Let’s start with facts:  we live in a failed democracy that has transitioned to incompetent dictatorship. Given that kind of mess, it is worth going back to first principles to think about effective government.

First of all it should be noted that there is an intrinsic conflict of interests in any national government.  This isn’t complicated; it is basically parallel to what goes on in any corporation between the interests of labor and interests of management.  Near term they are dividing up profits, but longer term both have a common interest in the success of the company.   Successful companies are able to manage the conflict.

In government you have the economic powers-that-be versus the population as a whole.  Both have to benefit for success, but immediate interests are opposed in much the same way.  It should be emphasized that here too exclusive power to one or the other is disastrous. We’re accustomed to hearing one side of that story—uncontrolled spending on government benefits for the population will bankrupt the economic engines of the country. But an exclusive focus on the business side is equally bad and it’s not just a matter of living standards:  business interests are myopic both in terms of time scales and in terms of the environment needed for success.  You won’t have the technologies, or the people, or the physical environment necessary for the economy (and as we’ve seen recently, business people can risk bankrupting the country too!). Government has to speak for the whole picture.  Even the patron saint of free enterprise—Adam Smith—was well aware of this issue.  “The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.” There is nothing sacred or proven about claims that government should never interfere with the marvelous natural workings of the marketplace—that’s just self-serving propaganda for the “haves” side.

This intrinsic dichotomy is very important for effective government.  Both sides must be present but neither side can win.  That’s one of the reasons we’re in such bad shape right now.  What we have today is business capture of government—exactly what Adam Smith worried about.  To be effective government needs to provide means for functional negotiation and cooperation between both sides.  Those sides don’t map exactly to the Republicans and Democrats, but that’s pretty much what it comes down to.  Bipartisanship is not about being nice; it’s working out fundamental tradeoffs between the two sides.

That is precisely what we have lost–structurally.  There are three immediately obvious issues.  The first is the primary system.  Since primaries are partisan, candidates are chosen exclusively based on appeal to one side or the other.  That guarantees extreme positions and more importantly disenfranchises the center of the voting population.  A second example is the way partisan power is used to control legislation offered in Congress.  In the House the so-called Hastert rule only allows on the floor measures that are supported by a majority of Republicans.  In the Senate the majority leader Mitch McConnell routinely blocked anything he disagreed with—regardless of overall support.  Both rules disenfranchise the center and make the country effectively ungovernable except in extremes—so whiplashing policies are a matter of course.  Finally there is the Supreme Court: lifetime appointments plus limitless power give a huge incentive for partisan appointees.

All of this is bad news and good.  The bad news is that it isn’t clear when we’ll be in a position to fix any of it. The good news is that there are significant items that really aren’t so hard to fix.  For primaries, there are a number of possible variants, including non-partisan primaries with rank choice voting.  For the Congress, you don’t need to change the constitution to change the rules.  And there are many proposals to fix the terrible mistake that is the Supreme Court—an undemocratically-chosen body with lifetime appointments and no constraints on its power.   With a decent Supreme Court we should be able to fix gerrymandering, for example.  That is a math problem we chose to turn into a political mess.

Bipartisan cooperation is fundamental, and we can stop going out of our way to make it hard.  That way we can make the tradeoffs for the country to be governable.  Then we can move on to two other necessary and straightforward matters:  direct election of the President (the current system is grossly inequitable and invites fraud) and adding the few extra Senate seats needed to compensate the ill-represented largest states. Such measures won’t solve everything (not control of media for example), but we can make things quite a lot better.  We can make our democracy work.

It’s not so complicated–if we ever get a chance to do it.