American Politics & Governance Is Actually in Relatively Good Shape
In world comparative perspective, at least, it is. & yet Katie Porter seems to want to convince me that it isn’t—& so I am not going to vote for her in Tuesday’s California Senate Democratic primary…
What determines whether a society’s governance will be one of the administration of things and the coördination of win-win productive processes on the one hand, or the domination of a gang over persons—followed by resource extraction on a large scale?
A broad-brush analysis would say:
You have the first if people regard themselves as citizens choosing their stewards to provision public goods; maintain a property and ownership and social power order largely regarded as at least somewhat legitimate against threats from roving bandits, local notables, and the government’s own functionaries; provide social insurance; and keep a weather eye on the evolving distribution of property to maintain a degree of fundamental equality of status.
You have the second if people see those they ought to see as fellow citizens as enemies—as people whose claims to property and social power are fundamentally illegitimate, uncoöperating, as people whom it is the business of government to do down and dirty rather than to regulate and channel their energies into productive directions.
And the second is pretty much the case of Cameroon since independence:
I was going to vote for Katie Porter in the Democratic primary for the California U.S. Senate seat next Tuesday. My thinking was that a United States Senator from California ought to be one of the more leftist members of the U.S. Senate.
I am no longer going to do this, because while watching Jeopardy with my mother-in-law I saw Katie Porter’s commercial:
Announcer Voice: ‘Typical. Politicians… “He’s bad. I’m good.” Blah, BLAH.
Let’s shake things UP! With Katie Porter.
Porter refuses corporate PAC money. And leads the fight to ban congressional stock trading. Katie Porter. Taking on big banks to make housing more affordable. And drug company CEOs to stop their price gouging.
Most politicians just fight each other. While Katie Porter fights for you.
For Senate—Democrat Katie Porter.
I’m Katie Porter and I approve this message.
But members of a legislature don’t “fight each other”—except when they are campaigning for election. Members of a legislature legislate: they try to find some compromise that will win the approval of a significant and durable majority when the issue comes to a vote, and so structure the bureaucracy so that it is a better administrator of things and coördinator of win-win production processes. There can be a lot of campaigning on a legislature floor. But that legislative-floor campaigning is directed at shaping the character of future legislative majorities so that better compromises will win the approval of a significant and durable majority when the issue comes to a vote, and so structure the bureaucracy so that it is a better administrator of things and coördinator of win-win production processes.
Democratic Senatorial candidate Adam Schiff’s commercials are all about how Republican Steve Garvey would be a disastrous person for California to send to the Senate because of how his presence would shape potential legislative choices, and how getting Adam Schiff into the general election is the best way to minimize the chances of that happening.
What does Katie Porter’s commercial tell us about the team that she is on?
There is no team that she is on. There is no faction of politicians alongside whom she fights. There are just “typical politicians” and her.
And she is just going to “shake things UP!”
But how, exactly?
If the other politicians in the U.S. Congress are all “Blah. BLAH” and are definitely not on her team, how is she going to get her—long overdue—ban on congressional stock trading passed? The “drug company CEOs” certainly do as much “price gouging” as they can and dare in the places where the administration of things fails. But to see Albert Bourla and Stéphane Bancel—who each led their company to invest unbelievable fortunes in building-out speculative advanced mRNA technologies that put the world in a position to rapidly prevent much of the death that was being wrought by COVID-19—are those really the people whom she is going to “fight”? And how?
And does she really think that housing in California today is unaffordable because of “big banks”? I don’t think she does. And so is there then any way for me to take her “Katie Porter fights for you” as anything other than another lie?
What do I do with a politician who looks very much like she regards me and the rest of us California Democrats as cattle to be driven rather than citizens to be informed? Who says that she is going to make expressive ideological pronouncements and statements that she hopes will make the left-Democratic citizens of California feel good about themselves, rather than work on a team that is building a legislative coalition toward a majority?
I really do not like Steve Garvey, or his policies. But he did not get into the politics business here in California to get rich(er), or to be one of the “typical politicians” who “fight each other” rather than working for the citizens. He got into the politics business here in California because he badly thinks we need very different representatives in Washington if we are actually to preserve the administration of things and the win-win coördination of production processes. And Garvey thinks that we have something very valuable here in the United States in the form of a government that works for the citizens and is their steward—that there is a vast difference between how the typical politicians of the United States act and how they act in Cameroon.
Katie Porter, by contrast, seems to want to minimize that difference—to convince us that other politicians are our enemies, and only she is on her side. But is she, really? Is trying to convince us that our political establishment is not made up of often-inadequate stewards—is that really something that someone genuinely on our “side” would think a good thing do?