May 14, 2010

• Theories of Government’s Core Problem

  Generally, there is broad agreement inside and outside of the political arena that our Government is fundamentally broken. Part of that is probably just the general sense in which every generation yearns to make things better and tends to see the worst in things.  But part of that is also I think a correct assessment that our political system has gone wildly off track and no longer seems capable of solving the big major problems of our day. 

  There’s general agreement that the last decade or two has had a plethora of serious problems that we’ve had to deal with. Amongst these include:
  - Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
  - Illegal Immigration
  - Foreclosure Crises
  - Global Warming and Climate Change
  - Terrorism
  - Lagging behind other countries in Education
  - Lagging behind other countries in Internet Access and Speed
  - An extraordinarily expensive Health Care system
  - A Global Financial Crises
  - Runaway Derivative Trading
  - Nuclear Proliferation
  - Growing gap in income and wealth and income between the rich and the poor
  - Dependence on Foreign Energy
  - Risks of instability resulting from global poverty, water, and food shortages
  - Growing individual and government level debt
  - Excessive incarceration and the failing Drug War
  - Increasing ill health and obesity
  - Hurricanes like Katrina
  - Earthquakes like the massive one in Haiti
  - The Golf Oil Spill
  - The threat of flu pandemics like hte Swin Flue

  I could go on and on. Most of these problems aren’t specifically caused by government. It might not even be anyone’s fault. It could easily be that we are just living in a time when social and economic problems are growing at a faster rate than our old form government can handle thanks to our growth in population and technological advancement. We might just be facing larger problems than ever before in human history.  Or it might be that we’ve just become lost and forgotten how to go about dealing with and preventing big problems like we knew how to do in ages past. But regardless of why there’s so many problems these days, there’s little doubt that they exist. And there’s less doubt that we need a government that functions far more effectively than the one we have in order to deal with them.

  Meanwhile, we hear of scandal after scandal after scandal. Some big, some small, but ranging from every level of government from the local to the Presidential. It often seems that not only is our government not capable of solving our problems, it’s not even trying. Major figures seem more embroiled in their own internal sex scandals and political games and posing for the press and trying to earn a quick buck.

  And then on top of all that in the news people experience their own personal crisis. Suddenly there’s a medical emergency, or a job that screws them out of their pensions, or a sudden bout of unemployment, or an injury that forces early retirement, or a death in the family, etc. etc. and they find that there’s just not any help for them. They see their investments vanishing into thin air and their homes getting foreclosed on and their neighborhoods falling apart because the State they live in is too poor to afford to pave the roads anymore. 

  So yeah given all that, there’s pretty universal agreement that our government is broken and that we desperately need to get it fixed. But that’s as far as the agreement goes. We agree that we need better government: less broken, more effective. But we don’t agree on how broken the government is. We don’t agree on whose fault it is that the government is broken. And we don’t agree on how to go about fixing the broken government. We don’t even agree on what language to use to describe the ways in which our government is broken.

  But I think we can make significant progress on establishing some sort of unity here if we were to simply try to come up with a shared understanding of what the CORE problems are with our government.  There’s no way we’ll ever agree on every problem and every nuance of every problem and how best to solve them. But perhaps we can get to the heart of the deepest faults that have the greatest influence on why government so frequently of late has failed to live up to its over inflated promises. Because if we can establish what those core fundamental issues are, then we can solve them first and then move on to solving the rest of our problems with a government that is at least basically functional, trustworthy, and responsive to the wishes and desires of its people. Government might still screw up after that. But then at least we’ll feel as if it’s our shared problem. WE might make a bad decision, sure. But let it be OUR mistake knowingly made that we can correct for. Don’t let it be some sort of accidental problem that arises from a dysfunctional system that we feel like we have no control over.

  So there are I think probably four major popular theories that most people see as representing the core problem with government. Let’s explore them each in turn.

  The Systemic Theory
  The idea is basically that there’s a continuing systemic breakdown in the way government works that is eroding the ability of politicians and bureacrats to trust one another and work together and solve problems. This is the theory most commonly asserted by people actually in politics though they are certainly not the only ones espousing it. Usually adherents to this theory speak about certain methodologies and rules changes and new technologies have fundamentally changed the way politics is played resulting in a more divided society. They will claim that we’re as a society far more ideologically polarized now than ever before and that’s causing politicians to be embroiled in a kinds of rhetoric arms race in order to discredit and attack the other side. Finding “dirt” on one another to increase one’s chances to get elected is more important than actually solving problems and dishonest false statements is just part of how the game is played.

  Why do I call this the “systemic” theory? Because at it’s core this about how political systems that have already existed and are part and parcel of how our government are designed are falling apart under the weight of modern sentiment. So, the system of voting for example has always been a part of our system, but recently it’s become a game of voter manipulation more than voter choice. Likewise the fillibuster has been part of our system for many years but now it seems like it’s creating an enormous incentive for obstructionism.

  Advocates of the systemic system believe that change can be obtained along two lines.  1. A greater sense and willingness to cooperate amongst politicians. Basically they need to stop worrying about getting elected or their party’s standing and engage in more good faith efforts to get work done.  2. Changing the political rules so that they allow the party in power to govern effectively. e.g. eliminate or weaken the filibuster, change the stranglehold of committee heads on the crafting of legislation, improve the fact checking capacity of the media so as to keep politicians more honest and make attacks less effective, etc.  
  
  The Influence Theory
  This theory is probably the most complex because it involves many variations but in many ways it’s also the easiest to understand. The influence theory basically just asserts that there is some force or power that has more influence on what or how political leaders act than the people who elected them. There’s a weaker and a stronger form of this theory. The weaker says that the undo influence creates a conflict of influence that makes it appear as if the politicians aren’t acting in good faith. That erodes the people’s trust in the politicians and the entire system of representative politics. The stronger version accepts that but ALSO asserts that those politicians are actually heavily influenced by the outside force and thus it’s right for the people to lack in trust of them. Even amongst the stronger theory there’s a split between those who see the influenced persons as deliberately knowingly being effected by the one who influences (which starts us to get into the corruption theory, see below), or those who assert that they are unkowingly or unintentionally are effected by the influences sometimes even in very subtle but nevertheless very dangerous ways.

  Influence theories have been around a LONG time and the history of them mostly involves differences in what was perceived as the agent causing the influence. So for example in the past people have theorized undo influence from: foreign powers, religions, communists, the rich, the poor, colleges and universities, unions, scientists, big party machines, the mob,  etc. etc. Probably the reason why these various theories proliferate is because there’s generally some truth to it. Lots of things really DO influence people. Our actions are in many ways a product of our many incentives and those are related to the groups we interact with.

  However, in recent times, the modern influence theorist proclaims there is a much bigger source of influence that has a far more pervasive and corrosive impact on our politics than any other influence currently facing society. That influence is of course: Concentrated Corporate Power.

  Corporate Power influence theorists posit that through the exercise of a lot of money by buying campaign ads, making campaign donations, and employing armies of lobbyists, a few extremely powerful corporations and other wealthy interests are able to effectively buy politicians, buy legislation, and buy reduced regulation that in turn enriches those corporations with more money that they can in turn use to further influence Congress and the President to get there way. What follows is a kind of perversion in the order of things where the Government ends up seeming to serve the corporations more than it serves the people.

  All Influence Theorists whatever they believe is causing the influence, tend to think the solutions lie in three areas. 1. Campaign Finance reform. The idea is to create laws that ensure that politicians have to get their money they use to run and the perks they receive, etc. etc. directly from the people. Hence they don’t have an incentive of cowtowing to special interests in order to get re-elected.  2. Transparency. The idea here is that while we can’t always prevent all possible things outside of the people’s will effecting a person’s decision making process, at the very least we should try to make it transparent to people what those things are. Hence if you get a politician doing the will of Exxon mobile in order to get a big fat pay check from them, then well the people can find out about that and replace them with a politician who is not so heavily influenced.  3. Constitutional Protections. There is already precedent. The first amendment offers some significant protection against undo influence from religions. Similarly other constitutionally invested powers could enable Congress to pass laws protecting its own independence from special interests or forbid them from making laws that favor certain special interests or tie the government too special interests. All these things are seen as ways to ensure that the primary and chief constituent of a politician is the person who elected him or her so that that’s for whom said politicians make their decisions.
  
  The Corruption Theory
  The corruption theory, is similar to the influence theory, except that it’s a perception from within the institutions of government rather than without.  The corruption theory asserts not that there’s some outside force influencing politicians in general so that they make bad decisions, instead they assert that these particular politicians are themselves simply corrupt. Hence, Washington is broken because it a cess pool of vile and evil corrupt people who simply have no interest in serving the people. They are interested in the power they get from being politics and the money they can obtain from being in politics.

  Corruption theorists have a few variations too. There are those who believe that Washington is inherently corrupting. This is sort of the “absolute power corrupts absolutely” idea. Basically those who believe thsi don’t believe that politicians can ever be trusted and that every few years there has to be a turn over in order to get the less corrupt people in there and the more corrupt people out.  There are others who believe that the problem is an erosion of cultural morals within the society as a whole. These people tend to think that there just a core set of “good” people out there and the key to politics is finding those people and putting those in power while avoiding the assholes.  There are others who believe that the problem is in fact a corrupting ideology. That is to say that politicians who believe in a certain kind of politics even if they personally mean well are believing in something that results in them engaging in dangerous destructive practices that will inevitably lead to destruction of our political system and perhaps even our very way of life!  Lastly there are just those who don’t think it’s anything nearly that particularly complicated. It’s just that right now we happened to have picked some bad apples and given them too much power.  Those don’t think there’s any inherent likelihood of that, just that we got unlucky and our current batch of politicians suck.

  Corruption theorists present the simplest theory for how to fix the problem.  Vote the bums out. That’s it. The idea is put the people in power who are good trustworthy people with the right ideology and let them stay in place up unti if and when they start to show signs of corruption and then vote them out too.  Corruption theorists will tend to advocate short terms, more elections, and term limits. Corruption theorists are also big on investigations and police action and using the media to root out and find corruption so that corrupt politicians can be tried, expelled, arrested, or impeached.

  The Fundamentalist Theory
  The fundamentalist theory is the one that I personally have the hardest time wrapping my mind around. But basically the idea is this. Government sucks because government sucks. Here is the idea that it is fundamentally inherent in government that it will always make bad disastrous decisions that hurt people. Government is basically inherently illegitimate and becomes more illegitimate the more power it is authorized to execute and the more people it has sway over.

  Fundamentalists see the solution to government’s inability to solve problems is to move the act of solving those problems out of the hands of the government altogether. Whose hands that responsibility goes into determines the difference between different kinds of fundamentalists.  Some, for example believe that the authority should rest in the hands of the smallest government units possible that are thus closer to the people.  Hence, the States should have more authority than the federal government, the counties more authority than the States, the local cities and towns more authority than the counties, and even the individual neighborhoods having more authority than the cities and towns.  The idea for them is that government units have to be as small as possible to be the most responsive to the people. The bigger they are the more likely they are to not represent the will of the people.

  Other kinds of fundamentalists think differently though. Individualist fundamentalists think, generally, that government at any level is invalid and that all authority for solving problems should rest in the hands of specific individuals.  The idea here is  that there should be “no free lunch” and that “personal responsibility” needs to be the key principle that drives our actions. 

  Lastly there are Capitalist fundamentalists who think authority has to be rested in individuals by virtual of the businesses they run. Competition then is seen as the means through which complex problems are solved. The most extreme version of this is to believe that all authority is better off in the hands of corporations than the government in effect sort of the exact opposite view of Corporate Power Influence theorists.

  Regardless of their types, Fundamentalists see the only way to solve problems is to dismantle the mechanisms of government entirely. Lower taxes, fewer services, less regulation.

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  Those are basically I think the four major theories for why our government sucks.  Generally you’ll see people on the Left leaning more toward the Systemic Theory and the Influence Theory though some on the left also embrace the Corruption Theory to some extent or another.  But you can sort of define the modern Left as those who almost entirely reject the Fundamentalist Theory.  In contrast the Right is pretty much the opposite. The Right is MOST likely to be in favor of the Fundamentalist Theory. By far the second most significant to them is likely to be the Corruption Theory. Quite a large and growing number of people on the Right are embracing sort of their own brand of the Influence Theory though especially amongst the Tea Party. And there are some on the Right who also see Systemic Theory problems with government though generally they don’t think they are core.

  We can look at popular figures and we can sort of see where they stand with regard to these theories.

  Barack Obama is a pretty core Systemic Theory follower. Though he thinks Influence Theory problems exist, he doesn’t think they are the core of the problems with government. This is apparent in his speeches he’s given in front of or directed toward Republicans where he speaks of how the poisonous politics of the day are preventing Republicans and Democrats from rolling up their sleeves and working together to solve problems.  In fact I would make the argument that most of the leaders in Washington on both sides of the aisles are at least partly Systemic Theorists in terms of what they see as wrong with Washington, though Democrats are much more so than Republicans.

  Obama judging by his actions is certainly NOT a Concentrated Corporate Power Influence Theorists (CCPIT?). He doesn’t see that as the core problem because he is willing to negotiate with major power centers in Washington in order to get things done be they banks or pharmaceutical companies or insurance companies or energy companies. That might just be his realism or pragmatism, but it’s certainly the thing that creates the greatest tension between him and most of the Left.

  On said Left, you can find numerous examples of Influence Theorists. Generally many of the most famous figures on the Left outside of Washington are Influence Theorists. People like Glenn Greenwald, Larry Lessig, and Noam Chomsky speak persuasively about how corporations have effectively captured our government. Economists like Simon Johnson are asserting the same when they speak of the destructive influence of intellectual capture on politics in Washington and the Banking Industry.  Dick Durbin expressed the core principle of Corporate Power Influence Theorists when in that famous statement of his when trying to cobble together financial reform referring to Congress and the banking interests: “they [the banks] frankly own the place”.

  As you can probably guess from reading my blog, I pretty strongly identify with this position. While I think there really are systemic and corruption problems, I think solving the problem of concentrated corporate power’s influence on our government is absolutely 100% essential to making government work effectively for all of us. I think it’s the problem we have to solve first before we can solve any other.

  Many famous figures on the Right, most notably Glenn Beck are pretty clearly Corruption Theorists. Glenn Beck believes that the problem with Washington is that we are this slow winding road toward fascism and naziism because our political leaders, mostly the Democrats lead by Barack Obama are hopelessly lost within a fundamentally corrupting ideology of socialism and beliefs like social justice. Beck thinks you can solve everything if you stamp out any trace of any of the people in government who have become infected by this twisted line of thinking.

  Most famous Republicans or republican enthusiasts be they Michael Steele or Rush Limbaugh tend to at least seem to be Fundamentalists.  Limbaugh seems to me to be a pretty clear case of pro-corporate Fundamentalism. He’d like to see the powers of government invested in companies to do with as they please and for government to butt out.  The historical classic Fundamentalist at least in rhetoric was Ronald Reagan whose persuasive speeches catapulted the idea that the government is always the problem into a position of national pre-eminence. Though in practice as President he didn’t implement as many fundamentalist policies as most fundamentalists would like.  Ron Paul is a fundamentalist as well though he, like most libertarians are the not capitalist-fundamentalists or corporate-fundamentalists (though they do believe in capitalism)  but more individualist-fundamentalists. An example of an economist fundamentalist would be the much revered Milton Friedman.

  OK so now that you understand the four most popular theories of why government is broken, let’s have at it. How can we take what’s true about each of these and throw out what’s false about them to come up with a really good theory of what’s wrong with government that we can ALL get behind.  Is it possible?  Or if you can’t merge them what would you say the order of significance between them? Which of these problems should we tackle first.

  Or maybe there’s another theory you think is even more significant than the ones I’ve described. Certainly these aren’t the only possible explanations, they’re just what in my estimation seem to be the most popular. There’s others like the theory of ignorance which would say government doesn’t work because we’re all just too stupid these days or maybe because the problems have become too complex for us to be able to collectively solve. Or there’s the theory of excess democracy that might say that government doesn’t work because it currently is too dependent on popular opinion that pulls it in too many directions at once. Or there’s the theory of lack of social diversity that asserts that Government can’t solve problems because the people in government are not diverse enough to represent the people and hence know what those problems are. Or there’s the theory of lack of skillset diversity that asserts that government’s core problems is that we don’t have enough rational thinking people like Scientists and Engineers and Mathematicians or just people who think in any kind of a different way than the way Lawyers, Professors, Politicians and the occasional Doctor think which is what the bulk of our political class are.

  Or there’s the theory of un-representativeness which I find particularly scary. That’s the one where a society starts to think that a government is simply hopelessly unrepresentative of the will of the People because they aren’t “part of us” or “the same as us”. They’re the Other. Maybe they’re taken over by the elites, or maybe be the illegal aliens or maybe by the blacks or the jews or the nazis or the dirty poor or some other crazy nonsense. In anyway the people start to think that the government is just so far removed from what they know and think that participating in the act of politics is a waste of energy and time because it can’t change anything. Generally when that theory becomes pre-eminent you will either get an extreme wave of absolute apathy and disinterest toward politics or you can expect a major uprising of some kind, sometimes leading to revolutions or civil wars and in the worst case genocidal extermination campaigns.

  So that’s my thoughts. What’s your theory?  What do you think is the Government’s core Problem that makes it not able to solve the problems that we now face and how can we correct it?

  • 7:21 pm
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