The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [106]
Options for Fundamental Change
My recommendations in this chapter can be called ameliorative: they aim to use moderate means to turn around a moderately broken situation. We have to ask, however, whether this will be enough. The despair and cynicism in America are deep. There is a widespread feeling that nothing will change. Perhaps only a more dramatic break with today’s political institutions can work.
One obvious starting point would be a third party, to break the corrupted duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans. The obstacles to such an effort are real but not quite as insurmountable as is often believed. In recent years we have had several important third-party candidates for president, including John Anderson in 1980, Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, and Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004. Each achieved ballot access across most of the United States, and each generated a significant following and made a significant contribution to the political debate.
My view is that a broad-based national party that stood for effective governance, the end of the corporatocracy, and investments in America’s future could command the vital center of politics, a kind of radical centrism.7 Perhaps an ARC—Alliance for the Radical Center—Party could test the waters in 2012. The party would be centrist because America’s centrist values, which balance individualism and social responsibility, offer a basis for a new prosperity. It would be radical in that it would signal a decisive break with the recent past. The costs of launching a third party would be small, and the potential benefits could be enormous if it accomplished nothing more than awakening public awareness and putting pressure on the two corrupted major parties to clean up their acts.
A more fundamental set of constitutional reforms would usefully shift America’s majoritarian constitutional system toward more parliamentarism, perhaps aiming toward a French-style mixed presidential-parliamentary system. Constitutional change is inherently slow and hazardous, the ultimate Pandora’s box of politics. We can’t yet know whether fundamental constitutional change will be needed to rescue American democracy. But if it is, we should aim for the benefits of parliamentary systems: a coherent government that combines the executive and legislative branches under a prime minister; a longer-term perspective of four to six years rather than our current two-year cycle; and more proportional representation, to give more weight and voting power to the poor and minorities so that their concerns, too, will be addressed—and redressed.
Saving Government Before It’s Too Late
The bad old joke complains about the lousy restaurant where the food is terrible—and the portions are too small. Arguing for a larger role of government feels about the same. Yes, the federal government is incompetent and corrupt—but we need more, not less, of it. On the one hand, we need a more active role of government to address fundamental collective challenges such as infrastructure, clean energy, public education, health care, and poverty. On the other hand, the government is so dysfunctional that our tendency is to want to cut rather than expand its role. This chapter, I hope, has suggested some ways to overcome this impasse. We need more government, but also a much more competent and honest government. Economic reform and political reform must go hand in hand. Without the one there cannot be the other.
The best hope is to take big money out of big politics and to reform the public administration so that it can handle social problems of greater complexity and a longer time horizon. At a technical level, there are clear steps that can be adopted to achieve such aims. Many of these suggestions are already the law of the land in other, better-managed countries. Yet our public management