Such rules run the gamut from technical stipulations that affect only a few specialized businesses to substantial reforms that have a direct impact on the lives of millions. In October , for example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau passed a rule that would require providers of payday loans to determine whether customers would actually be able to pay them back—potentially saving millions of people from exploitative fees, but also making it more difficult for them to access cash in an emergency.
The rise of independent agencies such as the EPA is only a small piece of a larger trend in which government has grown less accountable to the people. In the latter half of the 20th century, the Federal Reserve won much greater independence from elected politicians and began to deploy far more powerful monetary tools.
Most of these treaties and agreements offer real benefits or help us confront urgent challenges. Whatever your view of their merit, however, there is no denying that they curtail the power of Congress in ways that also disempower American voters.
This same tension between popular sovereignty and good governance is also evident in the debates over the power of the nine unelected justices of the Supreme Court.
Since the early s, the Supreme Court has ended legal segregation in schools and universities. It has ended and then reintroduced the death penalty.
It has legalized abortion. It has limited censorship on television and the radio. It has decriminalized homosexuality and allowed same-sex marriage. It has struck down campaign-finance regulations and gun-control measures. It has determined whether millions of people get health insurance and whether millions of undocumented immigrants need to live in fear of being deported. Now that the Court has started to lean further right, these views are rapidly reversing.
Take Citizens United. By overturning legislation that restricted campaign spending by corporations and other private groups, the Supreme Court issued a decision that was unpopular at the time and has remained unpopular since. In a poll by Bloomberg, 78 percent of respondents disapproved of the ruling. It also massively amplified the voice of moneyed interest groups, making it easier for the economic elite to override the preferences of the population for years to come.
Donald Trump is the first president in the history of the United States to have served in no public capacity before entering to the White House. He belittles experts, seems to lack the most basic grasp of public policy, and loves to indulge the worst whims of his supporters.
The antidemocratic view gets at something real. What makes our political system uniquely legitimate, at least when it functions well, is that it manages to deliver on two key values at once: liberalism the rule of law and democracy the rule of the people. If only it were that easy. As we saw in , the feeling that power is slipping out of their hands makes citizens more, not less, likely to entrust their fate to a strongman leader who promises to smash the system.
And as the examples of Egypt, Thailand, and other countries have demonstrated again and again, a political elite with less and less backing from the people ultimately has to resort to more and more repressive steps to hold on to its power; in the end, any serious attempt to sacrifice democracy in order to safeguard liberty is likely to culminate in an end to the rule of law as well as the rule of the people.
The easy alternative is to lean in the other direction, to call for as much direct democracy as possible. Large corporations and the superrich advocated independent central banks and business-friendly trade treaties to score big windfalls.
All of this selfishness is effectively cloaked in a pro-market ideology propagated by think tanks and research outfits that are funded by rich donors. Since the roots of the current situation are straightforwardly sinister, the solutions to it are equally simple: The people need to reclaim their power—and abolish technocratic institutions.
This antitechnocratic view has currency on both ends of the political spectrum. The far right puts more emphasis on nationalism, but otherwise agrees with this basic analysis. Mair and Crouch, Krein and Bannon are right to recognize that the people have less and less hold over the political system, an insight that can point the way to genuine reforms that would make our political system both more democratic and better functioning. One of the reasons well-intentioned politicians are so easily swayed by lobbyists, for example, is that their staffs lack the skills and experience to draft legislation or to understand highly complex policy issues.
This could be addressed by boosting the woefully inadequate funding of Congress: If representatives and senators were able to attract—and retain—more knowledgeable and experienced staffers, they might be less tempted to let K Street lobbyists write their bills for them.
Similarly, the rules that currently govern conflicts of interest are far too weak. There is no reason members of Congress should be allowed to lobby for the companies they were supposed to regulate so soon after they step down from office.
It is time to jam the revolving door between politics and industry. Real change will also require an ambitious reform of campaign finance. Because of Citizens United , this is going to be extremely difficult. But the Supreme Court has had a change of heart in the past.
As evidence that the current system threatens American democracy keeps piling up, the Court might finally recognize that stricter limits on campaign spending are desperately needed. For all that the enemies of technocracy get right, though, their view is ultimately as simplistic as the antidemocratic one.
The world we now inhabit is extremely complex. We need to monitor hurricanes and inspect power plants, reduce global carbon emissions and contain the spread of nuclear weapons, regulate banks and enforce consumer-safety standards. All of these tasks require a tremendous amount of expertise and a great degree of coordination. If we simply abolish technocratic institutions, the future for most Americans will look more rather than less dangerous, and less rather than more affluent.
This, to my mind, is the great dilemma that the United States—and other democracies around the world—will have to resolve if they wish to survive in the coming decades. We need to build a new set of political institutions that are both more responsive to the views and interests of ordinary people, and better able to solve the immense problems that our society will face in the decades to come.
If we rigidly hold on to the status quo, we will lose what is most valuable in the world we know, and find ourselves cast as bit players in the fading age of liberal democracy.
Only by embarking on bold and imaginative reform can we recover a democracy worthy of the name. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
From our March issue Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read. Whatever the form or the idea of the state, man cannot get rid of himself. His philosophy, his vagaries, his stomach, are always with him. Democracy is not an insurance against the consequences of being born into the world. It is no panacea. The state is no better than the men and women in it; it can do no more than they.
A sound statesmanship starts with a sound man. If no such man exists, then he must develop before the healthy state can come. And the people know this; whence their lack of reverence for the state.
It is a thing which they made, and they know its imperfections. Did the farmer make the apple, or the gardener the flower? It is not only political, but industrial honesty that we need.
The coin that is current in a sound state has two sides. Two centuries ago, democracy was necessitated by forests to be cleared, mines to be worked, fields to be ploughed, things to be made. This was at the threshold of a material age in the evolution of democracy. Some rude adjustments must be expected in politics, while yet the industrial apparatus of the people is rude. The intricacies of democracy do not disclose themselves at first view.
It is the administration of government in a democracy that tests its strength. An untouched continent afforded the material opportunity of the modern world. That opportunity was America. Now that the plough has furrowed across the continent, that the primeval forest has been cut down, that the first output of the mines has made this operation more difficult and less remunerative, an industrial adjustment is necessary.
The process of that adjustment is complicated, because it involves both the politics and the labor of the states-men. It demands political recognition. Labor calls upon the state for a guarantee. Labor seeks a political formula by which every man may gain wealth. There is no doubt that this condition implies changes in the state. Is the state hereafter to be defined as an industrial corporation, a copartnership of men for things?
Is the state to he conceived in this material philosophy as a factory for the general welfare? Is it a device to assist those to acquire wealth who are incapable of themselves to acquire it? Is society to be divided into two groups: first, the state and the poor; second, the rich? Is democracy in America, like monarchy and aristocracy in Europe, to develop class interests, — those of the house of Have, and those of the house of Want? Our democracy is evidently in a rudimentary stage.
In spite of our suspicions of its defects, we like the reformers and their reforms no better. We are certain of one error, — the opinion that our democratic institutions would correct the ills of mankind. Wealth brings leisure, and leisure breeds criticism and discontent. A portion of our discontent arises from our limited notions of a democracy. It consists of more than meat and drink and a ballot.
The whole man is involved in it. He is somewhat more than an economic integer. His world is also moral and metaphysical. Material results will never satisfy him. The range of his activities is beyond the merely industrial treadmill. Our boasted mechanical devices are in vain, if the gain by them is merely more material. Moses and Newton got on well without the steam engine or the telegraph. Democracy has for its ultimate that with which it begins, — man.
It is doubtless productive of unexpected results. But in its evolution it must include the whole interest of man. Every actual state, says Emerson, is corrupt. The element of decay in our democracy is the cheapness at which it holds man. This evil has long been known. It was apprehended by the most democratic of American colonizers more than two centuries ago. William Penn had learned from Sidney; he instructed Locke and Montesquieu. To carry this evenness is partly owing to the constitution [that is, the theory of the state], and partly to the magistracy [that is, the administration of government].
Where either of these fails, government will be subject to convulsions; but where both are wanting, it must be totally subverted; then where both meet, the government is like to endure. The convulsion of was an instance in which one of these failed. With the leisure of the twentieth century there come its political convulsions. If, in some way, men and women of leisure could see the necessity for labor, that government of a democratic kind may endure, they would find fields for their best efforts all about them.
Municipal evils are not all in the city hall. Public charity is self-defense in disguise. If they who have amassed wealth desire its safety, it is better to make the use of that wealth a matter of public concern by bringing to its defense those who might destroy it. Time is the best friend of democracy. The canal-boy of to-day is the president of to-morrow. The sons of august senators become street-car conductors. The daughter of old Scrooge founds a hospital, or endows a school.
Labor will have its own. In the evolution of democracy in America, industry shall receive its own, and no more. The administration of government is the chief public concern. But in that administration man must be credited to his full estate. Man, the citizen, must reckon with himself, and face his own destiny. Though crafty devices may seem to shift the burden of citizenship, the burden will always. In democracy, as in other forms of the state, it is government of man for man that is wanted. Constitutional : Our system of government is considered constitutional , because the power exercised by the people and their representatives is bound by the constitution and the broader rule of law.
Federal : Our government is also a federal system, since power is shared between a national government, representing the entire populace, and regional and local governments.
These two terms can come in handy when you want to get really exact with your description. These terms just help us further define our governmental structure, especially when comparing the United States to other countries. In the literal sense of the word, yes. In practice, the answer is more complicated. Our system of government depends on citizens being able to freely elect leaders who will represent their interests.
In a study published , two political scientists found that, on average, the policies representatives pursue are not in fact dictated by public opinion. Share Tweet Email Copy and paste the text below, or send it in a new email message :.
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