When I taught Introduction to Public Administration at Northern Illinois University during my time in the PhD program, this lecture was my capstone. Here it is, somewhat condensed. This lecture did leave them speechless, not because these concepts are profound, but it was like the problem had never been expressed to them holistically before.
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If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the will of the people” then know that whoever is using it is selling something to you. The best salespeople aren’t ones that are selling a physical object, but rather a concept such as “justice” or “equality” because these terms have different meanings to different people. Concepts themselves are not self-articulating, and the person getting the sales pitch fills in the gaps and half makes the sale. History’s worst demagogues claim to speak for these vague concepts rather than the more concrete self-interest of themselves and their followers.
America’s republican form of government was messy at the start and got messier as the right to vote was expanded because political concepts of justice or equality or fairness stretched in relation to that expansion. Even if there was somewhat of a public opinion consensus on what concepts were to be given priority, there is no articulable way to translate the will of the people into policy because there are numerous intermediate steps.
These intermediate steps are inherent in the American political system between the abstract will of the people and the concrete physical reality of some policy or another. There are 6 steps in all. These steps act as filters so that what the people want bears little resemblance to what they actually get.
The foremost filter is political parties. America’s elections are first past the goalpost as the winner. The candidate that gets 49% of the vote gets exactly 0% of the spoils of victory. Because the oldest and surest law of politics is that an organized minority defeats an unorganized majority, people with like-minded ideas and goals organize for their own self-interest. If they don’t organize, the people who DO organize will succeed at winning elections. Power, then, is the motivation. In America, these parties are big tent parties. The Libertarians and Greens do nothing in the scheme of things but nibble at the margins. Therefore, if you have niche policies you want enacted into law, party activists of the two major parties will subsume, at least to some extent, their niche policy desires so that their team gets power first. Then they will start an internecine squabble for which policies that power will be used for first.
The second filter is party candidates. Nobody shares 100% of your political beliefs but the man in the mirror. Politicians’ views are not à la carte, which is to say you’re ordering a set menu of what the candidate believes in his own head, rather than picking and choosing for them. After all, they’re the ones making significant investments of time and energy to run for public office, not you. If you wanted a politician to agree with 100%, then you’ve got to run for office yourself. Making this filter worse is that all politicians lie, even the good ones.
The third filter is the mechanisms of voting itself. Regardless of how clean elections are (and America has never had particularly clean elections) this filter works by turnout. Still, American elections are not Russian elections where Putin, after silencing, imprisoning, or killing his rivals, gets 95% of the vote. But not everybody who can vote will vote. Turnout varies between 40-60% or so in major national elections. This filter means that the will of the people, three steps down the waterfall already, is giving power to a lying politician you don’t agree with on a whole lot of things via only about 50% of the people who COULD vote that actually DO vote, and of that 50% of the people that actually vote, the winner is conceivably getting only 51% of the ACTUAL votes.
The fourth filter is government institutions. A newly (re)elected politician joins a pre-existing unit of government, such as the House or Senate. These institutions decide their own rules for how they do business, within constitutional guidelines. Even if elected with a clear mandate from his district by his platform emphasizing the importance of a topic (gun control/gun rights, ending foreign aid, etc.), he’s but a single person amongst hundreds of others with their own concerns. This politician then has to primarily concern himself with the internecine squabbles of the party that supported them in their run for office and their desire for the spoils of victory. Oh, and raising funds for reelection. Once people get a taste of power, they rarely want to give it up.
Then there is the fifth filter, which is to say that the abstract will of the people has to be expressed somehow in law. It is still correct to say,
“we are a nation of laws, not men.” As Otto von Bismarck famously said: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” After an idea goes through the political process and comes out the other end of the lawmaking process, it is not what the people back in the home district imagined in the abstract, if they even imagined it at all.
The sixth filter is the enforcers of the law. The American legal scholar Roscoe Pound’s seminal work about legal realism called “Law in Books and Law in Action” showed the distinction between legal theory and rules as written and how they are practiced. I will take it a step further and note that there is a phantasmagoria of imagined law compared to what street level bureaucrats actually do. These laws as enacted may only bear a slight relation to what people actually want, again if they even ever expressed it as a prescription of things to do or do not like the Ten Commandments.
In conclusion, because there are at least six major filters between public opinion on a topic and law on the ground, the public rarely gets what it wants, and this is without touching on other issues such as corruption, blackmail, and coming full circle, endemic propaganda convincing the public to want something that it otherwise wouldn’t.
If I may put on my Austrian economics hat for a moment, this is why the free market is so powerful. There are just three steps and a constant feedback loop. There is the consumer, the maker, and the retailer. Sometimes, there is just the maker and consumer. Don’t produce what people want, and you don’t sell anything, and you run out of money and fail. This is a lesson Hollywood is learning right now, because unlike taxes, nobody can force you to go to a movie theatre and watch The Marvels.
You made me lookup "phantasmagoria"!
Well done sir.