"I've heard many times that although democracy is an imperfect system, we somehow always muddle through. The message I want to give you, after long and hard reflection, is that I'm very much afraid it is no longer possible to muddle through. The issues we deal with do not lend themselves to that kind of treatment. Therefore, I conclude that our democracy must grow up. I'm not going to give you a magic recipe on how that will happen—I wish I had one—but I offer some thoughts that I hope will stimulate your thinking.
What's principally lacking on the federal scene, it seems to me, is the existence of respected, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary teams that could at least tell us what is possible and something about the pluses and minuses of different solutions. Take energy, for instance. What I would love to see established, with the National Academies or any other mechanism to confer respectability, is a team that will ... say, 'Okay, there are lots of suggestions around, and most of them won't work. But here are six different plans, any one of which is possible. We'll tell you what each one costs, what's good about it, what's bad about it, how dangerous it is, and what its uncertainties are.' At least each option would be a well-integrated, clearly thought-out plan. I do not trust democracy to try to put together such a plan by having each committee of Congress choose one piece of it. Suppose Congress designed an airplane, with each committee designing one component and an eleventh-hour conference committee deciding how the pieces should be put together. Would you fly on that airplane? I am telling you we are flying on an energy plan, an inflation plan, and so on that are being put together in exactly that way.
Unfortunately the original 1980 article that this was excerpted from is paywalled.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @10:22PM
Yep! jmorris is the first name that comes to my mind when I think "political theory" and "without bias"! I mean, the whole "not a democracy" thing is such a new and searing insight, not some hackneyed point that has been bandied about by the forces of evil since the establishment of American Constitutional Democracy.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 01 2017, @10:45PM
Yeah J-Mo has one thing in common with his oogedy-boogedy nightmare man Marx, and that is that both of them are born critics :) Which is to say, while they may be insightful about pointing out what's gone wrong, for the love of Cthulhu, do NOT listen to their proposed solutions!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...