
the party elites' refusal to support him seems a very significant move
in his favor. Oh well.
---
I
like that insight that political platforms = hypotheses and
administrations = expts. Too bad that the folks in power always
attribute "successes" to their actions/vision and failures to the
opposition party / external events / people who hate the country. Maybe
some of it is true, but that prevents a lot of useful learning and
avoidance of repeated mistakes (e.g. Vietnam to Iraq to the inevitable
next quagmire).
Well, you must have seen the S. Tues
results. I suppose Kasich is holding on to try to win OH, but probably
that helps Trump because his supporters would likely not shift to
Trump's camp if he bowed out. A Brokered Conv. would be quite something,
and in this case I'd say it's justified. But it is a slippery slope as
Peter suggested.
At least it's not like the
smoky secret boardrooms where Cheney and Co. planned out how we would
carve up the Middle East among Exxon, Boeing, and Halliburton. In this
case, it's "how the fuck do we prevent calamity and save what shreds are
left of the GOP's rep?" Maybe this is an unfair analogy, but it's kind
of like the Turkish/Egyptian/Pakistani military stepping in (as a
venerable institution guarding the national interest) and unseating the
Muslim Brotherhood or some other leader. Call it a coup, but I guess
sometime in a coup you can actually replace a bad guy with a less bad
guy.
Lastly to change gears a bit, I am pretty
tired of Michael Hayden's PR tour re: his recent book to whitewash all
his spycraft from the last decade.
- The most misleading quote he had recently was that "if [Trump or the next president] wants to bring back waterboarding, they need to bring their own bucket." (slight paraphrase) Meaning that the CIA would refuse to participate.
- It's not because the CIA has somehow found morals and now respects int'l laws, but that they felt "betrayed" by the Obama admin. and Congressional Dems who investigated the activity and alleged that it was criminal.
- He said that the torturers acted in good faith and under the assumption that the (Bush) WH lawyers supported what they were trying to do, ostensibly to reduce threats and gather intel.
- So that makes it all good, because the intent was noble and their boss said it was OK? You have a sworn duty to not follow unlawful orders.
- He totally ignored the fact that our security apparatus has some real bad apples / sociopaths in it, and they welcome any opportunity to overstep bounds.
- But we should probably blame the politicians/voters for this. We were all freaked out after 9/11 and just gave the security svcs. carte-blanche: "just protect us and we don't care how you do it, we'll look the other way." We shouldn't be surprised that some abuses occurred.
- Hayden said that Trump's proposal to go after terrorists' families "because they deserve it" is wrong; intel is about anticipating the future, not avenging the past.
- While that is partly true in principle, there is no way that the CIA/NSA isn't deep in the vengeance and punishment game (hasn't he heard of Richard Nixon?).
At
least he's siding with Apple vs. the FBI. Anyone who thinks it's safer
for the gov't to have exclusive keys to a backdoor into our most
intimate personal devices, and nothing could possible go wrong with
that, well I have a bridge to sell you.
---
---
I think it's humorous that if Trump wasn't running this year, we'd probably be mocking Rubio/Cruz/Carson as total joke candidates. But in comparison they are the safe/sane ones. Remember the "Teflon Don" John Gotti? Trump is the new "Teflon Donald" because as Eric said, no matter what terrible stuff he says/does, his support doesn't take a hit. Truly marketing & demagoguery at its worst. This is cold-water-to-the-face for US politics, but it should also be for US civics education. We might not have gotten to this point if secondary school (and parents/role models) did a better job to stress the seriousness & implications of civic engagement & vetting leaders.
Re: the CIA, yeah I think we can always find anecdotes where torture was "effective" or "ineffective." I suppose it also depends if they nabbed the right guy, as our thugs have rounded up & rendered to Gitmo (and Syria, when we actually paid Assad to torture folks for us) dozens of innocent/irrelevant people since 2001. The advocates of harsh security measures never consider this calculus:
- Either totally don't engage in torture/violation of due process/etc. on moral/principled grounds (because legal grounds will always have gray areas and loopholes)
- Or if you are considering it, think about: + benefit of the intel gained from true positives - cost of maintaining this global covert program - cost of type I/II errors - cost of true negatives (you tortured the wrong guy but didn't believe him until the end, thereby wasting resources/time) - blowback if/when your activities are made public
- I just don't see how that formula could be positive
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