bestkungfu weblog

More in the ping-pong match between myself and Jay McCarthy on blogging, politics, and maybe some new stuff I’ll throw in here.

Jay continues:

So this is the distinct between Delegate and Trustee, and further — at what level should we delegate? I agree that there should not be a vote about every single issue. The best solution, in my opinion, would be to allow a vote whenever the people cared enough to make one. Currently, you can contact your representatives is a very ad-hoc, unreliable, and unresponsive way. I can call and get put on hold, email and not get answered, mail and get a template letter back, protest and be hidden from sight. This is not representative democracy. This is “electing” dictators.

I want to have a say. I want people who claim I’ll have a say when they get elected to give me a say right now. I want to be more than a vote for an idea, I want to be a generator of ideas. I want to be more than a source of money. And I want all of you to be too!

I want my representatives to be responsive, too. But I know that there are limits to what can be accomplished, and that I need to be reasonably patient. Some things take time, and getting 435 of anybody to work together on anything is one of those things. Politicians do tend to ignore emails, form letters and faxes, but that’s because they’re low-effort and easy to manipulate. (Still, most members of Congress count pro and con mail, calls, faxes and emails.) Simply raising the profile of a message to indicate your personal involvement (for example, a handwritten letter) is substantially more effective, and really, not too much to ask for your favorite cause. But this is related to communicating with individual pols, and thus pretty subjective.

I did dream when I was very young of an age where we could just log into terminals and vote daily on the issues of the day. (I think it was because I went to EPCOT Center.) I also dreamed that I would one day be a candidate that takes the opinions of each constituent, weighs them, and impartially delivers them to Congress.

The problem with this is that anyone who takes this path is unelectable. There are patterns in the drawer of every party operative to paint a candidate that’s listening quietly to issues during a campaign as uninformed on the issues. Someone “who’ll do anything to get elected.” An idiot, a hack. Or worse, a liar.

It presumably would take its toll on a candidate, as well. A candidate that’s not hard-wired on at least a few issues is bound to be a mediocre policymaker, at best. That’s why we have debates, instead of just choosing who we think is most trustworthy in evaluating our demands as constituents. Politicians moved into their positions because of a desire to make better policy, for their definition of “better”.

And once in office, the average Representative has 600,000 citizens in the home district. There comes a time when the decision has to be final. I wonder if Jay would be happier with a confederacy, in which state representatives representing a few thousand people apiece have most of the power, and the federal government has limited constitutional powers related to commerce, defense, and settling issues between states.

What can you do to ensure that your voice is always represented in the legislature? Join it. Even then, your results may be mixed. You could find yourself sponsoring a bill that you end up voting against, because it was laden with enough pork or poison-pill riders that it cancels out the benefit you wanted. And sometimes, that puts you in exactly the position your opposition wants. In the case of Max Cleland, a vote against the homeland security bill that he had pushed years beforehand because the Republicans demanded that the new positions be classified something other than civil service jobs cost him his Georgia Senate seat. Cleland sat there, with three limbs missing from fighting in Vietnam, while a chickenhawk named Saxby Chambliss told the people of Georgia that Cleland was unpatriotic and soft on national defense. And Chambliss, with millions in Republican soft money, won.

It’s a horrible environment. Campaign finance reform may help curb such shameless power plays from happening, but in my mind, what needs to happen is for the equation of corporation = citizen to be negated before any real improvement happens.

In June, Thomas C Greene of the Register wrote a description of the House that was so good, I had to blog about it:

(…)Representatives must stand elections every two years and therefore exist in a campaign steady-state, and dare not anger the media behemoths on whom they depend for money and publicity.

Jay responds to my assertion that we would have nuked the Middle East if we’d all taken a vote on September 12th:

This is probably a joke, but I comment regardless. Protecting ourselves from that sort of result is what a division of power and mutual restraint would be effective at. If the country had the right amount of information and foresight, I don’t think that would even be proposed. But if it was, and if it was past, then that horrible country would deserve whatever they got.

It wasn’t a joke. I think that a country which was hurt the way we were would have a visceral response that outmatches the stimulus. I think that if a nuclear remedy were on the table for all to see, we would have allowed ourselves to think our way out of it. That’s not politics, that’s an angry mob with more power than good sense. Information and foresight is not what you get from the guys with the torches and pitchforks.

And I see the allure of Jay’s approach, which is for everyone to demand a redress of their grievances, and have them all individually addressed in good time. But I can’t believe that such a system would be successful, beyond the arrangement we currently have. It’s a wonderful ideal, in which hundreds of millions of informed citizens hash out their issues in informed debate, and enlightened decisions occur. But that is untenable in this country and culture we have constructed. Irrespective of the interest and reasoning power of the population, which is where I think Jay and I are of widely differing opinions, this environment requires good faith from all sides of the debate. Those invested in the status quo would do everything in their power to subvert the will of any voices that are not theirs. Should they succeed in any facet, we will have arrived at a system that is far more open to abuse than this one, I fear.

Or maybe I’m talking past Jay, and he’s saying that he just wants his politicians to listen to him (and others). I don’t have that problem right now with two of my three Congresscritters, who do listen to voters, and tend to respond meaningfully to thoughtful appeals. (The third, Maria Cantwell, isn’t getting high marks from much of anyone around here, that I can tell. And that will shake itself out in due time.) I can see how a number of barriers that have built themselves up over the years could be swept away for the benefit of the voter. I just have to stay on the side of evolution rather than revolution.

I’m stopping now before I get into game theory.