What’s Wrong and How to Fix It. By Adam Garfinkle.

Broken: A Primer on American Political Dysfunction. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, January/February 2013.

What’s Wrong and How to Fix It. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest.

Part 1: Introduction and Globalization/Automation. October 9, 2012.

Part 2: Political/Institutional. October 15, 2012.

Part 3: Corruption/Plutocracy. October 25, 2012.

Part 4: Television and Politics. November 2, 2012.

Part 5: The Financial System. December 17, 2012.

Part 6: Tax Reform. January 2, 2013.

Part 7: Health Care. January 9, 2013.

Part 8: Repeal the 17th Amendment. February 4, 2013.

Part 9: Government Design. February 5, 2013.

Part 10: Institutional Reform. February 6, 2013.

Part 11: National Service. February 7, 2013.

Part 12: Relocate the Culture Wars. February 8, 2013.

Part 13: The New Homestead Act. February 8, 2013.

Part 14: Dreaming the New/Old Liberalism. February 9, 2013.

Part 15: A Foreign Policy/National Security Coda. February 10, 2013.


Garfinkle, from Part 4:

I’m neither a registered Democrat (anymore) nor a registered Republican (never have been), and I have already suggested why: I don’t want to go back to 1965 or to 1925. But let me briefly restate my antipathy to both sets of party orthodoxy in somewhat different language before getting to my ten proposals.

The Left in this country, generally speaking, tends to excoriate corporations, even to disparage the profit motive itself, and to think of government as a proper vehicle not only for battling the depredations of capitalism but also for forcing on the nation the kinds of multicultural, politically correct social biases it likes. It has inculcated within itself the old countercultural notion of consciousness-raising, in which it presumes to know more about what’s good for you than you do. It is the self-appointed Robin Hood of our political soul, though its populist pretensions are belied by its elitist ways. The Left displays a blindness to the benefits of a non-distorted market economy, and an even more grievous blindness to the limits of what government can accomplish—especially a government that tries to do more than it should in what has become a misaligned Federal system.

The Right these days, generally speaking, tends to excoriate government, to dismiss the idea of an inclusive and fairly governed national community, and to blame those who are genuinely poor for their own poverty. Much of the Right, having regrettably abandoned its own Burkean heritage, sees through a crude Social Darwinist prism that acknowledges only individual judgment, ignoring the social context in which that judgment is seated. It is blind to plutocratic corruption and doesn’t see, either, the widening cultural gap between an isolated elite and those Americans who are falling out of an often recently won and still fragile middle-class status. It is particularly blind to the fact that a distorted market system dominated by large corporate oligarchies that deploy increasingly sophisticated advertising methodologies can be responsible for undermining both social trust and the founding virtues.

Again, there’s no reason to choose between the problems caused by the public sector (a sclerotic, dysfunctional and wildly expensive government) and the problems caused by the private sector (a predatory corporate leadership class, and especially an increasingly powerful parasitic financial elite, that has become an extractive rather than a productive asset for the nation as a whole). Both problems exist, and both are getting worse.

Moreover, these problems are not really separate; they feed one another. Private sector abuses feed the appetite for government protection, but government is too dysfunctional to provide that protection; instead its efforts tend to harm small businesses that lack the arsenals of specialist lawyers and accountants that huge businesses use to evade government attempts to hem them in. You get a hint of this by looking at what the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements have had in common, which is a fair bit more than either group likes to admit.