The last month or so hasn’t been very good for me as a blogger…I feel like I’ve lost the will to write, and what has always been very easy for me (writing) suddenly became very hard.
I was mulling over why this weekend, deciding what to do, and kind of came to a conclusion about why, at least.
It’s just massively depressing.
While few Democratic bloggers are big fans of mine, I have always at core been a Democrat. I really did believe that a new President, who followed the dicta of openness and who put down the partisan cudgels might be able to make desperately-needed change happen in Washington.
I really did believe that my leaders in Sacramento would wake up as the car approached the edge of the cliff and turn us away.
And I was naive on both counts – first, for believing that Obama meant what he said, or that the clowns sitting in the California Legislature were capable of change.
I really didn’t want to write anything about this, because it just seemed – whiny and unhappy.
But my more-mainstream-liberal friend Kevin Drum broke the ice for me today…
…rejecting the eminently qualified and reasonable Maldonado for the inconsequential job of lieutenant governor – apparently because Dems were unwilling to allow a Hispanic Republican to gain a higher profile – was both stupid and loathsome. And making the repeal of Prop 11 [the antigerrymandering proposition – AL] their highest priority is – well, let’s just go with stupid and loathsome again. These guys aren’t really worth a trip to the thesaurus.
The depth of California’s political suckitude is hard to fathom. It’s like a contest from hell, where both parties try to outdo each other in sleaze and contemptibility. Republicans have a pretty big lead, but it’s not insurmountable. Apparently Democrats are out to prove it.
I feel like I’m watching all my worst predictions come true…the hollowing out of the US job markets and economy…the political and business elites ignoring the impending crises in order to cling (bitterly) to power and advantage…the reinforced ‘iron rice bowl’ of rent-seeking by public sector employees, politicians, and corporations – all seeking to mutually reinforce their positions on the backs of the rest of us.
It’s going to stop. It’ll stop when we finally gather the political will to do something about it, or else it will stop when it simply can’t go on any further and crashed to the ground. I’d prefer the former…
We are led by good people who are trapped within a system that transforms them into the ‘stupid and loathesome.’ We need to fix that…
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Ah, Kevin Drum. Reading his old blog was the proximate cause of my leaving the Democratic Party. Kevin himself wasn’t so bad, rather conventional even, but the folks in the comment section were frankly insane. There was no tent big enough…
I think the proposition that a powerful government tends inevitably to rent seeking and dysfunction is worthy of consideration. The founders certainly seemed to give it some weight.
So I assume it won’t shock you that I’m gonna go with “Whaaaa!”. Heh, how dare you believe that politicians can do positive things, they are evil and at best all you can hope for is incompetence.
Fool!
Cordially,
Uncle J
“Gleefully watching the Dems dreams of a socialist paradise crash and burn”
Yes! Exactly!
I live in Rhode Island — smaller than California but our state legislature has a similar proportion of total losers. (I am unable to decide if they are more corruptly incompetent or incompetently corrupt.)
It is, however, on the national scale that these freakin’ morons (both Democrat and Republican) truly scare the crap out of me. There will come some point from which we will not be able to recover and I fear for my children and grandchildren.
Jimbo’s right. It’s much less depressing when you set your expectations at a sufficiently low level.
We are led by good people who are trapped within a system that transforms them into the ‘stupid and loathesome.
Part of the problem may be the assumption that it is the system that is bad but yet the people in it are good. Seems to me that the system is in many ways a product of the people in it rather than the other way around.
Frankly, IMO the worst sort of people are generally the ones who enter politics as “activists†whiles the best people are the ones who want as little to do with government as possible.
I used to comment frequently on blogs and a small baseball-oriented discussion group. I gave it up about 4 years ago, and now will only comment rarely. A friend asked me at a ballgame why, and would I start commenting again; I told him that I wouldn’t, because the people I agreed with had begun to annoy me as much as the people I disagreed with.
Sadly, the title of your post has it right.
The system has degraded to the point where it rewards selfish careerism. They have access to way too much money and their hands are in way too many pies. There are no institutional controls forcing them to choose between rent-seekers – it’s easier to run up the deficit some more. There being no reason for them to make hard choices, they don’t – staying on the gravy train, rewarding their friends, etc. is their focus. As presently written, the job description screams “GRAFT!!!!!”
Absent real, structural limitations on these people’s power, the dysfunction will continue until the system collapses.
We’re at this point because, to date, “we the people” haven’t demanded better.
I don’t know about good people there now, but the problem is clearly systemic and corrupting. The Porkbusters and now Tea Party movements are one response to this, arguing for more modest government particularly in fiscal policy. I wish them luck (and I’ve been to three tea parties in the DC area), but I know that the movement will fail because the system is too democratic (small ‘d’ important) to be anything other than corrupt and fiscally irresponsible.
Consider: the key feature that differentiates politicians (and CEOs for that matter) from the rest of us is the will to power. In practical terms, that means that politicians will seek power relentlessly, and having gotten it, will do everything in their power to retain it. Retaining power in our system requires two things: money and public happiness. The money (for campaigning — ideally, you want enough to convince your opposition not to even show up) — leads to the corruption. But the really pernicious aspect is the happiness. The reason that this is pernicious is that it incentivizes putting the burdens of citizenship on as few people as possible, and spreading the benefit as widely as possible. If I’m one of the 50% or so of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, my incentive is to demand as many payouts as possible. Are the 10% who pay 70% of the taxes going to outvote the 50% who pay no taxes? Clearly not.
Without electoral reform that limits the franchise to people with an interest in the future of the country (owners of real, illiquid property; parents of dependent children; people with a record of military or emergency service; etc), we will continue down this road until we reach a crisis of existential proportions; the incentives allow no other outcome.
I dunno. I agree it’s depressing, and I agree I don’t really know what to do about it. I’m sort of with Grim. I never figured Obama was a cure for anything, except possibly a victim mentality among young black men and women. Some good may come of that. Plus, I’m somewhat gratified that you can still see the founding principles from here. They’re not completely out of sight or mind.
My political will has been dwindling for awhile now. Last year my Mother-In-Law was diagnosed with cancer, and then passed away in November. As she started getting sicker, (and the political system seemed to buckel simultaneously) I really lost a lot of interest.
The way I look at it, the last 8 years has shown a republican majority, followed by a democratic majority. And in that time, we were able to fix…. I can’t think of a single thing.
That basically shows that neither party is willing to make the tough decisions needed to fix all the problems in our country (infastructure, grid, energy problems, healthcare, etc)
And one of the biggest problems is the left-said/right-said banter that only encapsulates the (they fail/I win) attitude. Of course, as the legislature continues to fail, so do we all.
Enjoyed your post because I think it reflects many peoples’ frustration no matter where they are on the political continuum.
Although I am a democrat, I run my own life with fiscal restraint. While both parties have been big spenders, it is Obama with his stimulus and runaway budget that is breaking our back. On the back burner is HC and cap and trade, based on science that is falling apart, which will only push the country into more debt. We are trillions of dollars in the hole, the private sector has no confidence in this man, and thus there will be very little job creation except in the govt. and public service areas.
There is no other party to balance the democrats agenda except for the Republicans. So, I hope 2010 has a reset in who it sends back to Congress!
Some of my ramblings:
1. The government itself is our biggest problem, primarily because it can’t do anything without being hugely expensive, intrusive, and inefficient. If you want the government to “solve problems”, you have to first fix the government before talking about “sacrifice”.
The Age of Bureaucracy, inspired by “progressive” ideas of a professionalized civil service organized hierarchically and responsible to elected officials, using “scientific management” to “solve” society’s ills, is clearly coming to an end. It’s ending due to the sheer weight of social complexity and the cost of the bureaucracy itself.
People know this, but can’t imagine what “comes after”. I’m not sure either, but if I were a mid-career bureaucrat, I’d be very worried.
I read “the death of common sense” a few years back, basically about how beaurocracy prevents work from getting done, and also protects those who are responsible from damage.
The last ten years has been a perfect example of this: the stimulus, the bank bailout, 9/11 all were the failures of overly complicated systems (where no one is truly in charge) and those responsible for the muck-up have been insulated (or even rewarded) for the damage.
If I remember correctly, the writer of “Death of common sense” even had a few good words for the “New Deal” even though he disliked the bearocracy that followed. I’m paraphrasing here: but I believe he said:
One of the reasons that the New Deal worked is that FDR reached through the beaurocracy to assign specific men in charge of specific operations. If an operation failed, it would be there head on a plater.
This is remarkably different from how government currently works, and I think that’s because the powers at be (donors, politicians, lobbyists) like it that way. The more complicated a system is, the less responsible each person becomes, and everything fails.
I’m kind with Thorley, here, and invite this thought experiment.
Think of the kinds of negative parental interactions a lot of teachers experience. I’m talking about the parents who seem to think the rules shouldn’t apply to their kid, or who lie for their kids and encourage them to do likewise, relentlessly looking for an ‘edge’ deserved or not, etc.
Does anyone believe that has not become a lot more common in the past 30 years? With few to no meaningful sanctions for that kind of behaviour?
And if you do believe it’s more common and has fewer realistic controls, why wouldn’t you expect the same sorts of behaviours and trends at higher levels in society?
Yes, all the things Public Choice Theory talks about, and the Founders knew, are true. But a system ultimately is built upon a culture. There is no political system in the world that will make Haiti rich and successful, if the system must be implemented and run locally. None. Zero.
A culture that tries, at all levels, to take a holiday from accountability and consequences will eventually find that they just reap a different set of consequences, with much less ability to plan or react.
A culture that couples this with a system that destroys limited government reaps the kind of perfect stprm usually reserved for lying movies about environmental catastrophes.
The 2 keys here are to use the resulting crises as teaching moments with respect to the system, while pushing on a parallel track for Consequences (capital C) in our society. The previous comment about FDR’s approach illustrates the natural m.o. of a Consequences Society. I use that word instead of “accountability” because the latter has become near-meaningless. In fact, if the Consequences movement goes well enough, a lot of the systemic trash will get taken out in due course.
David Brook’s “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/opinion/19brooks.html/ today about the change in the power elite bears on this. He looks at some systemic changes.
1. A change to a meritocracy. The smart and hard working from all quarters can advance to positions of power (which is good); the flip side, he suggests, is that the particular skills that are rewarded don’t necessarily include being able to grasp context, empathy, and other fuzzier virtues that have served past generations well. Thus although the power elite may be better trained and “smarter” something (what?) may have been lost in the process. Joe suggests there is a malaise of people who narrowly think the rules shouldn’t apply to them. Brooks, here, is pointing to something different. I think the people he has in mind all play very much by the rules, they are accountable, they are smart. Perhaps, he suggests, we have the wrong rules for advancement?
2. The loss of integration of society at the local level. [The head of the biggest bank in a small town used to be local, maybe marry a secretary; now he’s remote and marries another banker] That sounds spot on. The fact that many of these power structures now run abroad makes the loss of loyalty to the local that much greater. That’s a huge challenge systemically. I don’t think that genie can be put back in the bottle, can it? So what can replace it?
3. Loss of leadership class solidarity. Term limits, corporate financing of campaigns, the public media all help to tear this down. In sport and politics the fiercest fights happen when the pecking order is unstable. One of the reasons the political pecking order is so unstable at this time is because the minority has so much power in the Senate. How do we foster better collegiality among the leadership elite? After 230 years we may need some structural changes to bring better stability to the system.
4. Shrinking time horizons. The lack of intergenerational self-interest. This observation seems spot on as well. How do we get corporate leaders as well as political leaders to focus better on the long term?
5. Government is too transparent he suggests. Transparency of a disfunctional mess surely is what makes us all despair. I’m not sure, however, that less transparancy would solve anything. We all need to have a realistic undestanding of the level of disfunction and hypocrisy that is unavoidable, and some tolerance of it. Beyond that, what can we do to keep this down to a dull roar?
Now what does that remind me of? Oh, yeah…
Roland,
David Brookszzz zzz zzzzzzz …. sorry, what were you saying? After all the water over his particular bridge, I’m supposed to take him seriously?
_Transparency of a dysfunctional mess surely is what makes us all despair. I’m not sure, however, that less transparency would solve anything._
While I don’t completely agree, it is an interesting point. A “founding fathers” expert was on the white house at one point last year, and basically said that the only way the constitution got finished is by locking constituents into an office and forbidding them to talk to anyone about the negotiations process.
I think 24-hour news creates “transparency” without understanding. It puts you in the blow-by-blow of negotiations, without really understanding what the negotiations aim to accomplish. You suddenly have massive resistance to parts of a bill THAT DOESN’T EVEN EXIST. Yes, it’s transparent, but it’s not illuminating.
And I think (at times) this transparency can freeze political gains (for good or ill) before they even take form. Like possoms, politicians can’t tell where the danger is from, so they just lie dead (or entrench themselves further into a political dogma)
It’s a small thing, but if there’s ONE thing that I’d want to see enacted, it’s that NOBODY is exempted from paying some amount of tax on their income, no matter HOW SMALL that income might be. As it is, we’ve convinced ourselves that somehow it’s more FAIR to exempt the poor…and then we’re surprised when they vote to spend more of OUR money. And why shouldn’t they vote for more government wealth redistribution. After all, it’s no skin off THEIR nose. On the other hand, if their taxes went up along with everybody else’s, they might see things a little more realistically.
I thought that Alchemist (#17) had an astute point about the ramifications of having a 24/7 news cycle giving people “transparency” without understanding. I hadn’t really looked at that facet of dilution of ideas by having fits of news diarrhea.
Also Clioman’s (#18) contribution about “everyone” paying a little tax is something I totally agree with. When going through life free of taxation people tend to intellectualize the idea of being taxed by saying, “Oh, they can afford it more than me.”
I also might add that I think instead of taxes being taken out of paychecks directly, people should have to write that check themselves at tax time. It would make an indelible impression on them, putting taxation into perspective.