Making Democracy a Priority
Cross-posted from Talking Points Memo Café. Click here to read this Special Feature with comments.
I don't know about you, but I'm still glowing. The sight of Barack Obama, standing tall, taking the oath—cheered by one, heck, two million flag waving Americans, was an epochal affirmation of democracy. The Mall seemed a Walt Whitman poem come to life. It would be easy for our minds to follow our hearts, and assume that American democracy is in robust health.
So what's the worry about American democracy? Isn't the fact of Obama's election proof enough that the system works? And aren't there more pressing matters to occupy our attention?
The piece I wrote for Democracy argues that we judge presidents in part by what they do to expand and strengthen our democracy. Bush leaves a paradoxical legacy. In myriad ways, his term laid bare deep and significant problems with our systems of government and politics. The economic crisis, to cite one example, flowed in significant measure from financial deregulation that was itself a product of the campaign finance system. That's the bad news. The better news is that these frequently led to a backlash—a spike in participation, often driven by revulsion at Bush's policies. The challenge is to turn this surge into longstanding democracy gains.
My view is this: To translate the remarkable progressive energy of 2008 into lasting political change in 2018 requires more than discrete policy victories, no matter how vital. We must change the systems of politics and policymaking, too, to permanently broaden the electorate and shift the role of big money in our politics.
Even since the election, a few things have come into focus.
For starters, the maladies that I discuss in the article have not been magically swept away by Obama's electoral army. Voter participation rates long have been among the lowest among democracies. Obama placed an unprecedented and heartening emphasis on organizing and grassroots mobilization. Even so, the voter turnout rate was only a few million votes higher in 2008 than four years before. Some sixty five million eligible Americans simply aren't registered to vote (as of 2006). The same is true with the even more astonishing explosion of small campaign contributions to Obama. His use of the Internet to build a mass base of Democratic donors is truly impressive and heartening, even if it was not the "parallel public financing system" that Obama claimed it to be... But there's some evidence, at least, that Obama's small donor revolution was less complete than met the eye. Much of his nearly billion dollar war chest came from far larger donors. Simply, he did better among all donors. In any case, the small donor revolution is just a rumor on Capitol Hill. There is every reason to believe that Members of Congress raised their funds the old fashioned way: in large amounts, from legislative interests, with funds flowing overwhelmingly to incumbents.
At the same time, the surge in participation has created momentum for a new line of democracy reforms. For too long, reformers seemed determined to purify politics, drawing from the mugwump tradition. Shopworn measures were either numbingly arcane (especially in voting), or seemed to be futile attempts to dam the flow of money in politics A better approach is to reinvigorate reforms by emphasizing participation and citizen engagement. So voting rights groups are gearing up to push for a federal voter registration modernization bill that would require states to register every eligible adult citizen, and keep them on the rolls permanently. Technology in the form of new statewide voter databases now makes this feasible. Similarly, new campaign finance proposals are emerging that seek to tap the small donor phenomenon by offering matching funds.
In all these ways, the stars align for democracy reforms. Yet they are not near the front of the congressional or executive agenda. We should not take for granted that this is so; in 1992, after seeing Ross Perot win 19% of the vote, Bill Clinton announced that campaign reform would be one of his top four priorities. Of course, he didn't achieve it (I was his aide working on political reform), but the difference of rhetorical emphasis is still stark. Washington will turn to these issues later, it seems, if at all.
Politicians respond to felt need and public pressure. They have a lot of other things to do, putting it mildly. In part, it is up to all of us who care about these issues to force them onto the national agenda. Barack Obama cares about process and accountability; witness the tenor of his first executive orders. But we must take our cue and build a far more robust movement for change than has yet (or recently) been seen.
We need to persuade the strategists who guide national policy that they would be foolish to neglect the chance to shape a permanent political realignment. That will come from astute crisis management and policy "deliverables" (such as health care). But it will also come if today's political figures recognize that revitalized systems of democracy, reoriented toward maximum political participation, will shift markedly the tenor of politics and the inputs for policymaking.
I am eager to hear what comments people have. I recognize, by the way, that my focus here has been on traditional issues of voting and money. There are new ways to enhance democracy, to fully use the potential of the Internet and online communities, that I have not mentioned and do not fully grasp.
