Subject: Re: The Ballroom
You may want to ride along with Douthat on this demolition of democracy carnival ride but no-one else is compelled to join him in his delusion.

Shame on you, buddy.

I think you misunderstand my point, or where I agree with Douthat.

I don't particularly like what Trump has decided to do with the White House. But I think that Douthat is right that the general idea of the federal government being able to do things quickly, without being bogged down in years of Commissions and blue-ribbon panels and listening tours and veto points from stakeholders is going to be very popular.

As a lawyer, I understand the importance of process. How we reach decisions is critical to the functioning of a society...not just what decisions are reached.

But a critical aspect of democracy is that it allows decisions to be made. People sometimes mistake democracy for a process for reaching consensus, a mechanism for finding a mutually agreeable outcome. It can do that - but the key aspect of democracy is that it allows a majority to impose a decision even if the minority disagrees with it. The democratic process gives the decision legitimacy, even if it's not what the minority would want - or even if they think it's abhorrent.

I think the American electorate is very dissatisfied with the fact that our federal democratic processes have ossified to the point where few, if any, choices actually get made. That everyone - up to and including the President - is hamstrung by the processes and red tape of government. That even when a party wins power, there's no way for them to actually execute an agenda: whether it's the Democrats in 2020 or the Republicans in 2024. That type of paralysis is extraordinarily frustrating for the American people. I don't think it will be very good politics for the Democrats to rally support around the idea that the person who won an election isn't the right person to make choices like this, but instead to promote the idea that a nebulous arrangement of reviewers and committees and staff analysis and...whatever they think should have happened instead of the President deciding this.

I think the death of the Inflation Reduction Act shows how far we've gone astray, here. We had a Democratic supermajority pass legislation to do all of these infrastructure programs arm-in-arm with the President...and they couldn't get done. Because the process we've built for everything is so suffocating that even when you have the stuff actually get through Congress and the Executive, nothing definitive can happen quickly - there's just so much review and opportunities for challenges and veto points, that years later nothing happens. We are so concerned with stopping any bad decisions, any bad choices, that the government can't do anything anymore - everything gets swallowed up in that morass.

Douthat's right in pointing out that defending the morass is not going to be good politics. People may not like what Trump has chosen to do with the former East Wing (though I suspect most people don't care), but they certainly don't like the idea that nothing can ever be done without years and years of study and delegating decisions to a horde of experts and community stakeholders. That doesn't read as defending democracy as much as Democrats like to think it does.