“ We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.”
— Charles Krauthammer, via Wonkbook
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Posts tagged with democracy
“ Conservatives talk about government as if it were something foreign, alien, or extrinsic when in fact the Constitution says it truthfully and simply: ‘We the People.’ Government is us. It’s capable of true greatness, real nobility, and majestic triumphs. I’d go further: the U.S. federal government is the greatest force for good in human history. Period.”
— Paul Begala
A Working Government
It’s not clear why we should judge the system by whether it is faithful to its original design rather than suited to its current challenges. The credit-rating agencies, the bondholders, the climate, the economy, the jobless and the deficit are certainly less interested in our system’s design than in its results. We should follow their lead. If this is our system working precisely as intended, then it is time to start thinking — as we have during many previous periods of reform in our history — about making it work better.
Yes yes yes.
People don’t actually care about institutions, they care about outcomes.
Against Democratic Representation
David Wessel (or some guy as Gruber might say) summarizes a National Academy of Sciences lecture from Paul Romer:
Congress should tie its own hands more often, retaining power to investigate and vote proposals up or down but avoiding the detailed crafting of legislative provisions that influence the flow of money.
To Romer, good institutions are created and maintained by philosopher kings. See him here on charter cities. But I’d offer up the continual wrangling over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a case study in how semi-autonomous insulated from Congress institutions actually get built. A creation reality that Romer might find less than appealing.
Filed under normative economics (WSJ link via Met’s Fan #1).
“ Political activists use the Internet to fundraise, to contact voters, to spread information, and to debate issues. News flash: we were doing all those things before the Internet was invented. We may do those things differently — sometimes more easily, sometimes more effectively, but not always — but it’s still the same basic tasks of politics.”
— Seth Masket arguing against the over-exaggerated claims for technology on democratic politics
“ Congress is a substitute for violence. When you go around the world, they kill each other. Here we go down to the floor and argue with each other.”
— Dick Gephardt as quoted by Steve Elmendorf
Responsible Implies a Predicable Partisanship
Seth Masket on ideological extremity in congressional policy making:
The fact that we have parties that actually seek to deliver on campaign promises is something we should be celebrating.
Knowing What to Know
Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org:
Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other
And
Companies that make use of these algorithms must take this curative responsibility far more seriously than they have to date. They need to give us control over what we see — making it clear when they are personalizing, and allowing us to shape and adjust our own filters. We citizens need to uphold our end, too — developing the “filter literacy” needed to use these tools well and demanding content that broadens our horizons even when it’s uncomfortable.
Quite the contradiction. I see contemporary news consumption as James Hamilton’s All the News that’s Fit to Sell on steroids. It is consumer preferences and growing control over media intake that is creating the personalization and filtering in the first place. See also the concerns of the epistemic closure debate.
But I think it would be a mistake to assume that just because Facebook or Google tightens their recommendation engines, people won’t be exposed to the same swath of news that they are now. The biggest problem has always been that most voters expose themselves to very little news whatsoever. I suspect that the growth of ideological voices with points of view have increased the overall consumption of news. Few people are going to miss the artificial he said/she said format that too often passes for unbiassed journalism.
And more importantly, democracy depends on its ability to combine the view points of citizens with multiple viewpoints and not actually each “citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints.”
Courting the Supreme
Damon W. Root defends the value of judicial review for Reason:
Democracy can be a wonderful thing, but it also has its limits.
Of course the usual example of civil rights requiring the the antidemocratic powers of the Court is artfully wielded.
But so what? People don’t care about institutions. People care about outcomes. Liberals don’t like the Court today because they correctly see it as a conservative counter-weight to their legislative accomplishments. And of course, you don’t hear Republicans complaining so loudly about activist judges these days. You can’t take any institutional critique at face value, they are almost always arguments for policy preferences cloaked in the rhetoric of democratic theory. See also the Filibuster.
Link via Munger on the Twitter and if he wasn’t the one who first taught me that he could have been.
“ People hate democracy. They like democracy in the stylized version they have in their heads, which involves everyone in the country agreeing with them. They don’t like it in practice because, well, it’s messy, and it turns out people disagree with them.”
— Matt Jarvis, in the comments to a Jonathan Bernstein blog post
