I love your focus on sharpening accountability, and I agree that focusing on fairness has made us all miserable without improving outcomes, but I'm not convinced that it's either necessary or desirable to completely abandon the idea of who should rule.
Being able to remove bad rulers is obviously important. The Founders spent a lot of time worrying about how to prevent an individual or group from seizing power and shielding themselves and their followers from accountability. But they also made it difficult to quickly remove politicians from power. To them, the gravest danger to continued self-governance was that populist mobs would allow majorities to impose their will on minorities. Madison wrote, "In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason". Therefore, you need representatives to be receptive to the will of the people, but not TOO receptive. You need time for passions to cool, for deliberation that eventually allows people to see reason.
The analogy I would use is that for a car to function properly, you obviously need a steering wheel to be responsive. But if you make it too responsive, so that a small movement radically changes the direction of the wheels, then you will quickly end up in a ditch. This is why I think the question of "how dynamically" our government is functioning is actually a pretty terrible question. Unless I am mistaken, dynamic just means responsive. If Trump were to order the military to round up all ranking members of the Democratic party, their ability to immediately follow that order would be very dynamic. Asking whether or not it is tyrannical seems better.
“Responsibility should assigned so when a party wins, they govern alone: no coalition compromise and no diluted policies.”
It sounds nice, but in practice I think that concept leads to less accountability rather than more. Coalition politics requires building a broad consensus in order to rule, diluting the power of any one group or individual. What the Founders feared, accurately in my opinion, was that a single faction would gain too much power and wield it to oppress the other factions. By diluting the power of a single faction, you reduce incentives for violent repression and help incentivize leaders to cooperate towards common goals. That's exactly why the separation of powers is so important, it further dilutes the power of any individual or institution. If a single group gains centralized power, they will immediately use it to prevent themselves from facing accountability.
“Eliminating the second round in favor of single-round plurality meant whoever won governed alone, owned outcomes alone, and could be removed alone. Governing alone clarifies responsibility.“ -I couldn't disagree with this more. After implementing this change, Hungarian politicians became incredibly corrupt, which is the biggest reason so much of the population eventually turned against them. But it took 16 years of corruption to finally get rid of them. Centralized control did make institutions highly dynamic, they rapidly reoriented so their purpose could be to enrich Orban and his friends rather than serve the public good. Orban was able to make that change because at the time his party had achieved a super-majority. After he changed to single-round plurality, it meant that he only needed to serve the largest faction rather than the public good.
The plurality rule insulated Fidesz against reform, because even if a majority of Hungarians hated their corruption, it requires a single consolidated political party to challenge them. Normally in politics, each individual can have their preferences and choose a party that aligns most with those preferences, but in order to fight corruption in the new Hungarian system required voters to sideline their normal preferences (education, taxes, wages, etc) and ONLY prioritize anti-corruption. Which means that you can't just have one party that is pro-environment and anti-corruption and another that is against raising taxes and anti-corruption, you have to build a new coalition who's only concern is being anti-corruption, which is how Magyar was eventually able to win. In the real world, things have to be REALLY bad to get people to set aside all their other priorities, which is why it took 16 years of living with corruption to achieve. Orban didn't just manipulate the rules a little bit, they took control of all national media and academics, created a system where government jobs could be handed out to voters of their party and ensured that those votes went the right way using "chain voting" (look that one up, it's pretty nuts), among many other corrupt and illegal moves.
Our Founders believed the exact opposite, they thought that many acts of governance should be based on gaining a simple majority, but anything radical needed an overwhelming majority to pass. Constitutional changes don’t just require a 2/3rds vote in congress, but also 2/3rds of state legislatures. That makes our institutions less dynamic, but it also reduces violent swings in power, reduces rapid changes to the law, and ensures lasting stability. Of course many people argue that these requirements have become terrible impediments, but that's the whole point! In this polarized time, it's a very good thing that a leader who gains 51% of the support of our people and loses it weeks later can't make massive changes to our laws. Eventually, this should force the parties to return to the pre-Trump norms of bipartisan coalition building as the public becomes more and more exhausted by the constant fighting. Since the fastest growing political party these days is Independent, I think we are getting closer.
I guess what I don't follow about your argument is how do you remove politicians without fair elections? You can't derive the legitimacy of a government based on the outcome of elections, but it absolutely requires consensus around the rules, and institutions that can enforce them. Parties and politicians will always be incentivized to cheat. If they succeed, they will make it harder for voters to hold them accountable. Fairness then seems like exactly the question we should be asking.
But I do worry that no one seems to be having the conversation we should be having, which is about populist power. The Founders didn't want us to have a government that was so reactive to the passions of the mob, which is why the power of the "people's house" was supposed to be balanced by Senators appointed by state legislatures, and why the President was never supposed to be directly elected at all. Republicans and even many Democrats will talk about "unelected judges" as though arbiters of the law should derive their interpretations only through popularity contests. The Founders would have been horrified by that. We will have great difficulty returning our system to stability unless we recognize the realities of human behavior and design our system accordingly.
I'm actually writing a sequel that responds to many of these points in more depth, but you took the time to write this out so I'll do my best here.
1. On dynamism: I may not have explained it well enough, and that's on me. What I meant isn't how responsive each individual part of the system is to voter preferences (that would be closer to direct democracy and who should rule), but how well we can spot failing leaders and remove them. The car analogy works better this way: it's less about the responsiveness of each individual part than it is about our ability to locate which part is failing (the steering, the wheels, the axle) and then correct it. A problem that's hard to locate and hard to correct is one we should design against. Your point about stability is fair and very common. I lean toward quick correction being the stability, but I recognize that's a genuine disagreement worth having.
2. On faction and the immoral majority: this was a hard pill for me to swallow too, so I don't expect it to land easily. But I don't think proportionality or independent checks on each branch reliably save you from an immoral majority. I don’t think anything can. The best chance we have of alleviating ourselves from one without violence is to focus on removal mechanisms rather than inputs. That's really the crux of where I think we disagree.
3. On the abolition of second round in Hungary: I'm not seeing how eliminating it started or accelerated the corruption you're describing. You may be right that it contributed, and I'll admit my research on Hungary's specific electoral changes was limited. But I don't think adding a second round solves corruption but I know it muddies accountability by forcing compromise and coalition, which dilutes blame.
4. On constitutional changes requiring supermajorities: I actually think this supports my point. The fact that changing the rulebook requires broad consensus across Congress and state legislatures means the institutional stability is already baked in. But it's a different kind of stability than what proportionality or independent checks provide; it's stability through high removal thresholds for the rules themselves, not stability through consensus on day-to-day governance.
I hope I addressed most of what you raised. You're asking genuinely good questions, I just think they're operating from a premise about the who should rule problem. The desire to prevent an immoral majority is understandable, but consensus as the solution seems circular to me: consensus is itself a form of majority rule.
I'll be touching on all of this more in the next piece. Stay tuned, and thank you! This kind of feedback is exactly what makes our system better—even if we’re both wrong.
1. This begs the question, what is a failing leader? This is the reason I don't think you can ever get away from the question of who should rule, because success and failure will always be based on opinions, not empirical data. And we can't judge a politician purely on the merits of their previous term, because it's always a choice between them and a replacement politician whose future success potential can only be guessed. Sometimes we go with the lesser of two evils, which seems fine.
2. The idea here isn't to prevent an immoral majority from existing, it's to limit the damage they can do while they are in power. To prevent them from using the power they are given to remove mechanisms of accountability and end self-governance. I think the new idea they introduced that truly allowed the American experiment to work was that of individual rights. Due process (protected by an independent judiciary) is the final safeguard against faction.
3. It accelerated corruption for precisely the reason you suggest, it made it harder for their politicians to be defeated. It allowed Fidesz to win a 2/3rds majority in the National Assembly even if they only received 35% of all votes. Hungary has lots of political parties, and what normally happens is that after the first round of voting happens, the smaller parties drop out or join forces for the second round of voting. So all they had to do to stay in power was ensure that their core base of support didn't drop too far, so they used governmental authority to reward their own supporters.
Most European countries have parliamentary systems where multiple political parties have to join together to form a coalition government. The system seems to work very well for them, because it encourages cooperation. While it sounds logical that coalition building muddies accountability, I wonder if you have specific examples you can point to where that happens in the real world? I don't feel like American politicians are better held accountable than European ones because we only have two political parties, making blame easier to distinguish.
4. I agree, protecting the rules is more important than arguing over which faction gets to lead.
Broad consensus is necessary for self-governance to work. Imagine that Congress is trying to decide between two health care reform ideas.
Idea 1 has this support in the population:
25% love it, 35% like it, 15% are neutral, 20% dislike it, 5% hate it
Idea 2 has this support in the population:
55% love it, 45% hate it
Idea 1 is a better path forward even though fewer people love it. Think of Idea 2 as something like prohibition. Yes it has majority support, but such a large percentage of the population opposes it that in practice it isn't enforceable or sustainable. When I say broad consensus, I'm not just talking about getting to 51% approval on an issue or politician, I'm talking about outcomes that 80% or more of the population can live with.
Absent that, people start to question the legitimacy of their government. Even if you think it's the "wrong" question for them to ask, at the end of the day it is going to be the question that they do ask. I don't disagree with you that the ability to remove terrible political leaders is incredibly important. I just don't see how you can separate it from the question of who should rule, because different people will define success and failure in different ways. Many Hungarians still think Orban was a success, and around 81% of Republicans still think Donald Trump is a success. Who should rule and who is a success are the same question.
Thank you for your kind and insightful response, looking forward to your next piece. I like to be disagreeable and debate ideas, but I always enjoy your writing.
Really enjoyed this. I reckon I’d only add one observation on top, which is the constant human instinct to see and sort the world around us through a series of false binaries. If Hungary (and Trump) are indicative of nothing else, it’s that the two buckets of lawless autocracy and thriving democracy are insufficient at capturing reality. Reality is almost always more nuanced and contradictory than binaries can account for.
Thoughtfulness, rigorousness, and the taking of a wider view are all required to get at reality’s true nature and this piece is a great example of all three. 🫡
Thank you very much for your genuine feedback. Yes, we’ve too often been captured by Plato’s spell to figure out who should rule when we should be more concerned with retaining the ability to blame and remove them.
I’m trying my best to think about these problems the most effective way possible, and I appreciate you taking the time to do the same.
My pleasure. I think you’ve hit on something really important that gets overlooked. As an independent who has long felt both underrepresented and unprecedented, I dwell a lot on the notion that elections are rarely won in this country, rather they are almost always lost. The over interpretation of mandates that follows leads to the next round of punishing, etc. In my view, it could be better, but perhaps in keeping with your very important point, a failure to punish effectively would be far worse still. While much of our practice of self-governance leaves room for improvement, it seems to me we are handling the removal / punishment piece pretty dern well.
I wrote a note a few weeks back briefly looking at big picture strategic achievements (and failures) by China, Europe, Iran and the U.S. measure over decades. In the broadest, most oversimplified sense, it seemed to me both the relative outperformance and durable advantage for the U.S. come from course-correcting more willingly and completely than anybody else. It’s messy, it’s acrimonious, it occurs with fits and starts, but I see our willingness to “grill our own sacred cows”, as I put it, as pretty unique. In some sense, one wonders if we’ve seen a durable shift, at least for a time, away from two-term presidencies and I’m curious about how such a shift might lead to different advantages and disadvantages. I can see both.
In any event, your piece really got me thinking and reframing. That’s always a blessing and I’m grateful.
Love this: “it seemed to me both the relative outperformance and durable advantage for the U.S. come from course-correcting more willingly and completely than anybody else.”
Thank you, sir. The whole note is linked below. I was sort of fumbling around trying to articulate a) that our politics actually produces a real and durable advantage and b) why, but your piece is a much more learned and thoughtful way of getting at the core of the issue.
I can feel a fuller reevaluation of some of my most core opinions about our politics and at least one proper article bubbling up in my head now. Truly grateful for the piece you wrote and will duly credit it when I get around to mashing keys here in the next few days.
I think that we may see fewer two-term presidencies, but I'm doubtful that it will lead to better outcomes. Unless Congress can get it's shit together, we will simply see a continuance of the trajectory we are on, where more and more power is given to the President (shielding representatives from accountability for unpopular votes).
Seems to me that in the last few decades we've seen Congress shift much more often between party control, but that has correlated with less bipartisanship and more gridlock over issues that used to be bipartisan. At the same time, we have more safe districts than ever before, which makes the primary election the real elections, and shifts both parties to their extremes. So does it matter if we can throw out the bums more often if all we ever get are bigger bums?
I broadly agree. My own sense is that (as with any human organization), so many of Congress’ problems come down to leadership. By design and precedent, so much institutional power is vested in the speaker and Senate majority leader. From there committee chairs and whips and so forth. One need only ponder how important quality leadership is in any organization and then consider that unlike the military or corporate America, each member of Congress has the right (and in plenty of circumstances) the duty to say no. Hence the many references to herding cats.
So a key part of the challenge is the primary vs general dynamic you laid out (huge issue), but part of the challenge also comes from deciding that Congress wants the responsibility and the institutional belief that they can handle it. The two are mutually reinforcing, but other than Pelosi and McConnell, who I regarded as master cat wranglers but highly partisan ones, I really haven’t seen much in the way of congressional leaders who can deliver much of anything.
It’s a real problem. There are lots of good folks who end up serving in that institution, but the fact that so many good ones left and the new ones don’t end up wanting to stick around says a lot. Here too, although rarely considered, just like any other organization, morale amongst the rank and file / middle management actually matters a great deal. It was once a really special institution to be a part of and one could feel that serving there. Sadly it’s not anymore and in turn, that tends to end up attracting and retaining the wrong sort of people. It’s problems stacked on problems, but little about those problems is structural. The ball is sitting right there anytime they feel like picking it up and running with it.
I'm not entirely sure what to think about how leadership has contributed to this crisis, it seems to depend on the situation.
In some ways it's good to have strong leaders with authority to enforce rules and norms. Democrats can still pass large parts of their agenda with a small congressional majority because they have such a system. Republicans can't even pass bills that have broad support among Republicans because populist movements give members too much power over leadership.
On the other hand, I've read that Congressional leaders have changed rules over the years to consolidate their own power, which has led to less bipartisanship and fewer members simply voting their conscience.
When it comes to the nomination of candidates, I think the parties SHOULD have more control. It's preposterous to have Bernie Sanders running as a Democrat, he didn't belong to the party. He didn't have the same beliefs, in fact his beliefs were antagonistic to theirs. The same was true of Donald Trump. The fact that Democrats had a system that allowed them to keep out Bernie while Republicans just sat there and watched their party be hijacked by a Democrat shows you how broken our nomination system has become.
On the other hand, our first-past-the-post system makes it almost impossible for third parties to work, so without changing that, maybe there's not really an alternative? It's complicated. If I had my druthers, we'd go back to nomination by convention, where each state would send delegates to vote for the nominee.
Interesting. The shift from who should rule to whether a system can actually remove those in power is pretty useful. I think Trump is definitely trying to degrade the removal aspects but the responsibility part is still very much intact.
We gotta make sure the institutions do a better job of holding but they have so far done an okay job!
I love your focus on sharpening accountability, and I agree that focusing on fairness has made us all miserable without improving outcomes, but I'm not convinced that it's either necessary or desirable to completely abandon the idea of who should rule.
Being able to remove bad rulers is obviously important. The Founders spent a lot of time worrying about how to prevent an individual or group from seizing power and shielding themselves and their followers from accountability. But they also made it difficult to quickly remove politicians from power. To them, the gravest danger to continued self-governance was that populist mobs would allow majorities to impose their will on minorities. Madison wrote, "In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason". Therefore, you need representatives to be receptive to the will of the people, but not TOO receptive. You need time for passions to cool, for deliberation that eventually allows people to see reason.
The analogy I would use is that for a car to function properly, you obviously need a steering wheel to be responsive. But if you make it too responsive, so that a small movement radically changes the direction of the wheels, then you will quickly end up in a ditch. This is why I think the question of "how dynamically" our government is functioning is actually a pretty terrible question. Unless I am mistaken, dynamic just means responsive. If Trump were to order the military to round up all ranking members of the Democratic party, their ability to immediately follow that order would be very dynamic. Asking whether or not it is tyrannical seems better.
“Responsibility should assigned so when a party wins, they govern alone: no coalition compromise and no diluted policies.”
It sounds nice, but in practice I think that concept leads to less accountability rather than more. Coalition politics requires building a broad consensus in order to rule, diluting the power of any one group or individual. What the Founders feared, accurately in my opinion, was that a single faction would gain too much power and wield it to oppress the other factions. By diluting the power of a single faction, you reduce incentives for violent repression and help incentivize leaders to cooperate towards common goals. That's exactly why the separation of powers is so important, it further dilutes the power of any individual or institution. If a single group gains centralized power, they will immediately use it to prevent themselves from facing accountability.
“Eliminating the second round in favor of single-round plurality meant whoever won governed alone, owned outcomes alone, and could be removed alone. Governing alone clarifies responsibility.“ -I couldn't disagree with this more. After implementing this change, Hungarian politicians became incredibly corrupt, which is the biggest reason so much of the population eventually turned against them. But it took 16 years of corruption to finally get rid of them. Centralized control did make institutions highly dynamic, they rapidly reoriented so their purpose could be to enrich Orban and his friends rather than serve the public good. Orban was able to make that change because at the time his party had achieved a super-majority. After he changed to single-round plurality, it meant that he only needed to serve the largest faction rather than the public good.
The plurality rule insulated Fidesz against reform, because even if a majority of Hungarians hated their corruption, it requires a single consolidated political party to challenge them. Normally in politics, each individual can have their preferences and choose a party that aligns most with those preferences, but in order to fight corruption in the new Hungarian system required voters to sideline their normal preferences (education, taxes, wages, etc) and ONLY prioritize anti-corruption. Which means that you can't just have one party that is pro-environment and anti-corruption and another that is against raising taxes and anti-corruption, you have to build a new coalition who's only concern is being anti-corruption, which is how Magyar was eventually able to win. In the real world, things have to be REALLY bad to get people to set aside all their other priorities, which is why it took 16 years of living with corruption to achieve. Orban didn't just manipulate the rules a little bit, they took control of all national media and academics, created a system where government jobs could be handed out to voters of their party and ensured that those votes went the right way using "chain voting" (look that one up, it's pretty nuts), among many other corrupt and illegal moves.
Our Founders believed the exact opposite, they thought that many acts of governance should be based on gaining a simple majority, but anything radical needed an overwhelming majority to pass. Constitutional changes don’t just require a 2/3rds vote in congress, but also 2/3rds of state legislatures. That makes our institutions less dynamic, but it also reduces violent swings in power, reduces rapid changes to the law, and ensures lasting stability. Of course many people argue that these requirements have become terrible impediments, but that's the whole point! In this polarized time, it's a very good thing that a leader who gains 51% of the support of our people and loses it weeks later can't make massive changes to our laws. Eventually, this should force the parties to return to the pre-Trump norms of bipartisan coalition building as the public becomes more and more exhausted by the constant fighting. Since the fastest growing political party these days is Independent, I think we are getting closer.
I guess what I don't follow about your argument is how do you remove politicians without fair elections? You can't derive the legitimacy of a government based on the outcome of elections, but it absolutely requires consensus around the rules, and institutions that can enforce them. Parties and politicians will always be incentivized to cheat. If they succeed, they will make it harder for voters to hold them accountable. Fairness then seems like exactly the question we should be asking.
But I do worry that no one seems to be having the conversation we should be having, which is about populist power. The Founders didn't want us to have a government that was so reactive to the passions of the mob, which is why the power of the "people's house" was supposed to be balanced by Senators appointed by state legislatures, and why the President was never supposed to be directly elected at all. Republicans and even many Democrats will talk about "unelected judges" as though arbiters of the law should derive their interpretations only through popularity contests. The Founders would have been horrified by that. We will have great difficulty returning our system to stability unless we recognize the realities of human behavior and design our system accordingly.
I'm actually writing a sequel that responds to many of these points in more depth, but you took the time to write this out so I'll do my best here.
1. On dynamism: I may not have explained it well enough, and that's on me. What I meant isn't how responsive each individual part of the system is to voter preferences (that would be closer to direct democracy and who should rule), but how well we can spot failing leaders and remove them. The car analogy works better this way: it's less about the responsiveness of each individual part than it is about our ability to locate which part is failing (the steering, the wheels, the axle) and then correct it. A problem that's hard to locate and hard to correct is one we should design against. Your point about stability is fair and very common. I lean toward quick correction being the stability, but I recognize that's a genuine disagreement worth having.
2. On faction and the immoral majority: this was a hard pill for me to swallow too, so I don't expect it to land easily. But I don't think proportionality or independent checks on each branch reliably save you from an immoral majority. I don’t think anything can. The best chance we have of alleviating ourselves from one without violence is to focus on removal mechanisms rather than inputs. That's really the crux of where I think we disagree.
3. On the abolition of second round in Hungary: I'm not seeing how eliminating it started or accelerated the corruption you're describing. You may be right that it contributed, and I'll admit my research on Hungary's specific electoral changes was limited. But I don't think adding a second round solves corruption but I know it muddies accountability by forcing compromise and coalition, which dilutes blame.
4. On constitutional changes requiring supermajorities: I actually think this supports my point. The fact that changing the rulebook requires broad consensus across Congress and state legislatures means the institutional stability is already baked in. But it's a different kind of stability than what proportionality or independent checks provide; it's stability through high removal thresholds for the rules themselves, not stability through consensus on day-to-day governance.
I hope I addressed most of what you raised. You're asking genuinely good questions, I just think they're operating from a premise about the who should rule problem. The desire to prevent an immoral majority is understandable, but consensus as the solution seems circular to me: consensus is itself a form of majority rule.
I'll be touching on all of this more in the next piece. Stay tuned, and thank you! This kind of feedback is exactly what makes our system better—even if we’re both wrong.
1. This begs the question, what is a failing leader? This is the reason I don't think you can ever get away from the question of who should rule, because success and failure will always be based on opinions, not empirical data. And we can't judge a politician purely on the merits of their previous term, because it's always a choice between them and a replacement politician whose future success potential can only be guessed. Sometimes we go with the lesser of two evils, which seems fine.
2. The idea here isn't to prevent an immoral majority from existing, it's to limit the damage they can do while they are in power. To prevent them from using the power they are given to remove mechanisms of accountability and end self-governance. I think the new idea they introduced that truly allowed the American experiment to work was that of individual rights. Due process (protected by an independent judiciary) is the final safeguard against faction.
3. It accelerated corruption for precisely the reason you suggest, it made it harder for their politicians to be defeated. It allowed Fidesz to win a 2/3rds majority in the National Assembly even if they only received 35% of all votes. Hungary has lots of political parties, and what normally happens is that after the first round of voting happens, the smaller parties drop out or join forces for the second round of voting. So all they had to do to stay in power was ensure that their core base of support didn't drop too far, so they used governmental authority to reward their own supporters.
Most European countries have parliamentary systems where multiple political parties have to join together to form a coalition government. The system seems to work very well for them, because it encourages cooperation. While it sounds logical that coalition building muddies accountability, I wonder if you have specific examples you can point to where that happens in the real world? I don't feel like American politicians are better held accountable than European ones because we only have two political parties, making blame easier to distinguish.
4. I agree, protecting the rules is more important than arguing over which faction gets to lead.
Broad consensus is necessary for self-governance to work. Imagine that Congress is trying to decide between two health care reform ideas.
Idea 1 has this support in the population:
25% love it, 35% like it, 15% are neutral, 20% dislike it, 5% hate it
Idea 2 has this support in the population:
55% love it, 45% hate it
Idea 1 is a better path forward even though fewer people love it. Think of Idea 2 as something like prohibition. Yes it has majority support, but such a large percentage of the population opposes it that in practice it isn't enforceable or sustainable. When I say broad consensus, I'm not just talking about getting to 51% approval on an issue or politician, I'm talking about outcomes that 80% or more of the population can live with.
Absent that, people start to question the legitimacy of their government. Even if you think it's the "wrong" question for them to ask, at the end of the day it is going to be the question that they do ask. I don't disagree with you that the ability to remove terrible political leaders is incredibly important. I just don't see how you can separate it from the question of who should rule, because different people will define success and failure in different ways. Many Hungarians still think Orban was a success, and around 81% of Republicans still think Donald Trump is a success. Who should rule and who is a success are the same question.
Thank you for your kind and insightful response, looking forward to your next piece. I like to be disagreeable and debate ideas, but I always enjoy your writing.
Really enjoyed this. I reckon I’d only add one observation on top, which is the constant human instinct to see and sort the world around us through a series of false binaries. If Hungary (and Trump) are indicative of nothing else, it’s that the two buckets of lawless autocracy and thriving democracy are insufficient at capturing reality. Reality is almost always more nuanced and contradictory than binaries can account for.
Thoughtfulness, rigorousness, and the taking of a wider view are all required to get at reality’s true nature and this piece is a great example of all three. 🫡
Thank you very much for your genuine feedback. Yes, we’ve too often been captured by Plato’s spell to figure out who should rule when we should be more concerned with retaining the ability to blame and remove them.
I’m trying my best to think about these problems the most effective way possible, and I appreciate you taking the time to do the same.
My pleasure. I think you’ve hit on something really important that gets overlooked. As an independent who has long felt both underrepresented and unprecedented, I dwell a lot on the notion that elections are rarely won in this country, rather they are almost always lost. The over interpretation of mandates that follows leads to the next round of punishing, etc. In my view, it could be better, but perhaps in keeping with your very important point, a failure to punish effectively would be far worse still. While much of our practice of self-governance leaves room for improvement, it seems to me we are handling the removal / punishment piece pretty dern well.
I wrote a note a few weeks back briefly looking at big picture strategic achievements (and failures) by China, Europe, Iran and the U.S. measure over decades. In the broadest, most oversimplified sense, it seemed to me both the relative outperformance and durable advantage for the U.S. come from course-correcting more willingly and completely than anybody else. It’s messy, it’s acrimonious, it occurs with fits and starts, but I see our willingness to “grill our own sacred cows”, as I put it, as pretty unique. In some sense, one wonders if we’ve seen a durable shift, at least for a time, away from two-term presidencies and I’m curious about how such a shift might lead to different advantages and disadvantages. I can see both.
In any event, your piece really got me thinking and reframing. That’s always a blessing and I’m grateful.
Love this: “it seemed to me both the relative outperformance and durable advantage for the U.S. come from course-correcting more willingly and completely than anybody else.”
Thank you, sir. The whole note is linked below. I was sort of fumbling around trying to articulate a) that our politics actually produces a real and durable advantage and b) why, but your piece is a much more learned and thoughtful way of getting at the core of the issue.
I can feel a fuller reevaluation of some of my most core opinions about our politics and at least one proper article bubbling up in my head now. Truly grateful for the piece you wrote and will duly credit it when I get around to mashing keys here in the next few days.
https://substack.com/@tharrisonlewis/note/c-240811037?r=2ppeb1&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
I think that we may see fewer two-term presidencies, but I'm doubtful that it will lead to better outcomes. Unless Congress can get it's shit together, we will simply see a continuance of the trajectory we are on, where more and more power is given to the President (shielding representatives from accountability for unpopular votes).
Seems to me that in the last few decades we've seen Congress shift much more often between party control, but that has correlated with less bipartisanship and more gridlock over issues that used to be bipartisan. At the same time, we have more safe districts than ever before, which makes the primary election the real elections, and shifts both parties to their extremes. So does it matter if we can throw out the bums more often if all we ever get are bigger bums?
I broadly agree. My own sense is that (as with any human organization), so many of Congress’ problems come down to leadership. By design and precedent, so much institutional power is vested in the speaker and Senate majority leader. From there committee chairs and whips and so forth. One need only ponder how important quality leadership is in any organization and then consider that unlike the military or corporate America, each member of Congress has the right (and in plenty of circumstances) the duty to say no. Hence the many references to herding cats.
So a key part of the challenge is the primary vs general dynamic you laid out (huge issue), but part of the challenge also comes from deciding that Congress wants the responsibility and the institutional belief that they can handle it. The two are mutually reinforcing, but other than Pelosi and McConnell, who I regarded as master cat wranglers but highly partisan ones, I really haven’t seen much in the way of congressional leaders who can deliver much of anything.
It’s a real problem. There are lots of good folks who end up serving in that institution, but the fact that so many good ones left and the new ones don’t end up wanting to stick around says a lot. Here too, although rarely considered, just like any other organization, morale amongst the rank and file / middle management actually matters a great deal. It was once a really special institution to be a part of and one could feel that serving there. Sadly it’s not anymore and in turn, that tends to end up attracting and retaining the wrong sort of people. It’s problems stacked on problems, but little about those problems is structural. The ball is sitting right there anytime they feel like picking it up and running with it.
I'm not entirely sure what to think about how leadership has contributed to this crisis, it seems to depend on the situation.
In some ways it's good to have strong leaders with authority to enforce rules and norms. Democrats can still pass large parts of their agenda with a small congressional majority because they have such a system. Republicans can't even pass bills that have broad support among Republicans because populist movements give members too much power over leadership.
On the other hand, I've read that Congressional leaders have changed rules over the years to consolidate their own power, which has led to less bipartisanship and fewer members simply voting their conscience.
When it comes to the nomination of candidates, I think the parties SHOULD have more control. It's preposterous to have Bernie Sanders running as a Democrat, he didn't belong to the party. He didn't have the same beliefs, in fact his beliefs were antagonistic to theirs. The same was true of Donald Trump. The fact that Democrats had a system that allowed them to keep out Bernie while Republicans just sat there and watched their party be hijacked by a Democrat shows you how broken our nomination system has become.
On the other hand, our first-past-the-post system makes it almost impossible for third parties to work, so without changing that, maybe there's not really an alternative? It's complicated. If I had my druthers, we'd go back to nomination by convention, where each state would send delegates to vote for the nominee.
Interesting. The shift from who should rule to whether a system can actually remove those in power is pretty useful. I think Trump is definitely trying to degrade the removal aspects but the responsibility part is still very much intact.
We gotta make sure the institutions do a better job of holding but they have so far done an okay job!