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Reforming Government: What's Up With That? (I)
Modern republicanism is failing. Initiated two centuries ago with the founding of the United States, modern republicanism resurfaced ancient ideas and institutions of democratic self-government. In word, if not always in deed, republicanism swept the globe. At the end of the 18th century, monarchies were in place across the planet, today it is a limited exception.
Th institutions installed by modern republicanism were of the Agrarian Era, based on traditions of governance reaching back millennia. Unfortunately across the 19th century, this republican resurrection was overwhelmed by the forces of industrialism. The agrarian republican structures quickly proved ill-fitted to this new era. The new institutions proved profoundly inert, impermeable to change as the old kingdoms they had recently replaced.
Today, with the exception of perpetually growing bureaucracy—government power removed two or three levels from any direct citizen control—the institutions of American government have changed not at all in over two centuries. There's a number of reasons for this inertia. First, the idea of government is a very ancient one. From its recorded beginnings, governance was correlated with religion, monarchical power was deemed eternal and immutable as the gods. One of the great paradoxes of America's founding generation is as revolutionaries overthrowing the rule of a heavens backed monarchy, at the same time they endlessly talked of establishing a new system for the ages. The new republic's founders for all their radicalism could not break with government's ancient roots, particularly the idea of immutability as legitimacy.
The notable exception in America's founding pantheon of the idea of government changelessness was amusingly enough the greatest advocate of the yeoman farm, Thomas Jefferson. He wrote,
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
Over the course of the republic's history, little real thought and even less discussion has been given to changing the republic's institutions. The most revolutionary, historically unprecedented act of the republic's structure was in not adopting an official religion. The US became the first secular government in history. Paradoxically, the institutions themselves took on a quasi-sacred idolization. Instead of being simply understood as practical means to democratic governance, the institutions became objects of a secular veneration.
The greatest reason reform of the system became verboten was the republic's agrarian institutions quickly became controlled by an exponentially expanding industrial oligarchy, an oligarchy with zero interest in changing the institutions of government they would come to control.
With this history in mind, it's somewhat surprising and amusing that over the last couple months, a few pieces appeared, two in the establishment media no less, about the need for government reform. Focused largely on processes of representation more so than the structure of the institutions themselves, they do at least begin to broach the subject of reform.
All three pieces focus on today's very real problem that representation of the citizenry in American government exists little to not at all. The pieces hit on similar causes for the problem. It's important to point out in addition to secular government, the other true innovation of the American republic was representative democracy. Ancient Athens' and Rome's democracies were directly participatory. All three pieces correctly argue without representation, you have no self-government at all.
The first piece is written by a Harvard professor and published by the Washington Post. You can't get more establishment than that! She makes several important points including with the first Congress, the elected Congressman, they were all men, represented roughly 30,000 citizens. Today, a Congressional district runs the gamut from 500,000 people in Montana to almost 800,000 in Florida. Hard to argue no matter what the gender or race of the elected, they are representative. If any individual elected wanted to just simply spend one minute, eight hours a day, seven days a week meeting each constituent it would take four years—two terms.
The professor accurately points out, “The Founders never envisioned districts so large, and their gradual expansion over a century is a major reason our politics have become so dysfunctional” - Hallelujah, sister! However in traditional and contemporary American fashion, the professor looks not to more fundamental, call it radical systemic change, but what in essence is window dressing. She lists various formulas to expand the House’s size from 572 seats to, if you went by the original 30,000 constituents for each representative, 11,000 representatives. The institutions require far more fundamental reforms than numbers, starting with political power is far too concentrated in DC. It needs to be redistributed back across the country.
The next piece comes from the other coast and was published in the San Francisco Chronicle. The writer represents something called the Zocalo Public Square. It is a more interesting piece getting to some structural problems, though again primarily concerns representative numbers, this time in regards to the State of California. The author complains the City of Monterey, almost a half-million people, has no representative in the state legislature.
He writes,
“That fact is the result of California’s extreme stinginess in democratic representation. The average American state legislative district has about 100,000 people. But California hasn’t increased the size of its legislature since 1879, when the state had fewer than 1 million people. So, we have by far the most populous legislative districts in the U.S. State Senate districts have nearly 1 million residents each, and Assembly districts have 500,000.”
Adequate representation isn't a problem just in DC, but in the states and even at the local level. The County of Los Angeles with ten-million people has only five county supervisors. Counties are the traditional, fundamental, local institutions of American government. LA County is far and away the republic’s most unrepresentative elected body. Unfortunately, the author once again defaults to the idea of simply increasing the number of representatives to solve more rudimentary problems.
The final piece is the most interesting and at least cracks the idea of fundamental change. This one comes from the South, amusingly enough, a place called the Mises Institute. Ludwig von Mises was a mid-20th century Austrian economist. The greatest of the many problems of economics of whatever stripe is it’s a seriously limited view of how the world operates, a far too narrow a measure of the magnificence and sublime complexity of life. Nonetheless, this piece is excellently titled, “The Borders Between US States Are Obsolete,” a radical diagnosis getting a little closer to root problems.
The piece focuses on a few calls in some Western states for redrawing boundaries and creating new states. The main argument is political boundaries should be drawn to better represent people. Of course from the republic's beginning, the states and the Senate are this problem writ large. There is no better example of the lack of and the original purposeful distortion of representation in the American system than the US Senate, an undemocratic institution down to the corner stone of its foundation.
Focusing on how political boundaries should be drawn, the author writes, “This policy of clinging to the lines on a map drawn many decades ago is a recipe for political conflict and resentment.” He correctly states most political boundaries, whether county, state, and indeed national borders across the planet are arbitrary. I'd add, historically, many political borders were defined simply by where armies stopped and/or randomly drawn by far away powers, such as the English Crown defining the original American colonies. Two other great examples of arbitrary political borders drawn by far away powers are the 1885 Berlin Conference's drawing national lines across the African continent and Rome's 1493 papal bull inter caetera granting Spain dominion over almost the whole of the newly revealed Americas.
Not defaulting to the notion of more representation, the piece instead looks to better line drawing based on demographics. However, this elicits the question that no matter how good the demographics, how many people can one person truly represent? In the vein of one man, one vote, the author argues against the idea of simple territorial sovereignty, which is at the heart of the US states and indeed of all greater nationalism. Unfortunately, in so doing, the author dismisses a necessary component of all 21st century government reform: How can geographical variation and its resulting ecological diversity be in some way enfranchised into political decision making?
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