Why Democratic Reform has to be our first priority as a nation
This post is about the nature of power in America.
Imagine this: you, the reader, have just fought your way to victory in a bitter, partisan election. Due to a favorable electoral map, your party now has majorities in the House and the Senate. You now have the opportunity to make sweeping changes in America.
Unfortunately, you know this opportunity will not last forever. The Senate map will put your party on the defensive in two years, and whatever agenda you choose to pursue is sure to cost your party seats in swing districts.
You also fully expect the opposition party to fight you tooth and nail. They may not be able to stop you from passing legislation, but they will pull out every procedural stop to slow you down.
In other words, you have one shot. What issue do you choose to spend your legislative bullet on?
Is it addressing systemic racism? People of color have suffered systematic oppression throughout our history and the old structures of slavery are still at work debasing our claim of being a free and fair country.
Is it healthcare? As a former EMT and husband of a physician, I know first hand how broken our healthcare system is.
Is it immigration reform? Our legal immigration system is so dysfunctional that people, desperate for a better life, choose to risk their lives to cross into this country as illegal aliens.
Is it education? American students have been slipping on virtually every measure compared with the rest of the world, and an educated populace is critical for both long-term economic growth and for building the critical thinking skills necessary for participation in our democracy.
Ah! Maybe it’s addressing global warming! After all, what does any of the rest of it matter if a changing climate radically alters the face of our planet?
The problem, as I’m sure you noticed, is that ALL of these issues need to be addressed. We simply can’t wait eight years to address each issue in turn. Besides, power doesn’t align the same way every time. Barack Obama took his shot trying to solve healthcare with the ACA. Donald Trump immediately spent his political capital on trying to dismantle it.
The system I’ve just described is dysfunctional by any measure of the word.
And yet, that’s not even the full scale of the problem, because each one of these issues are related and interdependent. As an example, how do you address systemic racism without changing healthcare, immigration, and education? Even further, how do you address an issue like education without first addressing systemic racism!?
What I’ve just described is a feature of a particularly thorny class of problems dubbed Wicked Problems by MIT Sloan School professor Richard Buchanan in his paper ‘Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.’ In fact, according to Rittel and Webber, every Wicked Problem can be described as the symptom of another problem. These problems cannot be solved, only managed, and they change and adapt as you interact with them.
They are the type of problem our deadlocked and dysfunctional government is totally unequipped to handle.
Yet a common thread that binds each of these problems together is that any attempt to solve them must first overcome what game theorists call a Collective Action Problem. In other words, we have to convince multiple, competing entities to work together for their collective good; a task which is complicated by the fact that those parties may often individually benefit by selfishly breaking from the rest.
This is why it’s so difficult for our divided country to get anything done. It’s also why democratic reform must be undertaken before we embark on the noble work of solving our Wicked Problems. We must build a system that incentivizes interests to come together instead of entrenching more deeply.
There may soon be one of those rare chances to take action, when all the levers of government fall to a single party. Such moments represent a collective will, a mandate of the people. Let us not use that moment for a single fleeting attempt at a single issue only to watch our opposition chop the supports out from under us. Let us instead use the moment to make a structural change to our system that will enable us to tackle all of these other problems.
