Everyone knows that there's a groundswell in the Democratic party, a "netroots"-organized (though not equivalently "-funded") push to move the party back to its progressive roots. Gillespie assumes this as CW, though Bai does go through the trouble of exhaustively documenting the phenomenon. This is universally seen as a good thing, democratic in the positive small-'d' sense of the word. But Churchill was right and so Bai probes, with extensive reporting, the issue of whether the Democrats should become more "progressive." Bai notes that the intellectual heavy-lifting that formed the foundation of the original Progressive movement is nowhere in evidence today. Instead, the 'roots appear to believe that a political philosophy arising from the Industrial Revolution and refined during Vietnam and the Cold War can guide us well today. Bai points out that it can't, and that instead of crafting a true new philosophy for the modern Left, the 'roots have decided that no ideas since the Great Society were worth having and the only issue is which tactics and strategies should be used to elect politicians who put a 'D' after their name.
The result? Well. Gillespie highlights the farm bill passed by the current Congress. It has absolutely no intellectual justification at all. Democrats used to pass such stuff under standard Progressive justifications of supporting the common man, the farmer, the man of the soil, laboring the earth to feed and strengthen America. Then the Republicans came to power and passed the same bills, unabashedly to consolidate their political power in farm states and buy votes. Now the Democrats are back in power, and we know that:
- Farmers are prospering due to high crop prices
- Very few American workers are farmers, and practically none are working "family farms"
- Farming is environmentally harmful; and though alternatives are on the horizon, farm subsidies suppress those alternatives
- Farm subsidies are regressive, transferring wealth to the very rich
So the Democrats pass a bigger farm bill. What to make of this? Gillespie and Bai conclude (based, worry not, on lots of other evidence too) that the Democratic Party has about as much intellectual coherence as...well, as the Republican Party.
Bai has lots of juicy anecdotes, which serve to reinforce the growing belief among voters that the 'roots have an unpleasant flavor of elitism to them. (This is extremely dangerous for the Democrats, not because the elite rich are bad - I happen to think they've got a lot of good things to say - but because the Democrats open themselves to easy, demoralizing charges of hypocrisy because much of their agenda is based on the presumption that the rich are out to harm you. Republicans have always been the party of the rich, but what happens to this country when large numbers of voters realize the Democrats are too?) For example, Bai reports from a Hollywood party where "the host, the billionaire Lynda Resnick, declared from the top of her Sunset Boulevard mansion’s spiral staircase, 'We are so tired of being disenfranchised!'"
The conclusion? Actually there is a very practical conclusion. This country is very clearly in need of a powerful third party to f*k things up - not by winning outright, of course, as that's impossible, but by getting enough seats in Congress that no majority caucus exists to pass an organizing resolution and we get some quasi-parlimentary politics operating. The fact that that is also impossible given current laws should scare the s*t out of everyone. So the practical conclusion is: we must liberalize our election laws. Currently there are two major obstacles to fixing this country: and they are NOT "Democrats and Republicans," as we must not blame our problems on the inevitable presence in the political system of corruption and rent-seeking. The real obstacles are those which prevent the people from fixing things themselves; and those two obstacles are gerrymandering and ballot access laws.
Gerrymandering and ballot access laws; there is a patchwork of state laws regulating these things that has gotten to the point where we need federal constitutional action. I think a very apt analogy is the Articles of Confederation which governed the area of the 13 colonies from independence in 1783 until the new Constitution was ratified in 1790. The Confederation government could not collect revenue directly. The states were expected to collect taxes and make contributions, which sounds ridiculous but really isn't; the U.N. operates that way, for example, and seems to limp along all right. And in fact they did provide a decent amount of revenue; it was just realized that the system was unworkable and could not possibly expand to govern the growing country. We're at the same point now with regard to election law. Each of the 50 states has ceded to each of the other states the power to govern how the national representatives with power over all of us are selected. In California and Texas, for example, which send enough delegates to Congress literally to decide the course of the nation, gerrymandering and ballot signature requirements mean that it is a legal and statistical impossibility for a new party to field a candidate. My point is that this affects us all very profoundly - if California wants to rig its own legislature (as it has), let it do so, but why on earth does a tiny handful of classic smoke-filled-room politicians sitting in Sacremento get to govern this nation?
Elections for federal office should be under federal control - soup to nuts!! That means above all the lines of Congressional districts; but it also means ballot access requirements for federal office; the selection, purchase, and operation of voting machines; voter ID requirements; etc. This will require a Constitutional amendment, but I think that aside from the Bill of Rights that was basically a part of the original Constitution, no amendment other than the 14th[1] was ever so urgently needed. How would this work, exactly? I envision that the Bureau of the Census would be given authority, overseen by an independent nonpartisan panel (such things actually exist - look at the widespread respect for the Federal Reserve and the GAO), to draw the district lines (this detail wouldn't be in the amendment, which would just give the power to Congress, but there would probably quickly be a permanent law establishing the real mechanism). Envision a world without gerrymandering! This would be real, legitimate, nonpartisan, democratic reform.
[1](extra-credit assignment: wrap your head around the fact that right up into the modern era there have been serious states-rights arguments against the very passage of the 14th amendment, blissfully pretending that the little armed insurgency down Dixie way somehow had no effect on any the rights of the states busily engaged in slaughtering the duly commisioned Army of the United States)
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