Tired of government that doesn't work? It's the party system, stupid
The Unraveling of Government
By MICKEY EDWARDS, NYT
Mickey Edwards, who served in the House from 1977 to 1993 as the representative of Oklahoma's 5th Congressional District, is the author of "The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans."
Frustrated over the inability of political leaders to find common ground on even the most pressing national issues, Americans have developed a long list of people or political practices to blame for the fact that government doesn't seem to work anymore. But the real problem is something that's not high on most such lists, something that's far more crucial.
We're electing the wrong people, they complain. There are no leaders any more. There's too much money in politics. Too many corporations, labor unions, special interests and billionaires. Too many right-wingers, or left-wingers, in Congress, on television, on the Internet - and they're all zealous and nasty. Too many Americans only talk to people who already agree with them. And so forth. Every observer has his or her own pet reason for the failure of the federal government to function.
If any attempt is made to assess the problem as a whole, each side complains about "false equivalence" and doubles down on blaming the opposition. It's not that the villains they've identified don't share in the blame, because they've all played a part in the unraveling of government. The problem, however, is much deeper than any of these individual elements: it's the political system itself that is at fault. The problems with governance will never be solved until we turn that system upside down and start over.
While the United States is actually a Republic, with the attendant constitutional constraints on the powers of the majority, its political system is also based on a fundamental underlying democratic principle: that the people themselves will choose their leaders and thus indirectly determine the policies of their government. Because the federal government's most important powers - to declare war, to establish tax policies, to create programs, to decide how much to spend on them, to approve treaties, to make the final decisions about who will head federal agencies or sit on the Supreme Court - are all Congressional powers, it is only by being able to select members of the Senate and the House of Representatives that the people are able to manage the levers of government.
(More here.)
By MICKEY EDWARDS, NYT
Mickey Edwards, who served in the House from 1977 to 1993 as the representative of Oklahoma's 5th Congressional District, is the author of "The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans."
Frustrated over the inability of political leaders to find common ground on even the most pressing national issues, Americans have developed a long list of people or political practices to blame for the fact that government doesn't seem to work anymore. But the real problem is something that's not high on most such lists, something that's far more crucial.
We're electing the wrong people, they complain. There are no leaders any more. There's too much money in politics. Too many corporations, labor unions, special interests and billionaires. Too many right-wingers, or left-wingers, in Congress, on television, on the Internet - and they're all zealous and nasty. Too many Americans only talk to people who already agree with them. And so forth. Every observer has his or her own pet reason for the failure of the federal government to function.
If any attempt is made to assess the problem as a whole, each side complains about "false equivalence" and doubles down on blaming the opposition. It's not that the villains they've identified don't share in the blame, because they've all played a part in the unraveling of government. The problem, however, is much deeper than any of these individual elements: it's the political system itself that is at fault. The problems with governance will never be solved until we turn that system upside down and start over.
While the United States is actually a Republic, with the attendant constitutional constraints on the powers of the majority, its political system is also based on a fundamental underlying democratic principle: that the people themselves will choose their leaders and thus indirectly determine the policies of their government. Because the federal government's most important powers - to declare war, to establish tax policies, to create programs, to decide how much to spend on them, to approve treaties, to make the final decisions about who will head federal agencies or sit on the Supreme Court - are all Congressional powers, it is only by being able to select members of the Senate and the House of Representatives that the people are able to manage the levers of government.
(More here.)
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