DEMOCRACY IS A FAILURE

I taught political science at the university level for over 30 years, and I chose public administration as my major field when in grad school.  That qualifies me as a bit more of a critic than most but still leaves me short when it comes to saying that democracy in America has completely failed.  We haven't reached the point of total failure, but we're headed in that direction.  I'm not the first to be bold enough to say that.  Even basic textbooks for American Government have essentially said the same . . . but with a little less outright boldness.  I'll stick with my claim.  Our system of government is a failure, and that means democracy has failed too. 

Establishing a federal system where the central government shared power with the states is partly responsible for the failure.  States' rights aren't equal to that of the federal government, but they are strong enough to cause some major problems when it comes to implementing policy.  Obamacare is just one example of how federalism causes us to fail.  But there's more to it than that, much more.  If the central government could lay claim to really being a big brother, one that takes care of the heavy stuff, they'd have more justification for mandating policy states had no choice but to go along with.  But their track record is poor, and people don't trust them.  In fact, we seem to trust our local governments, and that includes state governments, more than we do the federal government. 

We have three branches of government at federal level - legislative, executive, and judicial.  We elect the Congress, composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate.  Congress is our only true democratic branch, the one subject to the election process.  It's the most democratic, but it's also our most worthless.  The biggest branch, the executive branch, has only two elected officials, that being the President and Vice-President.  All the others are appointed, and the same is true of the judicial branch.  But at the state level, we do far more electing of public officials.  Some states even elect judges, and that's not good. 

An agrument could be made that the real blame for lousy government rests in the hands of the voter.  We're the ones who put the politicians who run for office in positions of power, and that leaves us with a big management problem.  No politician is automarically a competent manager for a simple reason - they don't have the training.  When you train managers to do specific tasks, you end up with a more efficient government . . . and we just don't do enough of that.  And that's the bottom line when it comes to good government - you've got to have better managers. 

What I'm saying in a roundabout way is that the problem isn't our structure as much as it is our system of administration.  We nead to streamline the structure some, but we'll never be an efficient system until we get politicans out of the managing business.  Let them make broad policy, then turn the administration, the implementation, over to people who know what they're doing.  The American voter isn't likely to get any smarter and won't be sending better people to elected office.  It's almost like the dancing puppet kids love without even seeing who pulls the strings.  Maybe we need some of that - managers we never see or know, but are people who can make the puppet dance well.