A hot topic the last few months here at the League has been the issue of government accountability reform, and how best to loosen the grip of narrow interest groups over the federal government.  In connection with that discussion, I had the good fortune to get in touch with regular League reader Paul Fidalgo, who is currently the communications director for FairVote, a non-partisan think tank dedicated to electoral reforms whose Board of Directors includes personalities ranging from former GOP Congressman and third-party Presidential candidate John Anderson to former Nirvana bassist/activist/author/Washington state politician Krist Novoselic, who was appointed the chairman of FairVote in January 2008.

One of FairVote’s principal initiatives is the National Popular Vote (NPV), which seeks to convince states to give their electoral votes to whichever Presidential candidate wins the popular vote.  NPV legislation would not become binding until states representing a majority of electoral votes passed it.  Paul was kind enough to answer some questions about why the NPV represents an important piece of the accountability puzzle.

Mark: Let’s start with the basics.  What is the National Popular Vote initiative, and why is it important?

Paul Fidalgo: Let me answer the second point first. It is commonly understood that the Electoral College is a little bit odd. No matter who you supported in 2000, it can’t sit well with folks that we have a system in which the guy who got fewer votes than his opponent gets to be president. Plenty of well-meaning people see a lot of good in the Electoral College system, but its all theoretical and academic, and primarily ideological (not in the red-blue sense but in the states’ rights sense). 

In the comments last week, new League contributor Rufus (yay!) asked me whether the “Facebookization of political discourse” comment in my post reacting the President’s State of the Union speech was related to the turn out that the Canadian anti-prorogation rallies on January 23 as compared to the membership counts on various Facebook groups related to the topic. The short answer is yes… and no.

I’ve struggled to write about the whole anti-prorogation (nascent) movement in Canada beyond just presenting and evaluating the what I see as the facts partially because things are still unfolding, but also because I’m so close to it. It’s hard to take a step back and evaluate something you’ve given up whole days to and lost sleep for in anything approaching a cool and comprehensive manner. My view of the whole thing is, by definition, wholly subjective and I am, admittedly, pretty attached to the whole thing having organized the Calgary rally and now becoming involved in national discussions about moving forward.

But let me say that as far as turn out goes, I was pretty happy. The rallies only really had about three to four weeks to get started, organized, and announced. So to pull tens of thousands of people out in what was generally pretty cold weather over what was essentially a Parliamentary procedural issue in approximately sixty different communities across the country ain’t bad results, all told.

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No, according to Larry Diamond, whose paper on Arab democracy is worth reading in full. Here’s an excerpt worth considering for the “Islam is a fundamentally retrograde, anti-modern religion” crowd: [Read more →]

“Revolution requires a transformation of human nature so that people are capable of democracy.” – Michael Hardt, Examined Life (2008)

Last week, commenter and contributor to Grad Student Madness, Rufus, offered the following comment to my post on the inherent and historical  craziness of our modern politics,

I agree completely with the signal to noise argument here. But I’m not entirely comfortable with equating blogging with political “engagement”. It’s certainly intellectual engagement (well, at least, on occasion); but political participation is embodied, isn’t it? Or is that so 20th century? I mean, going to the town council meeting and ranting for your allotted five minutes is clearly engagement. But does that mean that posting the same rant on liberals-suck dot com is also engagement in the political process? I don’t know.

A smart comment and a useful question, to be sure. Rufus was responding to the part of the post where I said,

With the increase in noise, you get an increase in signal that results in more information being available to more people  in a more engaging fashion than ever before. It only makes sense that the din which has always attended political sparring would get all the more rancorous given the necessity of those circumstances. And if the increase in polemics indicates, at very base, an increase in engagement of average individuals in matters political, even if I happen to find that engagement, like Jason, rather tiresome at times, I’ll take it. Democracy is a messy business and it runs on the fuel of participation. Sorting through the muck that results is, frankly, part of the job of caring and ultimately the more muck the greater the potential for those singular gestures of grace.

The “on the face of it” answer to Rufus’ query is to say, no, blogging and political engagement are not the same thing. Indeed, as I suggested in my rant-post on online voting,

Don’t me wrong, I’m a big fan of the Internet, which has provided me with a means of voicing my thoughts to a much wider audience than I would have ever dreamed possible only years prior. But the Internet itself, as a tool, hasn’t made me more civic-minded. Spending time reading about issues, considering those issues and how I feel about them, speaking with other people, cultivating a greater sense of my community, and considering the relationship between my sense of self and those identities that extend into the local, regional, national, and global spheres have made me passionate about politics and my civic life.

So I think there is a real need to be careful about seeing the virtual reality of online activity is an appropriate stand-in for good old fashioned civic engagement and I don’t think that cultivating such a skepticism is, as Rufus puts it, “so 20th century”, as much as it is critical in the twenty-first century. At the same time, and getting back to the meat of Rufus’ question, neither do I think that blogging/Facebooking/etc. have nothing to do with political engagement and civic responsibility. My weekend is a good example of how this is the case. [Read more →]

That was the title of a post from Michelle Malkin on October 27, 2008 in which she added,

It would be another sign of “insane rage” and “violent escalation of rhetoric.” And: RAAAAAAACISM.

But string up a mannequin of Sarah Palin from a rope, and it’s just all in good Halloween fun.

Well, wonder no more, Michelle, because one such effigy* was recently found in Plains, Georgia, home of 39th United States President Jimmy Carter. The reaction from the vast liberal media conspiracy? What response there has been (not a front pager, this one) has stuck to, uh, just the facts, ma’am.

Meanwhile, Instapundit author Glenn Reynolds’ proof positive image of Obama’s haughty condescension has set the blogosphere alight with speculation and debate while the Rush Limbaugh death watch has PoliGazzette’s Jason Arvak sounding the death knell for relevance, focus, and seriousness in political blogging (due exception to the League noted),

And people wonder why fewer and fewer people even bother to write for the blogosphere any more. What’s the point? It’s all just scripts and sharp-elbowed attacks these days. Relatively few bloggers care about anything but somehow “winning” in their hate-war against those who disagree, and the very few who try to sustain some kind of real discourse get shouted down or, more commonly, just plain shunned by the systematic refusal of links.

In 2009, just four short days ago, I probably would have been right there with Jason in shaking my head about all of the above stories and the range of reactions to them, but a ten day blogging sabbatical complete with time to reflect on just what the hell I do on a day-to-day basis at this very site has yielded a slightly different response. I think we need to stop running through the agonized shirt tearing about the ridiculousness of the political blogosphere every time the antics of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Al Franken, or Keith Olbermann take centre stage and reconcile ourselves to a hard truth: this is our politics. [Read more →]

In my recently concluded interview with Publius from ObsidianWings on the role of the administrative state, a central question was how citizens can better hold the executive and legislative branches accountable and prevent regulatory capture.  It seems clear to me (although Publius may disagree) that these issues are closely related to the issue of growth of executive power in recent years, as Congress increasingly abdicates responsibility for the quality of government to the regulatory state and we increasingly view the President as something of an omnipotent legislator-in-chief. 

I. The Problem

The result of this abdication is largely an inability for citizens to hold government accountable for its actions or inactions.  Congress winds up blaming the Executive Branch for just about everything as a means of justifying its own inaction to remedy past mistakes.  The President blames Congress for failing to pass his legislative agenda while largely ignoring the way in which the regulatory state that he oversees gets captured by narrow interests. 

Meanwhile, the President winds up being the sole person we are willing or able to hold accountable….if the economy is good, we credit the President; if the economy is bad, we blame the President.  We dislike Congress, to be sure, but high incumbent re-election rates show that we are unwilling to actually place blame on our own members of Congress.  At best, we vote out a couple members of Congress in swing districts as a proxy for the President’s popularity (which is in turn a proxy for the state of the economy and the perception of our geopolitical status). 

The Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority leader are hardly immune from criticism and are certainly higher profile than just about any other member of Congress, but even there, we have little ability to hold them accountable for how well they are doing their jobs as long as they remain reasonably popular in their home districts and states. 

II.  The Solution: Turn On The Speakers

There is a simple, if perhaps only partial, solution to this twin problem of abdication of responsibility by Congress and lack of accountability for the administration of the regulatory state: nationalize the election of the Speaker of the House. 

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As many people should know, Obsidian Wings is often a bastion of worthwhile discussion and debate combined with unapologetic opinion in the sea of hackery and straw men that is the political blogosphere.  Over the last several days, the site’s most prolific blogger, as well as an expert on communications law and a passionate advocate of net neutrality, Publius (known in real-life as law professor John Blevins) was kind enough to indulge me (who once likewise blogged using a derivation of Publius as a pseudonym) in an exchange of e-mails on the interplay between regulation, legislation, and democratic accountability, and what the FCC’s recent actions on net neutrality say about it.  For the sake of the readers’ sanity, I should note upfront that the questions get significantly shorter and more focused as the interview wears on, and Publius may deserve sainthood for his ability to respond to the first question at all.

Mark: One aspect of American policy that tends to get little attention in our public discourse is that of administrative law, rulemaking, and adjudication, not to mention even more discretionary issues such as enforcement priorities.  Yet, at least on the federal level, this is quite often where the real “action” is.  With some notable exceptions, it seems (to me, at least) that it is physically impossible for government agencies to uniformly enforce all of the laws and regulations on the books, almost no matter how many resources we give to those agencies. Meanwhile, rulemaking procedures are often immune from the kind of democratic accountability that theoretically exists in the legislative branches – they are uniquely low-visibility, often – though certainly not always - attracting the input only of the most interested players with the biggest budgets.  Even where rulemaking succeeds in overcoming these more basic regulatory capture concerns, the resulting regulations are still inevitably of the one-size-fits-all variety, such that the largest players often wind up increasing their comparative advantage over small players, even where it was the malfeasance of the large players that created the impetus for the rule in the first place.  Additionally, the wide grant of quasi-legislative powers and enforcement discretion to administrative authorities has seemingly given Congress the ability to duck responsibility for its own action or inaction by allowing it to blame agency bureaucrats and appointees for various problems.  For example, we often hear GOP politicians argue quite plausibly against gun control legislation on the grounds that it is only necessary to enforce existing gun laws; meanwhile, to take another issue near and dear to my heart, Democratic politicians avoid responsibility for the nasty effects of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act by claiming that those effects are the result of an improper interpretation by the CPSC.

First, I do think the benefits of a strong administrative state outweigh the harms.  My vision of the administrative state isn’t quite as bleak as what you described, though I certainly share some of your frustrations and skepticism.

In general, I think problems with the regulatory state often reflect external problems.  For instance, if wealth and power are concentrated, then those disparities in political power will be reflected in rulemakings.  If, by contrast, there is less concentration, then rulemaking will benefit from more adverse, competing “vectors.”

Similarly, if one of our political parties views regulatory action essentially as a means to enrich industry, then that too will be reflected in the ultimate rulemaking and adjudications.  But that’s a problem with the intellectual state of the political party more than with the administrative state.

Finally, if the broad public isn’t organized and engaged (particularly at an institutional level), that too will be reflected.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Indeed, I think the FCC’s recent actions on open networks and net neutrality show the promise of administrative action, and undermines public choice skepticism (a topic we’ve discussed before).

First, the proposals show that you don’t necessarily need powerful rich industry groups to make change happen.  Open networks are the result of lobbying by underfunded, idealistic public interest organizations like Free Press.  The bigger content companies like Google aren’t doing much heavy lifting.  And I think, frankly, that Democratic policymakers are more attentive to policy at this point in history.

Second, the FCC’s actions show the importance of political mobilization and organization-creation.  In many instances, rich industry groups get their way simply because they’re the only people in the room providing information to policymakers.  In a sense, policymakers often read the brief from only one party.

With the rise of public interest and watchdog organizations, policymakers have more sources of information.  The process, therefore, isn’t hopelessly corrupt — it’s just that a lack of organization is depriving policymakers from hearing other voices.  Legislative and regulatory staffers are busy, and it’s an enormous benefit to receive useful information wherever they can get it. [Read more →]

I don’t generally find myself lined up with the likes of Michael Moore, but I can’t help feeling a certain sense of camaraderie with the sentiments he recently expressed to Democrats like Max Baucus and Kent Conrad,

To the Democrats in Congress who don’t quite get it: I want to offer a personal pledge. I – and a lot of other people – have every intention of removing you from Congress in the next election if you stand in the way of health care legislation that the people want[.]

One has to always be careful with and wary of the use of phrases like, “the people”, of course. Moore can’t possibly think (or at least certainly shouldn’t think) that every single Democratic voter, let alone the moniker of all Americans to which a catch-all like, “the people” might point, are supportive of a public option in the way that he and those who agree with him are. But it remains true that for all the controversy and haggling, there is reasonable base of support for the public option amongst Americans.

Given that support, the kind of galling concern-trollery one hears coming from the lips of Max Baucus sort of begs to be met with war cries. To the point I made last Friday, there is a troublesome disingenuous in the studied ballet of Baucus’ political pirouettes that has left many wondering what the real intentions at play here are. Politics as the art of the possible notwithstanding, do we really know what is possible before even trying or in the facing of hedging against possible outcomes from the outset of the debate? [Read more →]

On foreign policy, I’m something of a realist/intervention-skeptic, which is why I’m inclined to agree with Daniel Larison when he argues that democratization isn’t terribly compatible with stability:

Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Andrew Sullivan, democracy booster that he is, disagrees:

I don’t buy the argument that in the long run, autocracies are more stable than democracies, even in the Middle East.

Look at Iran. There are enormous risks to over-speedy democratization, especially in the Arab Middle East, but in the long run, democracies, by giving people the ability to vent and protest through nonviolent means are far stabler than the alternative.  It’s how to get from there to here in a minefield full of ancient grievance and weapons of mass destruction that’s the hard part.

I think it’s important here to make a distinction between “democratization” – the process of developing democratic institutions – and “democracy” as a set of institutions and norms.  Larison is absolutely correct to say that democratization is a tremendously destabilizing process; democratic transition is often accompanied by a wholesale abandonment of traditions and norms which maintained some semblance of stability.  And obviously, when we sweep those away in the name of equality, and absent any tradition of respect for minority rights, we – as Larison explains – empower people “with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements.”  It’s not much of a surprise that the collapse of colonialism and subsequent rapid democratization coincided with a terrible epidemic of ethnic violence in the developing world.

I think Sullivan is right to say that in the long-run, democracies (and more importantly, democratic cultures) are far more stable than the alternative, because they do give people the space to protest and resist.  That said, I think he’s being a bit overly optimistic: there’s no guarantee that the instability of democratization will calmly segue into something enduring.  In every case of democratization, there is the very real chance that those initial “birth pangs” (to borrow a phrase from Secretary Rice) will lead to a long-term period of instability and near-chaos for everyone involved. Trying to build a democracy is, in a lot of ways, like looking down the barrel of a gun.

Ezra Klein is worried that our dysfunctional debate over health care reform is symptomatic of broader problems with our democracy:

What we’re seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It’s distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the “institutional checks” that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government — and by extension, their fellow citizens — capable of.

And Will Wilkinson thinks that Ezra is being deeply – dangerously -  naive:

It requires an amazing kind of selective amnesia to think that there is “no evidence’ that the U.S. government is “capable of madness.” The government of the United States invaded Iraq and its agents have killed many tens of thousands people on the basis of the fact that some Saudis trained in Afganistan flew planes into the World Trade Center, plus some lies. Torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, etc. I call that madness. Of course, Ezra means the other parts of government concerned with domestic affairs. But not the parts that break into peoples’ houses and destroy their lives for selling contraband herbs, or that subject us constantly to mendacious propaganda about drugs. Our government — and by extension our fellow citizens — is capable of terrible things and proves it every single day. Is it really possible to love government so much, to invest so much hope in its benevolent efficacy, that we grow blind to its evident capacity for evil?

I’m inclined to side with Will here; as he notes, it doesn’t take much more than a quick glance at the past eight years (or the whole of American history, really) to understand that our government, like any other, has immense capacity for evil.  That said, I don’t want to completely dismiss Ezra.  Yes, he’s wrong about the government’s capacity for “madness” but I’m not sure that that actually invalidates his argument.  After all, even by fairly lenient standards, these protesters aren’t very informed: they don’t have a terribly sophisticated knowledge of American political history, and they almost certainly aren’t aware of the “madness” of the past few years.  In fact, if they are aware of the previous administration’s transgressions, I’d be surprised if they were actually bothered by any of them.  In all likelihood, these are the people who were stoked about invading Iraq, and cheered on the administration after Abu Ghraib.

This is all to say that Ezra is, in some sense, completely right.  For the protesters and the teabaggers, there is absolutely nothing in their political ideology which would lead them to believe that the government was capable of madness.  Yes, you could say that these are “small government” conservatives with an inherent distrust of authority, but again, most of these folks sat through – and probably applauded – the massive Bush-era expansions in the size and scope of government.  My guess is that these are folks who have completely lost their faith and trust in the ability of government to represent them in their interest.  But, insofar that they lack trust, I don’t think it’s because they are hyper-aware of the government’s various misdoings and moral failings.  Instead, they no longer believe that America has the moral bearings to choose an adequate leader.  To them, Obama is utterly foreign and it defies belief that a majority of Americans could have elected him.  That they did not only signals that the system is broken, but that they are at its absolute mercy.

It’s that, I think, which is the source of the fear, the rancor and the sheer, unvarnished hatred.

*I’ve been looking for a way to use this song as a post title for weeks.

“Moussavi passed through this system of ideological control; he’s no radical reformer. But what’s happened is that simply by representing an alternative, Moussavi became a vehicle for the expression of the hopes of people who are far more radical in their reformist attitudes than anyone in the dominant power structure. Even though the players in the Iranian elections were all screened for their personal views, the simple fact of an election became a forum in which radical and unacceptable political views could express themselves and ultimately co-opt one of the candidates.”  ~ Matt Steinglass

The Killers Live, Gentrification of the Rock Show, and Vitality of Democracy

On April 26 I had unmitigated privilege of going to see the Killers live here in Calgary. I say that it was an unmitigated privilege because it was one of the best rock shows I have ever been to; not the best, but certainly top ten. I went into the show with an appreciation for the Killers’ music, I came out a newly died in the wool fan (of the fanatical variety).

I think it goes without saying that there are plenty of bad bands/musicians out there, but I think it also bears noting that there are many good bands making music, as well. With the kind of revolutions in recording technology that we now know, it is, at least to my mind, not quite the feat it once was to create a good album full of good music — music that deserves to be recorded, released, and listened to. There are any number of tricks available to musicians to make a voice sound better than it might otherwise, writers and session musicians who can beef up the quality of instrumentation presented, effects that can blow the mind. In some senses, the creation of a good album has become as much, if not more, a process of construction than an art form. I don’t begrudge anyone those technological training wheels and I’m not a purist or a Luddite when it comes to music. But I think this reality is worth noting when we talk about music.

That is why, for me, the live concert as a litmus test for truly great musicianship and artistry has become all the more important. There are lots of things that one can embellish or even fake in the studio, but a great show is a great show and no size or opulence of light and laser show can substitute the chills one gets from a truly great live band with stage presence who are engaged in the infectious and energizing alchemy of their trade.

And it is here that the Killers got me.

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