EJ Dionne from the Washington Post hits a topic that should be important to each of us: the future of democracy itself, which is under assault around the world including here at home from a far-right insistent on obstructionism to prevent problem solving because they do not like the idea of government at all. See previous blog on Mann and Ornstein's work, which, along with the reports cited below, would be a great summer reading list. Add to that Schattschneider's Semisovereign People and you will begin to understand the otherwise frustratingly confusing political spectacle today.
“We know American politics are
dysfunctional. But after a week of scandal obsession during which the nation’s
capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about —
jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education — it’s worth asking if there is
something especially flawed about our democracy.
Our circumstances certainly have
their own particular disabilities: a radicalization of conservative politics,
over-the-top mistrust of President Obama on the right, high-tech gerrymandering
in the House, and a Senate snarled by non-constitutional supermajority requirements. [Citizens United inviting money to drown discourse]
Still, while it may not be much of a
comfort, the democratic distemper is not a peculiarly American phenomenon.
Across most of the democratic world, there is an impatience bordering on
exhaustion with electoral systems and political classes.
Citizen dissatisfaction is hardly
surprising in the wake of a deeply damaging economic downturn. That doesn’t
make the challenge any less daunting. We should consider whether democracy
itself is in danger of being discredited. Politicians might usefully disentangle
themselves from their day-to-day power struggles long enough to take seriously
their responsibility to a noble idea and the systems that undergird it.
It’s not hard to discover that this
conundrum is global and not just our own. “Has democracy had its day?” is the
headline on Columbia University historian Mark Mazower’s cover story in the May
issue of Prospect, a British magazine. The subhead: “Electoral politics has had
a bad decade.”
Earlier this month, the
Transatlantic Academy, a global partnership of think tanks led by the German
Marshall Fund of the United States, issued “The Democratic Disconnect,” a sober
report by a group of distinguished academics.
“Democracy is in trouble,” the
report begins. “The collective engagement of a concerned citizenry for the
public good — the bedrock of a healthy democracy — is eroding. Democratic
governments often seem crippled in their capacity to deliver what their people
want and need. They are neither as responsive nor as accountable as they need
to be in an era of hard choices and rising nondemocratic powers. There is
widespread concern about apparent declining rates of voter participation and
about the alienation or disaffection of citizens from the political process.”
In Europe, the authors noted, “there
is fear that the distance between ordinary citizens and the politicians and
bureaucrats in Brussels compromises democratic legitimacy.” In the United
States, “lamentations about gridlock and polarization are the order of the
day.” Even our peaceable neighbor Canada is not immune. “Canadians,” they
write, “worry about the tendency of their political system to place largely
unaccountable power in the hands of the prime minister.”
The report does include some useful
suggestions for reviving the democratic spirit and improving democratic
practice. But it is not alarmist to be uneasy about democracy’s prospects.
Ernst Hillebrand, the head of international policy analysis for the Friedrich
Ebert Foundation, the German Social Democratic Party’s think tank, describes a
chilling finding in a 2009 survey by the German polling firm Forsa: “that 0
percent — yes, zero percent — of workers in Germany believe they can have a
significant impact on how policy in Germany is shaped via the ballot box.”
And bear in mind that a poll
released last week by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that Germans are
far more satisfied with their country’s situation than are their European
neighbors.
In a conversation last week during a
visit to Washington, Hillebrand pointed to two streams of discontent the
world’s democracies face. One is material. The other might be called spiritual.
On the one side, large numbers of
lower-middle-class and working-class voters have seen their economic standing
deteriorate over two or three decades. There has been a substantial transfer of
wealth and income from labor — which is how most people pay their way — to
capital. Productivity gains no longer lead to wage gains. This builds justified
frustration. [because, translated into common language, that means that working harder and smarter is no longer a road to success]
At the same time, he says, many
citizens, especially the young, have enhanced expectations for “participation,
self-realization and control over their lives.” They do not see current
electoral arrangements in the democracies giving them much chance to achieve
any of these goals.
Since World War II, bouts of
economic growth have allowed the democracies to buy their way out of trouble.
One can hope this will happen again — and soon. In the meantime, politicians
might contemplate their obligations to stewardship of the democratic ideal.
They could begin by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling
elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of
talking points.”
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