This is the tenth video/column in a series in honor of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the release of my most recent book, American Democracy in Crisis. If you have not had a chance to listen to (or read) the previous videos, I invite you to do that.
In part 9 I spoke about one of the repercussions of the divisions in the American political system – specifically the problem of responsiveness and I used immigration as a mini-case study to help make this point.
Today I am going to focus on another repercussion, the inability to deliver for the people.
As usual I begin with a quote, then say a few words about it.
A government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.
This quote comes from the American founder, who many people know of today as a rapper, Alexander Hamilton. The brainchild of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton wrote more papers than either of his co-authors (James Madison and John Jay), including the paper this quote comes from #70.
Another way to think of this is that performance - the ability to design, deliver, and effectively administer policies – matters. Moreover, it is a critical aspect of how we judge our system.
Someone I respect a good deal James MacGregor Burns once said
it is the failure of the American system to produce that has most alienated leaders and followers alike.
Whether this failure is in the past or present, such as the inability to deal with children brought into the country illegally, immigration more broadly, the problems of social justice in policing, gun violence in schools, healthcare, and so much more, the fact is that a good government is one that addresses societal woes in a timely manner and in the interest of the health, safety, well-being, and happiness of the people.
When the government cannot do that, it is not surprising that the people become frustrated, disenchanted, disillusioned.
One example of this in practice, another mini-case study of sorts concerns the protests that broke out after George Floyd was killed. On May 25th, 2020, Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis. Video of the killing provoked outrage across the country and led to massive protests, as well as calls to address centuries of systematic, structural racism inherent in our policing practices and society writ large.
Shortly after Floyd’s murder, National Public Radio (NPR) spoke to a former federal prosecutor Atty. Bains who had worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and co-authored the Department’s report on the Ferguson Missouri Police Department. That study was prompted by the death of another unarmed black man, Michael Brown, who was killed in Ferguson in 2014. Brown’s killing was the second to get a good deal of attention during the summer of 2014. Just weeks prior, Eric Garner was also killed at the hands of police officers in Staten Island, New York. Like Floyd’s killing, the deaths of Brown and Garner were viewed by many as part of a larger pattern of systematic racism.
In polls taken in the years prior to Floyd’s death, nine out of ten Americans (87%) described racial discrimination as a problem, while 65% described it as a “big” problem.
The 2015 Justice Department report Atty. Bains helped produce contained several recommendations for reform of the kind that might have helped prevent Floyd’s death but, as he told NPR after Floyd’s death, in the intervening years, none of the proposals had been adopted.
Given how the system operates, it is not surprising that little changed.
Nor is it surprising that, in response to this failure on the part of the government to act and take steps to address this issue, after Floyd’s death, millions of frustrated Americans took to the streets to demand action.
There are countless other examples or cases we could point to of the government not performing, producing or executing. This is a problem because as Hamilton noted, good government delivers and bad government does not.
Moreover, just like the problem of responsiveness I talked about in part 9, it is a problem which results in large part from the structural divisions the Framers built into our system.
