The Biggest Problem with Our Democracy

As I work up my answers for the Liberal/Conservative test I wanted to post something new, and that something is, far and away, the largest problem I see with our government. I’m going to pose a very simple question:

How does an average citizen get their ideas into the political debate?

There is currently no way. If someone had a good idea for a program for energy and infrastructure (which I do) how do they get it considered for actual implementation? Even senators and representatives use forms on their websites where you have to pre-select the issue you’re writing about. Here’s a great question: Why must one pre-select the issue if their email will be read by someone? Having emailed representatives and senators, submitted info on Change.gov, and having even tracked down the emails of the Obama team and emailed them during the campaign, I can say I have never received any indication that a human has ever seen anything I’ve written. Now, I can understand why conservatives might not see this as a problem–their supporters are more ideologically homogeneous: If it’s a regulation, defeat it. If it’s more of anything government does, defeat it. If it lowers taxes, champion it. If it’s consistent with Christianity, support it. Otherwise, just say the Federal government shouldn’t be involved with such things. Liberals, however, truly represent the disparate interests of all the non-pluralities. Liberals, above all, should be willing to take all ideas from their supporters because the interests of those same supporters are complex and, oftentimes, at odds with one another.

In fact, exactly the opposite of this sort of thing currently happens. Even Democrats, the party most in the liberal image, give celebrities and executives more access than average citizens. Now, I realize it’s a hard problem. Businesses are hierarchies and there are natural people to assume represent their point of view. Average Americans, as a point of contrast, number in the millions and politicians probably fancy themselves the natural representatives (not without reason) of their points of view. Even if politicians don’t presume to truly know the ideas or nuances positions of the people, then how do they actually find those out? Who should be consulted?

Some might claim, at this point, that the populace is too numerous to actually have a direct influence on policy. This is naive, at best. First, only about 45% of the populace votes, or roughly 130 million people. My guess is that a small percentage of the voting population has any desire to engage in actually giving ideas to their government.  So, what kind of infrastructure would one need to ensure everyone’s suggestion was considered or point of view heard? To be honest, I think it would be the best call center job ever. Get ideas from your fellow citizens and forward them on to the people that make decisions–at a living wage, with government benefits. If the government hired full-time employees for this job then somewhere between one per thousand or one per ten-thousand is what I would suggest is the right number of people for this job. This is somewhere between 13,000 and 130,000 people, or, roughly, between a 0.7% and 7% increase in the 1.8 million federal government’s workforce (ex-Post Office). Obviously there are numerous other issues, but feasibility of something so ideological fundamental to a democracy seems to be off the table.

So, with feasibility off the table, what is the true problem? Why doesn’t the populace get to inject their ideas into the public debate? Why is it mostly career politicians who have no incentive to buck special interests whose money is important to running their campaigns, even less incentive to care about the points of view of the people that didn’t vote for them, and almost no expertise in any of the issues they are asked to vote on? I don’t think it’s all that controversial to say that most politicians view average citizens as photo ops before they consider them a source of solutions. Note, by the way, that this is very different from viewing their opinion on currently proposed solutions as valuable. Politicians, I’m sure, already do ask how citizens view proposed legislation, like the proposed auto-bailout, but that’s a false choice. Americans shouldn’t have to choose between supporting watered down solution A or watered down solution B.