This is what democracy doesn’t look like

IT HAD to be galling for Washington politicians, so used to lecturing the world about the superiority of the American system, to get a scolding from one of the U.S. government's chief creditors, as the debt ceiling crisis careened to an end last week.

"As U.S. politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world," declared the Chinese government through its official Xinhua news agency. "[T]he cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized."

The Chinese dictatorship certainly can't claim any democratic credentials. But it knows a dysfunctional government when it sees one. And as the owner of nearly $5 trillion in U.S. Treasury bills and other dollar-denominated assets, that's all that matters.

In the end, predictably, the Chinese ruling class and their counterparts in the U.S. got what they wanted. The Republicans finally threw in the towel and voted to end the government shutdown before the default deadline, and extend the U.S. government's borrowing capacity, at least through January 2014.

Unfortunately, the rest of us got stuck with the deepest austerity cuts yet in this Great Recession--not to mention a structure of government that's a relic of the 18th century.

AS THE shutdown circus wore on at the beginning of October, commentators reached back deep into American history to explain it all.

Michael Lind, writing at Salon, attributed the shutdown to a revolt of the "local notables," the neo-Dixiecrat business people who used to run the South before the civil rights movement-era federal government encroached on their power. The New Republic's John Judis went even further back, rooting the Republicans' Tea Party insurgency in the pre-Civil War slavocracy's tradition of "nullification"--and, later, the pre-Second World War opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.

While Lind and Judis made interesting points, their analysis was overstated--and their focus on the uniquely Southern roots of American reaction failed to explain why figures such as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachman, Utah Sen. Mike Lee or Iowa Rep. Steve King are identified leaders of the GOP fire-breathers.

In response to Judis, Seth Ackerman, writing in Jacobin, offered a more compelling explanation. Rather than seeing the current bout of government dysfunction as the product of a neo-Confederate challenge to the governing order, Ackerman blamed it on "a reactionary national consensus over a backward set of fundamental governing structures...that are most immediately to blame for the present crisis."

To give Lind and Judis their due, it's hard not to see a whiff of neo-Confederate racism in the opposition to the nation's first Black president. But Ackerman is right to point out the structural features of this antiquated system that allowed an acknowledged political minority to bring the government to a screeching halt.

In that respect--the empowerment of a minority to block the will of the majority--the constitutional setup worked exactly as it was designed more than two centuries ago.

EVEN BY a definition of democracy that sets the bar pretty low--relatively free and fair elections, where voters can participate with little threat to their personal safety--only about 11 percent of the world's people are considered to be living under "full democracy," according to the 2012 Economist Intelligence Unit's "democracy index."

The Economist does rank the U.S. as one of the world's "full democracies." But it puts America in 17th place, behind Norway, Iceland, Canada and the Czech Republic, among others.

It's pretty astounding that the U.S. placed behind a country that only emerged from Stalinism a little over 20 years ago. It only goes to show that when the Czechs cast off Stalinism, the system they adopted reflected the full history of the struggle for democracy up to that point--unlike the 18th century notions of "republicanism" and "representative government" that still dominate the U.S. political system.

One of the most class conscious of the "framers" of the U.S. Constitution, written in 1787, Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary and main author of the pro-Constitution essays known as The Federalist Papers, put it pretty succinctly: "[T]hat power that holds the purse strings absolutely must rule."

Given that the population had just fought a revolution to win independence from the British crown, the founders realized it was impossible to simply junk democracy. So they came up with a system under the Constitution that institutionalized the role of the rich and "well-born" to control the passions of what they often referred to as "the mob." The formula enshrined in the Constitution was of a "representative government," where the people would get to vote for a limited number of representatives, but where the representatives would come from the ranks of the rich.

The other key question that concerned the framers was making sure representative government didn't provide opportunities for the masses to unite and threaten the property of the few. Much of the 1787 Constitutional convention and many of the Federalist Papers are taken up with precisely this question: how to prevent the majority from asserting its will.

Judging by the results, the framers were largely successful. They created a system in which initially only one half of one branch of the government--the House of Representatives in Congress--was directly elected.

The Constitution was amended to implement direct election of the Senate--though not for 125 years. But the judiciary branch, at least at the federal level, is appointed and approved by the other branches of government, and we still don't directly elect the president to this day.

The structure of the U.S. government is set up to fragment power, with two houses of Congress, elected at different times and for different terms. Powers are divided between localities, states and the federal government, along with a division between executive, legislative and judicial branches.

All of this aimed, as James Madison wrote in the 10th of Federalist Papers, to guard against, among other things, "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project."

GIVEN THIS background, it's ironic that Barack Obama and the Democrats claimed to be defending the Constitutional order against the "Tea Party extremists," who themselves never fail to venerate the Constitution as holy writ.

But that's what Ackerman means by a "reactionary consensus." That consensus supports a governing structure that derails the popular will:

When voters do bother to vote, even on the rare occasions their vote matters, the results are rendered opaque and irrelevant--a proliferation of veto points, a miasma of dispersed authority--by a constitutional structure meticulously designed to suppress any visible connection between the casting of a ballot and the enactment of a program.

This point is well-taken--even if the Republicans' record-low popularity and generalized anti-incumbent sentiment does produce a "wave election" in 2014 that goes against the GOP.

The problem is that a defeat for the Republicans usually means a victory for the Democrats, who have become experts at playing to the ever-lower expectations of their base. During election season, they take advantage of peoples' outrage at the "extremists" on the other side. Yet once in office, that rhetoric melts away.

Remember when the Democrats swept into office in 2006 with a mandate to enforce a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq? And when they used that mandate and their constitutionally granted "power of the purse" to cut off funds to Bush's disastrous war? You might remember the first, but not the second, and neither do I--because it didn't happen. The Democrats did sweep to a majority in both houses of Congress in 2006, but they ended up voting to authorize more funds for the Iraq War than George W. Bush requested when he embarked on the "surge" policy in 2007. The constitutional order worked just as Hamilton and Madison drew it up.

Anyone whose e-mail spam control didn't work to block the steady stream of blasts sent out by Democrats.org during the shutdown will know that the Democrats' watchword was "compromise." One urgent message after another taunted the Tea Partiers for being unwilling to approach "common ground." By contrast, the Democrats reaffirmed their longstanding commitment to "come together" with their rivals, "for the good of the American people."

But when you look at the actual funding levels in the deal that ended the shutdown standoff, "compromise" isn't the word that comes to mind. The legislation that passed Congress accepted the Republicans' proposal for deeper cuts in discretionary spending. That's bipartisanship in action.

DURING THE shutdown, it was common for political analysts to explain the House conservatives' "suicide" mission by referencing the hermetically sealed world of American conservatism. According to this argument, gerrymandered House districts and the Fox News-Rush Limbaugh echo chamber insulated the Tea Party caucus from having to face reality. Against all evidence to the contrary, the Tea Partiers were led to conclude that their actions were actually popular.

But try a thought experiment: Like the Tea Partiers, the most liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives come from heavily gerrymandered districts where Republicans haven't won an election in decades. The Democrats even have their own cable television cheerleaders on MSNBC.

Yet can anyone conceive of the possibility of the most liberal Democrats threatening a revolt if Congress refused to pass, say, single-payer health care or a New Deal-style federal jobs program?

Not a chance.

In the summer of 2009, when Obama's health care legislation was running into opposition from the newly emerging Tea Party, more than 100 Democratic House progressives laid down the gauntlet in a letter to the White House. They insisted they wouldn't vote for any health care bill that didn't include the "public option"--itself a watered-down version of publicly funded health care.

Fast forward a few months, after the White House--predictably enough--negotiated away the "public option" in a bid to win support from the insurance industry. Nearly every signer of that 2009 letter ended up voting for the final legislation anyway. So much for standing on principle.

In the 21st century American plutocracy, where corporate money funds both political parties, the mechanisms of minority veto enshrined by the "founders" in the Constitution work only in one direction. And American liberalism plays its assigned role of convincing its supporters to celebrate as "victories" compromises that move the overall political spectrum to the right.

Perhaps the ultimate example of this dynamic is Obamacare itself. Considered the signature liberal achievement of an administration, under which domestic government spending levels rival the Eisenhower era of the 1950s, its debut has been nothing short of a fiasco.

The mind-numbing complexity of the law, coupled with its patchy application across the states and its protection of the profits of the health insurance industry, have made the launch a train wreck. And administration propaganda to the contrary, Obamacare's problems are only secondarily related to the information technology infrastructure.

As Kimberly J. Morgan argued in an insightful Foreign Affairs article, the health care system created by Obama's health care law:

is a complex public-private hybrid that has no real precedent elsewhere in the world. The blend is purely American: Policymakers in the United States have a history of jerry-rigging complicated programs of this sort precisely because they have little faith in government. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy that fuels only deeper public cynicism about the welfare state.

If the Obama administration had followed the patterns of national health care programs in other industrialized countries, it would simply have made more people eligible for an existing program like Medicare. In fact, some liberals actually talked about this in 2009 and 2010--before they "pragmatically" decided to cave to administration and industry pressure and accept what Morgan calls a "Rube Goldberg welfare state" solution.

The Obama administration is now living with the consequences of implementing a 2,100-page law--and people who have managed to sign on to healthcare.gov are actively considering whether they should turn down its still-expensive and limited coverage in favor of paying a tax penalty. If too many people decide to opt out, the entire Obamacare enterprise could collapse of its own weight.

If that came to pass, we would no doubt hear about how the health care "reform" fiasco proved government can't do anything right, and "market solutions" and "personal responsibility" are the only ways to address social problems. But the real explanation would be just the opposite. In tailoring a program to preserve the capitalist market and corporate profits, the Affordable Care Act has sown the seeds that may lead to its own demise.

This latest case of dysfunctional government in the "world's greatest democracy" is another example of something perhaps working not as planned, but certainly as designed. Sort of like that Rube Goldberg contraption the framers built in 1787.