In the Bookbag: The Cure for Our Broken Political Process

I just received a review copy of The Cure for Our Broken Political Process: How We Can Get Our Politicians to Resolve the Issues Tearing Our Country Apart by Sol Erdman and Lawrence Susskind which purports to tell us how to fix our government so that our leaders will spend less time fighting with each other and more time solving our problems.

Naturally, I’m skeptical. I’ve heard these kinds of claims before, and they often turn out to be partisan hackery: If we just get the other guys to see things our way, everything will turn out great! Either that, or they want to do impossible things like “getting money out of politics” or eliminating special interests.

Interestingly, Erdman and Susskind’s approach is apparently almost the opposite of that last one. They are both experts at conflict resolution, and they’ve noticed that people with competing special interests—industrialists and environmentalists, for example—can learn how to work together to reach solutions that make both sides happy. It’s only the politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties that can’t work together.

The problem, they say, is that our democratic process has some design flaws. The way we fill elected offices doesn’t reward politicians properly for cooperating to get things done. Erdman and Susskind have a plan to fix this.

I’m curious how they’ll handle some of the objections and concerns.

Why do they think their plan—whatever it is—will work? Do they backup their ideas with a good theory of the election process? Or have they found real-world examples that work? I’d prefer both, but at a minimum their ideas should not be contradicted by the theories, because even if there are working examples, the theories have an ugly way of reasserting themselves.

Then there’s the question of whether we can get there from here. Are there constitutional barriers? Does getting there involve some magical moment where Congress does the right thing? And could the process be subverted into something even worse than it is now?

Finally, one of the biggest dangers of this plan is that it could work too well. Government getting stuff done is not a concept that warms the libertarian heart. Gridlock is good government.

On the other hand, as ineffective as our politicians can be, they’ve managed to create a government that is still quite large and intrusive. I guess the question is whether Erdman and Susskind’s plan for resolving issues will include libertarian small-government ideas at the bargaining table, or whether their plan to end strife and make government more decisive will be biased toward more government intervention.

Update: I should add that even if I don’t believe in their solution, I expect their description of the problem to give me some new insights into the political process.