Expanding the Scope of Democratic Reform

From high school at the tail end of the 1970s, I vividly remember a textbook with a specific story about then-recent history: In 1960, while campaigning for the presidency, John F. Kennedy went to West Virginia, and there the privileged Bostonian discovered families living in dire poverty. Previously in this story, Americans hadn’t really known that deep poverty existed. “The paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty,” his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, called it in launching the War on Poverty, which our textbook affirmed was making modest progress in eliminating this well-defined problem.

This was a happy story but dubious history. For one thing, poverty could no more be “discovered” than North America in 1492, since the people living in it, at least, knew about it—and there was plenty of it in Boston, too, among both black and white communities. And this high school was in the already post-industrial small city of New Haven, CT, an ongoing laboratory for faddish social policy. We could see for ourselves the backlash against the War on Poverty and the meltdown of the larger economy. But the way the story was told—and there are more nuanced versions of the same happy folktale—was itself revealing of the limits of the postwar “liberal consensus” that would soon come to a crashing end: “Poverty” is a fixable exception in an otherwise well-functioning system. The basic engine of capitalism, in this story, is generating growth and equitably shared prosperity, except for this one little problem, which can be defined statistically and solved.

I go back to this story because I’ve come to think that the way we talk about democracy and political reform today often has a lot in common with the way poverty was for decades identified as an exception in an otherwise healthy system. We talk about “corruption,” which is obviously a very real phenomenon, especially in an era where the president of the United States seems to direct funding from our own and foreign governments into the accounts of private properties that he owns. Of course, this is corruption on an epic scale.

But even at this scale, corruption is still a well-defined problem, albeit one that spans the compass from Trumpian emoluments and tacit bribes to ordinary campaign contributions that make elected officials dependent on donors and pull them away from a loyalty to the interest of the public as a whole. “Corruption,” as an exception, assumes that there’s a functioning system that can find that public interest, and that corruption can be seen in deviations from that interest. But how often can we be sure what the more accurate measure of the public interest is? Is it the opinion of the median voter? An objectively ideal policy outcome? An outcome deemed fair by John Rawls’s principle that the greatest benefit should go to the least well off? This is itself a politically contested question, even if rarely discussed so explicitly.

In regulating money in politics, the traditional focus is entirely on corruption, in part because the Supreme Court in 1976 declared it the only acceptable justification for regulating money raised or spent on elections. But even the most expansive definition of corruption (such as those advocated in Zephyr Teachout’s Corruption in America or Lawrence Lessig’s Republic, Lost) or the legal regimen in an alternate universe where the Court reversed Citizens United along with the underlying Buckley v. Valeo precedent, would apply only to elections and spending intended to influence elections. Indeed, most of the recent Court decisions, from McConnell v. FEC mostly upholding the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act through Citizens United that took the other tack, have hinged not on the definition of protected speech, but on how to define the boundaries of elections, and whether certain kinds of spending should be treated and regulated like election spending.

Even if the legally defined zones of elections and congressional deliberation could be shielded from the influence of economic inequality, elections and official lobbying are far from the only way that the very wealthy drive the policy process, and are perhaps not even the most important. There are, for example, lavishly funded campaigns around issues and nominations, such as the Federalist Society’s $250 million effort to remake the federal courts, detailed recently by the Washington Post, none of which would fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Election Commission even in an earlier era. Or the influence of philanthropy, which has put policy ideas such as charter schools and criminal justice reform onto the agenda, and where spending is rewarded by an exceptionally generous tax deduction. Consider, too, the deference we seem to give to the wisdom of the very wealthy, such as by taking Howard Schultz’s presidential aspirations and ill-formed political ideas far more seriously than we’d take a person of average wealth. And there are the quasi-governmental domains formed by tech giants, where a single individual makes sweeping decisions that affect the scope of our speech or privacy.

It’s tempting to imagine that the house of democracy can be guarded from the distortion of money by a white picket fence and a “keep out” sign. But at current levels of economic inequality, where 10 people control more than $50 billion each, the dream of quarantining the democratic process from the influence of that inequality is likely to fail as long as we have any kind of First Amendment. Fixing American democracy, then, can’t be separated from the work of fixing our fundamental economic structures, not only reducing the advantages of those at the top, but also boosting the economic and personal autonomy of those at or below the average income, along with their capacity to organize and participate fully. Democracy advocates should no longer limit their scope to the processes and procedures of elections and voting, but should be unafraid of a deeper economic agenda.

***

There’s another reason I began with poverty and the 1960 election. It’s a story, however caricatured, about changing the agenda of politics. For whatever combination of reasons, “poverty” wasn’t on the agenda in the 1950s, but after 1960, it was. Individual leaders, events (beginning with the Watts Riots in 1965), books, an emerging consensus in academia, and new tools to measure economic deprivation all helped put it there. Later, though, conservatives redefined the agenda away from poverty toward “personal responsibility,” or “controlling entitlement spending.”

The core power in a democracy, even more than the power to draw congressional district lines or rules about voting procedures, is the power to define what politics is about, or what we argue about. John Maynard Keynes, in The End of Laissez Faire, drew the central distinction between “agenda”—areas where government had a role—and “non-agenda”—where it didn’t. “The chief task of economists at this hour is to distinguish afresh the Agenda of government from the Non-Agenda; and the companion task of politics is to devise forms of government within a democracy which shall be capable of accomplishing the Agenda.”

In recent decades, much has been off the agenda of U.S. democracy, governed by artificial limits on the scope of debate. Think, for example, of the priority given to the federal budget deficit, which meant that the economic stimulus to end the 2008-2009 recession was deeply inadequate, and the Affordable Care Act had to be twisted in complex knots to avoid adding a dollar to the deficit. The ’80s doctrine of shareholder value—that a corporation has no obligation higher than to deliver short-term gains for its owners—led to decades of leveraged buyouts, consolidation, pressure to reduce costs, and a deep divide between workers and owners of capital. The “Washington Consensus” on trade and financial deregulation similarly took a range of policy options off the table. Antitrust enforcement was virtually nonexistent, held back by a doctrine that set narrow limits on its application. None of this was accidental; most of it reflects an idea, common to neoliberal economic thinking, that certain aspects of the economy should be off limits to democratic decision-making. (It’s sort of the inverse of the vision that democratic reform can be isolated from economics.)

These limitations have had their own political consequences: Government was unable to fully respond to the devastation of families in the financial crisis, the hollowing out of the American economy as globalization took its toll, the flattening of wage growth for average workers, or the opioid crisis. And voters in turn lost confidence in the ability of government to respond to the challenges in their lives, turning instead to a racist demagogue with a vague promise to do better than the “very stupid people” who made policy before him.

So a second aspect of broadening the scope of political reform is to expand not just who gets to participate, but the scope of what we can argue about, and what we can make collective decisions about. Fortunately, this is beginning to happen. Presidential candidates for 2020, perhaps trying to keep up with Senator Elizabeth Warren in generating policies and plans, have not only put more detail into their ideas, but have challenged some of the limitations that bound the Obama administration and others before it. They will be less constrained by the deficit, more open to raising taxes on the wealthiest and broadening regulation to protect consumers and workers. They’ll also be open to a broader agenda on political reform itself, embracing ideas such as the small-donor matching system in H.R. 1, which enhances the voice of the less well-off rather than trying to limit the influence of others. They should also be willing to change the rules of the Senate, which was once an open forum for policy entrepreneurs to put new ideas on the agenda, but is now so tightly controlled by the Majority Leader that senators have to beg him to allow votes even on ideas with broad support.

This broader agenda will be as much a measure of a healthy democracy as reforms to voting rights, congressional districting or campaign finance, needed as those are. A true democracy is not only one in which everyone can participate, but in which the fullest range of public rules that affect our lives (aside from constitutionally protected rights) is up for debate.