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If only Tom Friedman had had a smarter grandma (or perhaps he did, and he simply didn't listen closely enough)

By Jack M. Balkin

NYTimes columnist Tom Friedman had one of his folksy columns in yesterday's Times about lessons his grandma (allegedly) taught him about what the United States needs to do to maintain its world supremacy. The key part of the column is as follows:

.... [A]t least six things have come together to fracture our public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions: 1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.

2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.

3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own
political echo chambers.

4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.

5) The Internet, which, at its best, provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices and, which, at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs from across the political spectrum that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.

6) A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.
These six factors are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis.

It is easy enough to agree with all of Friedman's critique, but much of it is vitiated by the almost willful obtuseness of the last sentence about "our system." Will he never recognize that we are in our present "paralysis" BECAUSE OF, and not IN SPITE OF, "our system"? And what, precisely, does he mean by "forcing compromises"? After all, one might see the present system as forcing all sorts of untenable and stupid compromises in order to get Olympia Snowe's or Ben Nelson's or some other holdout's vote, just as some of the earlier "great compromises" involved all sorts of payoffs to slaveowners. Friedman can travel all over the world, and consult frequently with his favorite political theorists, but he seems incapable of asking whether we are well served by the system designed in 1787. Why does he not even bother to mention the idiotic Senate and its idiotic rules? No one can argue that the Senate is "gerrymandered" in the sense he is using. It simply gives grotequely undeserved amounts of power to people like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, and other denizens of states whose total population is a pathetic (and unrepresentative) fraction of "we the people." Argh....

Full post as published by Balkinization on November 23, 2009 (boomark / email).

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