The Taxed and Unrepresented

A Mad Tea Party

"(With Democracy) No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of... democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville

Joe's post from Monday got me thinking about the Tea Party and our two-party system: 

It's tempting in a democracy to represent the policies of our elected officials as the center, but this is not an accurate picture of the American republic.  Extremists of every political and ideological stripe exist (I don't necessarily mean that in the pejorative sense).  The Tea Party's existence shows both that our politicians are out of touch with what the people want and that the people themselves are out of touch with what they want.  The Tea Party's anger may be justified, but it is incoherent.  Why should it be coherent?  Different people want different things.

I'd like to conduct a thought experiment to see if we can get any closer to the origins of the Tea Party movement: who is really unrepresented here in America?  Let's look at the three traditional policy axes under the presumption that the stated goals of policy are the actual goals of policy.

DOMESTIC POLICY - Healthcare as illustration of general principles by example

Dems - The Democrats recently attempted to extend healthcare to a large number of uncovered Americans.  With public-private competition, the idea is basically that a public option will force private insurance companies to play fair, increasing access to medical care for average Americans, decreasing profits for private insurance companies, and driving down prices for medical care.  Healthcare is just one example of how the Democratic Party seeks to expand and improve the safety net of welfare capitalism and represent first and foremost the most marginalized members of our society.   

Reps - The most recent substantial contribution to domestic policy from Republicans has been the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, which was an extremely complex bill, but essentially amounted to a privatization of Medicare under the assumption that private businesspeople would be vastly superior to government administrators in terms of efficiency.  The vast majority of Republican domestic policy since has been in trying to derail the Democratic agenda aimed at expanding the welfare state. 

The Democrat plan essentially increased coverage for poor people, but everyone must pay for it.  Although in the long-run, there is a good chance everyone's insurance coverage will expand while prices will drop as a result of the Obama plan (And that's not so much by virtue of the plan itself as much as it's due to the present rock-bottom state of health insurance).  The Republicans believe the efficiencies generated by private competition will improve coverage for all. 

What lawmakers from both parties seem to overlook is that health insurance is a highly inefficient, oligopolistic market; privatized institutions do not possess the same virtues as inherently private institutions; and consumers most of the time do not choose their own insurance coverage.  In other words, private health insurance in America is a market failure hootenanny, so either the Republicans are genuinely ignorant of the principles of economics or else they are actively pandering to big business at the expense of average Americans. 

What is never discussed of course is the idea of a decentralized and imperfectly competitive market for health insurance.  This ideal market would be free to experiment with ways to best suit individual communities, whether these communities are geographical or built on some other commonality.

I will mention social policy, though I personally find it to be just about the most cut-and-dry area of politics around: I don't want to comment on the culture war here, since so much has been said, but basically people should mind their own business.  Christians should stop harassing gays, and Dawkins-worshipers should leave the religious alone.  Ideas are not dangerous.  People who commit crimes and project power are dangerous, so we should concentrate on keeping robust the rule of law, and forget about "values" or "culture" or "character"; none of these is the province of policy. 

Basically, to summarize, the problem is not that the two major parties are not representing the people when it comes to domestic policy; the problem is that each party tries to represent all the people.  (Click on that link to really understand what I'm talking about here.)        

FOREIGN POLICY - How each party manifests American military power

Dems - Judging by the Clinton and Obama Administrations, it appears the Democrats have inherited the widespread, small-scale interventionist model from the Cold War: topple a dictator here, finance a rebellion there, and nations are created and destroyed to desired effect.  Granted, this is genuinely in the spirit of preserving the status quo at the smallest cost possible, but essentially it amounts to micromanaging the affairs of foreign sovereign states.  Recently, Democrats have been calling on us to focus war efforts on Afghanistan, as this country threatens most to destabilize the American global power regime.  It's still too early in the Obama Administration to characterize its foreign policy, but small-scale, quiet, targeted interventions in Yemen and Pakistan would not fall too far from the tree.

Reps - The Republicans seem to fall into two camps on war policy.  In the former are the supporters of Bush the Elder's foreign policy.  In 1991, the Cold War had just ended, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq was out of control.  A true international coalition (not just the U.S., U.K., Spain, and Poland) was formed and a small operation was undertaken to push Saddam Hussein's forces back to Baghdad and subject his government to repeated international oversight.  The Gulf War seemed to establish a new, post-Soviet blueprint for waging war, although its failings were apparent during the Clinton years, as Saddam's violations of international law continued to go unpunished.  In response, Bush the Younger attempted to capture Iraq in what was - and still is - a throwback to 19th century geostrategic, "Risk"-style warfare between nation states.

With foreign policy as with domestic policy, the problem is not a lack of representation, but overrepresentation.  The Democrats represent the small-scale interventionist micromanagerial approach to international relations: see a potential conflict, nip it in the bud with a swift and targeted bombing campaign or regime change.  The Republicans (oddly) represent both the internationalist crowd and the unilateral crowd to both the left and right of the Democrats.  

Yet both parties see the use of force to compel desired international outcomes as both justified and appropriate.  It seems we never debate the question of whether we should be so active in global affairs, and we never debate what are and aren't legitimate uses of American military power.  What we truly gain both as a society and as a world from such expensive and fruitless belligerency is never examined.  Those who would like America to focus more on its own problems, engage other nations through trade and mutual wealth-creation, or defer international problems to the established institutions of the international community are derided as "isolationist cranks", a category which includes both Andrew Bacevich and Ron Paul, incidentally both former members of our military.    

ECONOMIC POLICY - Where to draw the line between welfare and capitalism

I've written extensively on economic policy, so I'm going to keep this short.

Dems - Focus more on the welfare element of welfare capitalism; that is, Democrats tend to focus more on making it easier for economic losers to cope with failure, whether or not that failure is due to luck or incompetence. 

Reps - Focus on the capitalism element of welfare capitalism; that is, Republicans tend to focus more on making it easier for the winners to do what winners do, which is to create great things, employ us to build them, pay us a salary so we can afford to buy those great things, and make us all better off as a result.

Obviously, some sort of balance between these two concerns is best: it doesn't have to be Ayn Rand vs. Vladimir Lenin.  If we can maximize one element without simultaneously minimizing the other that is also good, and I think both parties tend to disagree amicably about economic policy (at least when the economy is good and it's not an election year).  Economic policy in America and in the world's other capitalist countries is really just a question of where to draw the line between welfare and capitalism while maintaining the strength of both. 

However, Democrats tend to create policy to help the most visibly poor-off members of our society (such as the unemployed, former auto workers, indebted mortgage holders etc.), while Republicans (and increasingly Democrats as well) craft policy to help the most visibly well-off members of our society, i.e. large corporations.  This form of overrepresentation leaves out the unobtrusive, i.e. the self-employed, the working poor, small-business owners, and entrepreneurs.  It is this unobtrusive pool from which long-term growth and innovation has historically come.  Our current policy of propping up a few large corporations at the expense of their smaller competitors is not only killing growth, but it is the singular source of the systemic risk implemented by leading economists as the cause of our recent financial troubles.  (Whether or not our welfare state is overextended really is a secondary debate.)     

CONCLUSION 

Granted, I've oversimplified and stereotyped here, but sometimes simple models are helpful to advance our understanding.

Is it shocking to anyone that those who believe in those quintessential American values of federalism, local control of local issues, limits placed on entitlement, self-reliance, and decentralization would be ostracized from federal representation?  I hope that correcting for favoritism is really what the Tea Party stands for. 

The death of individual and local autonomy across the spectrum of policy is why I believe more than anything that it is paramount to control and check the power of the United States federal government, not because it is evil, but because a central government simply cannot represent everyone, due to a vast heterodoxy of tastes and preferences.  Both Democrat and Republican policies are designed to benefit everyone everywhere at the same time, as though we were all the same; but we'd be much better off embracing our diversity and crafting a system inverse to the current one in order to avoid the abstraction of politics intruding on meaningful human experience.

The basis of any civil society is the sanctity of the individual.  In order of decreasing primacy: individual actors are free to do as they please until they begin interacting with other individuals; two individuals are free to make any voluntary contractual arrangement provided this contract - explicit or implicit - does not infringe upon the rights of any other individuals; groups of three or more individuals can determine the codes and conduct of group members in voluntary fashion provided this group does not infringe on any individual's rights; the interactions between groups are to be facilitated by municipal governments, which in turn are accountable to the county and the state; and eventually the federal government will make sure everything is running smoothly and that there are no violations of individual rights in any of the strata below.  If only there were some sort of document that spelled all this out in more detail... 

Redesigning policy to conform to such a scheme perhaps depends on a proper understanding of entitlement, both in the sense that unentitled parties constantly reach their hands into the pockets (and the bedrooms) of others in this country, and in the sense that we are all entitled, i.e. spoiled.  In a true federalist system, the Tea Partiers would address their grievances by providing the beams and struts of our broken state and local governments, instead of "turning their eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement".