Raising America

The U.S. political system “sucks. . . a parliamentary system without majority rule.”

--John Podesta, ex-chief, Obama Transition Team

Democrats thought all they had to do was return to power, and the country would get better. After all, Democrats are the national elite, have the brains and wealth, dominate the media, government, unions, academia, and the non-profit world, and control the mass culture. Their strength at the top explains why one of the meritocracy’s own, Barack Obama, became leader of us all. Once Democrats took back the White House office suites “that Texas cowboy” usurped for eight hopeless years, America would begin working once again.

A year later, after one year of total Democratic control, things still aren’t working. Signs of real concern, even desperation, are appearing within Democratic ranks. James Fallows is the Democratic former Atlantic Washington editor and U.S. News editor who in an earlier life was the first insider to write that Jimmy Carter’s presidency was failing. Now Fallows takes on our current failure in a long (nearly 11,000 words) Atlantic cover article titled, “How America Can Rise Again." Everything about Fallows’ package says, “IMPORTANT! MUST READ!”

You don't have to read it. Fallows takes a long road to say it’s our political system, not its leader, that “sucks.” As Fallows puts it, “the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke.” Fallows uses the word “demosclerosis” and says, “One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is ‘I wish we had a Senate like yours.’” He adds, “since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12% of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes.”

Actually, the GOP’s “blocking minority” of 41 includes senators from half the nation's 10 largest states: Texas (#2 in population), Florida (#4), Ohio (#7), Georgia (#9), and North Carolina (#10). An inconvenient truth, as is recalling that when Republicans wanted to bypass the filibuster in 2005-6 to confirm Bush’s Supreme Court nominees Democrats were blocking, Democrats branded any such move “the nuclear option”—something never to be done. Now that filibusters have instead frustrated Democrats seeking universal health care and cap-and-trade climate control, Fallows thinks it’s time to overcome “demosclerosis” with a constitutional fix of the Senate.

Elsewhere in the article, Fallows raises additional concerns for anyone who thinks compromise is necessary to democracy. Quoting another source, he calls cities ineffective because they have “different sections with different constituencies: labor, the city council, the mayor, interest groups, and contractors. Every [constituency] a brake, so lots of people can stop the [city] anytime.” Isn't that how democracy is supposed to work--it forces dialog between differing interests? Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” But Fallows leaves Churchill unmentioned, instead quoting John Adams who wrote, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Fallows’ solution to our current political situation is, and I’m not joking, to wish for “an enlightened military coup, or some other deus ex machina by the right kind of tyrants.” Fallows doesn’t really want generals to rule America (he calls David Petraeus unworthy of comparison with the “right men on horseback” like George Washington or Dwight Eisenhower—neglecting to mention both were elected twice so didn’t need coups). Fallows favors “plutocrats” instead, plutocrats like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates (!), or Ted Turner (!!!).

You can’t make this stuff up. To be fair, Fallows is realistic enough to write he won’t get his Ted Turner dictatorship, and we’ll just have to “muddle through.” But given the intensity of his distress with democracy, one would think his agenda presents special challenges.

It turns out Fallows' agenda is an orthodox, in Walter Russell Mead's words, feed the “blue beast" ("blue" as in "blue state," Democratic state) agenda. As Mead explains, "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party" looks back with nostalgia to the 50’s-early 60's “blue model," when big business, big labor, and big government (largely run by Democrats) worked together to build highways, build great universities, pour money into science and academia through the Pentagon research agency, and create the intellectual powerhouses that drew top immigrants to America. To Fallows and other lovers of the "blue model", no future looks as good as the America of their baby boomer childhood.

"Blue model" America, in Fallows' eyes, has from the Reagan era onward run into Republicans deliberately “giving governmental efforts a bad name.” Fallows calls Republicans “nihilistic, equating public anger with the sentiment that ‘their’ America has been taken away,” and says Republicans define success as stopping Obama. For the country, and for Fallows, Republican success means "dysfunction.”

In quite a reach, Fallows (who recently lived in China for three years) incredibly compares the current Republican-influenced U.S. political system to the “feckless” rule of rage-filled and frustrated pre-Communist China. Fallows would instead recommend “today’s Communist leadership. . . widely seen as pulling the country nearer to its full potential rather than pushing it away. . . we could use more anger about the fact that the gap between our potential and our reality is opening up, not closing.”

Does it really come down to this? To save America from Republican-influenced efforts to stop "feeding the blue beast," we need a Chinese Communist dictatorship? What's particularly weird is that when Fallows wrote the article, Democrats controlled the White House, the House, and 60 Senate votes, and actually could ignore all Republican objections.

Given Fallows’ long, awkward, and in the end, failed defense of the “blue model,” perhaps it’s time he and his fellow intellectuals considered, along with the rest of us, how best to tame rather than keep feeding the government “blue beast."