Too Much of a Good Thing

Are commissions really the perfect fix? Leaders could appoint gridlocking members. Consider GOP appointments to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. I would say that some national policy referendums could also do good. We could get rid of the high-end Bush tax cuts that way.

I don't know, Mr. Orszag. In some sense we really do need less democracy. There are way, way too many levels of government that every citizen has to keep track of and elect candidates to fill. In that sense, a surfeit of democracy is a glut that paralyses the thought process of even the most earnest of our political watchers--the politicians themselves. Think about federal public comment periods, local school board meetings, and state referenda you have failed to keep up with. People mainly elect politicians to take care of these mundane things so that they can live their lives. In some sense, you should be worried about both disillusionment in government and the decrease in party registration. As people pull themselves out of established political organizations that promote education and engagement, they lose a tangible link to shaping government and any particular reason to follow its course. The more that government fails to live up to a common-sense consensus, the more disillusioned these people get.

However--and this is a big however--even a successful reformist push that limited the role of politicians in government by reducing their input and ability to logroll or cynically stop governmental legislative action would still not solve the central problem of your essay. Our goal is to allow Washington to "do the basic, necessary work of governing".

At no time has it been plainer that the "our" in the sentence is restricted to the Democratic Party and an insignificant minority of Republicans (count the number of people caucusing for Huntsman to have some idea).

At no time has it been more obvious that the Democratic Party wants to govern at the federal level to promote the common weal and is willing to do whatever the centre of American public opinion dictates.

At no time has it been more obvious that the Republican Party's overriding goal (after, say, tax cuts for the rich) is to reduce the role of the federal government and hamper whatever inalienably federal priorities you promote so earnestly. It's not even close. Abolishing the EPA, Department of Energy, Department of Education? These are the same people who say they want to shrink the government by depriving it of tax revenue to such a size that they can drown the federal government in a bathtub.

Finally, at no time has it been more obvious that if we were simply to lock Congress's doors to prevent Republicans from entering and required unanimous consent on behalf of the Democrats who remained, the Democratic Party would have internal politics aplenty that steered it to propose and legislate reasonably centrist laws. Moreover, it would dispense with the important problems you raise and do so in a much more responsible fashion--for example, passing full year appropriations instead of continuing with periodic appropriations bills. Perhaps I'm dissembling a little: it was most obvious during 2009, when the major motions in Congress centred about getting the Democratic Senate delegation to hammer an agreement on what could pass unanimously.

Note that unless you take care to eliminate the significance of Republican opposition (in favour of prolonging this economic deterioration through the 2012 elections in particular and centrist, left-leaning, or even just generally rational policies in general) you will get situations like Bowles-Simpson, when Republicans decided a bipartisan debt proposal was dead because it modestly increased tax incidence on the rich. As long as Republicans can band together to block things (like the Financial Crisis Inquiry's report) and people don't hold them accountable because so much is going on, then you haven't solved our problem but you have reinforced people's disdain for democratic participation.

And what do we need in order to take these decisions away from Congress? Congressional approval. And so we end up where we started. Congress has, historically, given up power over details routinely and handed it over to the executive or independent agencies. On domestic policy, we see this in the expansion of the administrative state. On foreign policy, we see this in open-ended war authorizations. In all cases, this was done not because, or only because, it was seen as good policy but good politics, and I don't foresee today's radical GOP agreeing to automatic unemployment expansion or a more progressive tax code or any measure that could result in independent, sensible, but, in their eyes, liberal policy decisions being dictated by a faceless, nameless, unaccountable bureaucracy. No, we're dealing with an IPAB = "death panel" sort of mindset. So, I'm afraid that these ideas, while sensible, seem dead on arrival. I've got a big wish list too.

Blah, blah, blah...

Polarization is not the problem. "Polarization" is nothing more than a pejorative description of a state of affairs wherein there are two or more parties possessed of starkly contrasting visions of the collective good. There is nothing wrong with that, per se. In fact for a society to be able to survive the coexistence of parties with starkly contrasting views is a sign of health, and the peaceful struggle between such opposing viewpoints can itself be highly fruitful.

The problem, rather, is a rule-bound, byzantine political system that requires a legislative supermajority for action coupled with a politicized judiciary protected by lifetime appointments. There's the additional problem, almost certainly not fixable, of equal representation for all states in the Senate such that a resident of Wyoming has 80 times the influence in the Senate as a resident of California and infinitely more than a resident of Washington DC who has none at all. In other words, the problem isn't too much democracy, but too little.

As I mentioned, the non-proportional representation in the Senate is not fixable, but other aspects are. For starters, we need to blow up the filibuster. It has long outlived its usefulness. In fact, the only reason the filibuster has survived this long was the historical artifact of the northern labor Democrat and southern segregationist Democrat coalition that dominated American politics for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. With such an artificial supermajority, the legislature could accomodate the filibuster and still get things done.

we need some national referendums...

We are heading for the dumpster. We can only envy Rome whose decline and fall took five centuries and included many amusing leaders and fun times at the colosseum. This silly article just shows how dire things are when someone proposes major governmental changes that can only be enacted by a legislature that can't even do regular business anymore.

So Democrats should support inflation (last week's article in TNR) and less democracy (this article). What's next, support for a one child per family policy? I think Adams may have been linking suicide with an upper case, not lower case, D.

Christie's suicide denial trumps Sherman, and he's still being touted by desperate Repubs.

What we need is not less democracy, but less democracy as described by private political clubs (parties) which have appropriated the process almost completely.

For those with short memories, recall Orszag's sage advice to Obama in his first article in the NYT after he left the Administration. That's right, he advised Obama to extend the Bush tax cuts.

What Orszag is advocating is the transfer of even more power to well born and wealthy self selected governing elites -- you know, people like him who after pricey private school and Ivy League schooling move without effort back and forth from powerful non-elected positions in government to extreme wealth in huge private sector corporations like, for example, Citigroup (whose bail out, continuation intact, and unindicted senior executives constitute a national scandal). For starters, as a credential Mr. Orszag should disclose his Citigroup salary and perks.

Yes, Mr. Orszag, democracy is messy and many of the people involved are not of the sort you would invite home for dinner. But the alternative as both a practical matter and from an ethical point of view is far worse. The notion that there is some correct social policy that every enlightened person knows to be correct is simply absurd, and the notion that an unelected few should lord it over the rest of us (even the nut jobs in the Tea Party movement) is abhorrent.

What we need are better leaders and more articulate and well organized spokesmen for the public interest willing to fight it out in the light of day. Turning things over to the bankers and bosses of big business and mammoth institutions has never been a satisfactory solution to any of our problems, and surely never will be.

"Are commissions really the perfect fix?"

Would commissions being less than perfect mean that they're useless?

There is one thing that would tamp down the polarization, even if it does not eliminate it, getting rid of plurality voting. Instituting pairwise-ranked voting would result in voters electing someone representing the median voter of the entire electorate rather than the median voter of a subset when the deciding subset is becoming ever more from the extremes.

Certainly would be useful to go around the systematic filibuster of judges nomination.

I'm with rayward - this guy has done nothing but dog his former boss and lick Republican boots. How's that Fox gig treating you Orzag?

PS. PeteBeck for President.

Ya wohl, Orszag ist richtig. And he has done much to make it come about. And he'll get lots more non-democratic results when his anti_Keynesian economic policies and that of his former boss, Repubs, and Blue-Dog type Dems really kick in. Hopefully sooner than later. So that as many as possible (including BHO) can be challenged and replaced by 2012.

If not, both EU and the US are likely to get Orszag's wish. Krugman thinks that will happen without suffering another Benito or Adolf. Yeah-right. It can't happen here or there -- or in Beijing or Moscow when their economies also collapse. Sorry, I forgot-- they already have their Fuhrer's-- all they need is the economic collapse. For which BHO of course is in no way responsible and will act dramatically to prevent in the future as he has in the past 2 years.

Second PeteBeck's nomination.

I think others above are on to something: private little clubs, tightly knit "two party system," filibuster, super-majority rules, all these can and should be fixed.

But, making the US less democratic? Placing more trust in arbitrarily assigned "commissions," ie ruling cliques? Automatic triggers that will no doubt automatically hit the wrong targets?

Please.

Oh while I'm at it, national referundums, why not? We have computers now, why can't we use them?

Also, enough with the "electoral college." This non-democratic institution gave us Duyba. Imagine where we'd be had the popularly elected Gore been President instead. I think we'd be in a very different place, myself.

Finally, ridiculous "news" and other media. Free speech is one thing, corporate-sponsored propaganda is something else. We have a perfect storm of money, misinformation and power and people are worried about too much democracy?

" We have a perfect storm of money, misinformation and power and people are worried about too much democracy?"

Absolutely right, we don't have too much democracy, rather not enough.

To the extent that ordinary citizens are actively involved at all levels in responsible positions of power, the less danger there will be that irresponsible self centered elites or nutty quasi-populists will prevail.

I don't have any of how to get there, but I'd like to see the federal government run more along the lines of my Town in Connecticut, socially and politically conservative but in many ways a liberal's ideal with enough boards and commissions and town meeting slots for everyone to participate and learn about acting responsibly, resulting in excellent public services and recreational and health facilities and very good (not excellent, but we're working on that) public schools. Democracy does work if given a chance -- Adams was wrong.

I'm glad to see so many people rejecting this nonsense. The real issue, as others have pointed out, is too little democracy - we have supermajority rules for debating bills, arcane legislative processes in the Senate and all manner of chicanery concerning legislative committees.

And I second Sophia's suggestion that we should do more direct democracy with the Internet. I'm quite surprised that this idea doesn't come up more often.

We haven't had "democracy" in America for quite some time. It's simply a plutocratic ponzi scheme in which the higher-ups have placated us below into thinking they're doing right by us by shifting nearly every aspect of our society towards a corporate state. The fact that a corporation like Halliburton has more "rights" than your or I simply exhibits the state of affairs. The Dems simply kowtow to a slightly lesser degree to corporate/elite interests than say the GOP.

Here Orszag claims more committees are what we need and more studies for committees to produce. Which is just a polite way of saying much about nothing and doing little to nothing.

We don't need another commission to tell us the shit has hit the fan and the current "structure" is broken.

Was it Dewey who said that the cures for democracy's ills are more democracy? The problem, it seems, is that with political and therefore economic power in fewer hands, we're getting the illusion of democracy rather than the real deal. A mere five of those few granted corporations -- legal fictions, mind you -- First Amendment rights. Incumbency rates in Congress make change nearly impossible. I wonder if term limits, for federal judges as well as members of Congress, would be a good place to start. Oh ... right.

Although I largely agree, Mr. Orzag is missing a crucial point - commissions require some sort of nominating structure. The reason why BRAC works so well is that it generally made up of retired military brass. Which in addition to being military (and hence harder to filibuster) are generally non partisan and non ideological.

Look at our nominated positions today - numerous judgeship's are unfilled, two members of the FOMC are unfilled, and I believe the entire IPAB is unfilled.

Clearly if we had simple majority in the Senate things would be better more often, but I see no reason to expect anytime that the opposing party has control of the Senate (whether through a filibuster proof minority, or with a flat out majority) to approve nominees.

Unless we can a way to move forward in divided government (which I think is stupid in the first place, let a party implement their agenda, and if its not popular let the other party do it), we are going to perpetually have this problem going forward

I just thought it a stupid idea for the politics, but PK completely emasculates the poor fool: "The point is that what we need are the right ideas, not the right sort of people. Madmen in authority come in all forms, and the dignified men in suits are often no better than the rabble-rousers."

What we are seeing in Orzsag's prescription that the "cure for democracy is less democracy" is the other side of the coin of growing calls for the formation of a third political party to undo the gridlock of the other two. We are also seeing the confirmation of Walter Lippmann's prediction nearly 60 years ago that enfeebled government would inevitably lead to centralization of control as democracy gave way to dictatorship.

"It is possible to govern a state without giving the masses of the people full representation," wrote Lippmann of the rise of collectivist governments of the right and left in the 1920s and 30s. "But it is not possible to go on for long without a government which can and does in fact govern. If the people find they must choose whether they will be represented in an assembly which is incompetent to govern, or whether they will be governed without being represented, there is no doubt at all as to how the issue will be decided. They will choose authority, which promises to be paternal, in preference to freedom which threatens to be fratricidal. For large communities cannot do without being governed. No ideal of freedom and of democracy will long be allowed to stand on the way of their being governed."

Don't tell me that the Tea Party Republican Party and the oligarchs and plutocrats who finance it haven't been using Lippmann's observation as their operative principle all along as they've brought our government to a halt over the past 3 years of a liberal Democratic administration offensive to it.

And now we have elites like Orzsag sending desperate signals in calls for third parties and less democracy that they think democratic politics is problemmatic and the country is becoming ungovernable. Lippmann too worried that "Jacobin" revolutionaries just like Tea Party Republicans had made democratic politics with its "traditions of civility" impossible and he too looked at a stronger executive as the solution. But Orzsag's idea plays right into the hands of an authoritarian radical right that has always understood that by making politics impossible the public would turn to the kind of government conservatives like best, which is strong dictator-like executives in the mold of Cheney and George W. Bush who believe that what an American Empire needs most is a real emperor able to make decisions with speed and dispatch and without interference from either Congress or the Courts.

Let me just add that while I am sure Peter Orzsag is well meaning and the problems of gridlock he lists are real, we need to be showing why the deliberate polarization brought on by a radical right dominated Republican Party is a threat to democracy when it makes a virtue of standing on "principle" and refusing to compromise. We don't need to be lending the radical right a hand by dismantling democracy ourselves.

Technocratic commissions are weighted in favor of conventional thinking. They consist of the well-paid hired hands of the Establishment, insulated from economic reality. Orszag, scion of the comfortable upper middle class, is vice-chairman of Global Banking at Citicorp. Would Orszag give meaningful roles to liberal economists like Paul Krugman or Jared Bernstein or Dean Baker on his commissions? "Too much democracy" and paralysis have resulted from the Tea Party, a charity of the infamous Koch brothers and other reactionary rich.

If anything, the gridlock Orszag attacks here is a symptom of too little democracy, not too much. What's the democratic justification for a filibuster that's become essentially a 60% requirement for passage of any law? What do the electoral college and the committee system do to increase levels of democracy in the US?

Then again, it's a popular meme that "the people" are weak and irresponsible, as epitomized in the Lippmann quote cited above: "They will choose authority, which promises to be paternal..." - "they" being "The people," as context makes clear. But then again, when have the people ever been in charge?

So Orszag, the Vice Chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup, thinks we need less democracy. What a surprise. The banks think we need less democracy. But of course they do, since, as Ron Suskind reports, otherwise the democratically elected chief executives of the government might do things like--break up Citigroup. But then, course, those decisions can be ignored by the banking industry's control of the Treasury Department. Is Orszag moonlighting for the Tea Party's publicity operation? Because this plays right into their hands.

Orzag is not really proposing significantly less democracy. He's suggesting making a few things automatic, turning a few things over to commissions or agencies, etc. We already turn a ton of stuff over to independent agencies or the executive. Congress long ago handed the administrative state over to, well, the administrative state. We also have unusually strict rules about what Congress is forbidden from doing, even if the majority wants it. This is nothing new, nor should it be troubling to anyone who thinks that democracy is the worst system except for all the others. Why is everyone here hysterically getting on Orzag's back for proposing, say, automatic unemployment extension? Orzag likes the IPAB, a/k/a "death panel." Don't we like the IPAB too? I guess I didn't get the memo on Orzag.

I agree that the filibuster is a big problem, although that's easy to say until the shoe is on the other foot. Still, I can't make a prinicpled argument for it. The only time when it would be worthwhile is if it were to serve as a counter-balance to the Senate's disproportionate make-up. But it can't do that systematically. It will only do that in some cases. In others, it will exaggerate the problem. So, yes, best to get rid of the damn thing. But even if we got rid of the filibuster, it wouldn't help much when there's a Republican House, as there is now.

Putting that issue aside, aren't the agitators for more democracy ignoring a key point in Orzag's article? That the crazy nutjobs are doing what their voters want them to do? Yes, he frames it in non-partisan terms, and it's a partisan issue. Only one side is dominated by crazy nutjobs. Nonetheless, the point remains that the radical GOP is responding to what their idiot voters want -- democracy in action. Perhaps we Democrats, or liberals, or whoever we are here, should really come to terms with the unpleasant reality that people, generally speaking, or woefully ignorant, and they're often scared, stupid, and angry too -- genuinely so -- and they certainly lack any sophisticated understanding of economic issues. Someone above was going on about Der Fuehrer. But the right-wing movement in Germany was popular, and Hitler's rise was enabled by direct popular appeal to the disaffected public -- scared, stupid, angry -- and some surprising and helpful election results for nationalists and the Nazis in particular. A few others were agitating for more referendums. Because they always result in enlightened, intelligent policy decisions. Oh, wait. See California -- an absolute mess due to the wonders of direct democracy. I, for one, don't want Joe Jackass running my country. If I did, I'd vote for him. Republicans have been doing just that.

Orzag's proposals are an abdication of responsibility to lead, and based on a faulty reading of the causes of governmental inaction.

As others have said, the true cause of recent governmental dysfunction is Congressional inaction due to the super-majority requirement in the Senate. If that had been fixed in Obama's first term, many of the excellent bills that the House did in fact pass (with relative ease) would have become law and the ACA would have passed much more quickly--allowing Obama to be seen as a stronger leader and to focus his attention on other pressing matters, including the economy.

Again with the filibuster gripes. Have you no memories? Ted Kennedy almost singlehandedly held up much Repub-supported legislation when the Dems were in the Senate wilderness. Really want to end it? If the Repubs take the Senate again - a solid bet right now - you'd beg for the filibuster. But no, you all gripe because it wasn't removed during the Dem moment. C'Mon! A bit shallow, don't you think?

Rayward, PeteBeck, Sophia!, drofnats!, so glad to see you all, and many others here reject Orszags argument. Orszag is showing his colors by arguing essentially for more centralized and unaccountable power, frustrated that the majority disagrees with him. As far as the PK reference, I'd agree on the right ideas, except that I find PKs ideas repulsive. Oh, well. The paired voting, non-plurality election idea might work, and might encourage additional non major party candidates. Referenda and Internet voting sound good, but are also what the senate is intended to discourage - momentary passions. The central government is not weak, as Lippmann was concerned about, but perhaps too strong - the wealthiest counties in the country ring DC, full of supplicants and those who would bend centralized power to their will. It is tis centralization of power that is the main threat to our democracy.