The System Is Still Broken
I haven’t changed my mind
There’s a parable, popularized by David Foster Wallace, that goes like this:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
The point, of course, is that we’re rarely aware of the systems we exist in.
In my previous piece, I tried to argue that the our system of government — a majority-rule presidential system — led directly to many of the problems we’re currently facing, including some of the violent protests occurring in response to Donald Trump’s election.
It may have been that I published the piece too soon, when people were still busy mourning/gloating, but far too many of the responses I received were variations of “Quit whining. You lost, accept it!”
I had already preemptively responded to those in the article itself, but let me say it again: while I’m not by any means a Trump supporter, my objection was not that Trump won, nor was there anything particularly partisan about my criticism. If Trump hadn’t won, there almost definitely would have been at least as many violent protests — Trump and his supporters were already promising as much.
If the World Series had led to riots, and I wrote an article about what we could do to prevent baseball riots, it would have made no sense to tell me “Get over it, the Indians lost.” That wasn’t the point.
The point was that the goal of representative democracy ought to be to prevent violent struggle for power, and ours isn’t doing that. Violent protests are far from the exclusive province of the anti-Trump crowd; they’ve been increasing in recent years, among groups that both the right and the left tend to sympathize with. You can choose to call all protestors whiners if you want, but that’s not a solution to social unrest; it’s just a bit of bourgeois self-congratulation.
This is the reality, though: our current system leaves many, many people without governmental representation. Though I have no immediate plans to riot, I could even use myself as an example here. Every voting district I live in —local, state, and national — is safely Republican. I’m not the sort of person who tends to vote Republican, but even if I decided to start doing so, the system gives my “representative” no reason to care about my concerns. Even under ideal electoral conditions (full voter turnout; no third-party competition), all he has to do to remain in office is to keep 51% of the district happy. He doesn’t need my vote, so he’s not answerable to me in any meaningful way. (He might choose listen to me because he’s just a swell guy, but the system gives him no reason to do so.)
As any good economist will tell you, if you want to understand why people behave the way they do, you need only to examine their incentives. Basketball players engage in intentional fouling not because they’re jerks who like to hit each other, but because they exist in a system that rewards them for doing it.
We can’t talk about political corruption or delinquency without discussing the system that leads to it — but unfortunately, we’re like the fish in Wallace’s parable: we take the system we exist in entirely for granted while blaming problems on proverbial “bad apples.”
Part of this is simple mythologizing — we tend to think of the Founding Fathers as a glorious pantheon handing down the Constitution fully formed from the heavens — but an equally important part is that we tend to ignore reforms to our system that did not originate with us, or that our political elites have not had any room for in the past.
Ever since the cementing of our two-party structure within the Jacksonian Era, we’ve never really considered the possibility that party proliferation could lead to an enhanced representational structure. Some argue that legislative gridlock is a feature, not a bug, of our system — but for those of us who find it problematic, broadening representation could alleviate the gridlock. And this is important, since part of what is leading to Presidential Caesarism is legislative gridlock. Conservative presidents moving forward will be under the same pressures as liberal ones: our system, in its current form, operating within our current hyperpartisan atmosphere, is pushing presidents toward unilateral activity. And I’ve yet to say anything about the social unrest that seems to follow significant political moments. None of this is random; it’s the natural result of what the system incentivizes people to do.
You can see how it plays out with a simple thought experiment: as long as it’s politicians who draw district lines, and as long as all it takes to get elected to Congress is a simple plurality of the vote, state legislatures are heavily rewarded for drawing “safe” districts where an easy majority of voters will reliably vote for their party’s nominee.
This makes it almost impossible for sitting members of Congress to get voted out, which in turn means voters can only voice their disapproval with how things are going by voting out the president.
This means that the president is heavily incentivized to work outside of Congress, so that voters won’t punish him for Congress’s failures. And this, of course, is exactly what we’ve seen — an increasingly ineffective Congress and an increasingly dictatorial president. It hasn’t led to a military coup yet, but we’ll see what happens if Trump decides to follow through on his suggestion to command the military to commit war crimes as an anti-terror strategy.
And if you read all that and your response was “So what? It’s majority rule! That’s how democracy works, ya commie!” — then you’re still missing the point. My point is that this isn’t how democracy has to work. It’s possible to govern by consensus rather than simply allowing a slim majority (or, in Trump’s case, even a minority) to steamroll everyone else. The system we have is an old and creaky one, and there are newer, more efficient models for democracy available.
Others are more sanguine about our capacity to make the incremental adjustments, the necessary tweaks, from within.
I think we need to take a closer look at making more sweeping changes. I used Maine’s step toward ranked-choice voting as one example, primarily because it was relevant to the November 8th election, but there are plenty of other options for improvements we could make to the system (see, for instance, the “single transferrable vote,” a system used in places like Australia and India, and which allows even minorities in districts to send legislative representatives).
We’re in a relatively chaotic time, and a President Trump is highly unlikely to stabilize it. We need to have a serious discussion about how to fix things — before they get really ugly.
Luke T. Harrington’s debut novel, OPHELIA, ALIVE (A GHOST STORY) is available now from Post Mortem Press. Elsewhere, his work has appeared at Cracked and BuzzFeed, and he writes the biweekly column “Dumb Moments in Church History” for Christianity Today. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook, if you want.
