Bubbles

It has been nearly four years since I've done anything with this blog. In many regards, it feels like a vestige tail from a digital animal long gone. Yet, here it is. And it is particularly because it is something that feels out of place that I would like to start using this more.

Since I last did anything here, I've become more active via Facebook and Twitter. I've written academic articles and am working on a number of projects that get at the heart of the types of questions I want to explore professionally. I hope to outline some of that work here in the future. So this is a reintroduction of sorts. While I will continue to write, post, and engage through various media, it seems like a step back from the always immediate and ever-present cycle of news.

I realize that, in my own little way, I contribute to the constant process of refreshing of News Feeds and the like. It makes me think of one of my favorite lines from a writer that I should turn to more often than I have in recent years. This is the first of two points I want to make.

In an essay published in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice, Thomas Merton has an amazingly timely and insightful remark that I often think of when I'm finding myself consumed by "news," particularly the immediate and round-the-clock process we now see through uncritical eyes. Here is Merton's quote:

What was on TV? I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as “news.” When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too. 

This leads to my second point: not only might we be well-served to step back a bit, but we would also seemingly benefit from speaking and engaging with others unlike ourselves. As we know from the "blue" and "red" feeds that shape our lives, and this great SNL skit below, we largely live in our own bubbles and (mostly) like it that way.

John Oliver has also done a great job pointing out, in more detail, our bubbles.

I argue that we can and should engage with those around us, particularly those who don't share our political views. A recent story in the Manhattan Mercury about my work spells this out a bit more. I made a similar point in a USA Today interview: we can't scapegoat or honestly clump everyone who doesn't agree with me into some category, as easy or as comforting as that might be.

“This racial stuff to me is BS and I’m tired of hearing it. I have it made because I’m a white male? I’m prejudiced? That shit is long ago." pic.twitter.com/s6X6imuKfQ

— Brandon Stanton (@humansofny) November 20, 2016

So what is to be done? Here are some interesting/thoughtful/provocative links to help us see beyond our bubbles.

• http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html 
• https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/two-bubbles-unrealism-learning-tragedy-trump/#!
• http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/18/liberals-should-stop-ranting-and-seek-out-silent-trump-voters-like-me/

I hope to, with some regularity, write here rather than always posting and sharing via Twitter and Facebook. You're welcome and encouraged to follow here. You can sign up for RSS, but I will also make these posts available through other media. But as Merton helpfully reminds me, there is a benefit to stepping back. I am easily consumed by information, but I'm not always sure it's helpful. I'm going to try to do my part make sense of our work, not only through the algorithm Facebook thinks I want but through a more critical perspective and one that is open to others.

Kludgeocracy: Government Through Patchwork Fixes

As the recent “fiscal cliff” episode highlights, there are serious ongoing debates about the size of government in the United States. Underneath the cacophony of partisan voices across the political spectrum, Steven Teles points to a larger inherent problem in our democratic decision-making structure. In his provocative recent essay, “Kludgeocracy: the American Way of Policy,” he argues we are witnessing the rise of “kludgeocracy,” a form of government “with no ideological justification whatsoever” (1). This results in layered policy solutions, and multiple mechanisms that can distance citizens from decision-making processes. Teles defines kludgeocracy as:

“an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows” [Microsoft’s operating system] (1).

He continues:

“‘Clumsy but temporarily effective’ also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response. From the mind-numbing complexity of the health care system (which has only gotten more complicated, if also more just, after the passage of Obamacare), our Byzantine system of funding higher education, and our bewildering federal-state system of governing everything from the welfare state to environmental regulation, America has chosen more indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than any comparable country” (1-2).

The implications for kludgeocracy are numerous, with the most insidious feature being the “hidden, indirect and frequently corrupt distribution of its costs” (2). Teles uses the current U.S. tax code as an example of kludgeocracy. The tax code, he suggests, is “almost certainly the most complicated in the Western world, both on the individual and corporate side” (2). There are estimates that direct and indirect costs for complying with the complexity of the tax code are $163 billion each year. That is in addition to 6.1 billion hours spent complying with the filling requirements of the tax code. Taxes are but one example of the costs of kludgeocracy at work.

With layer upon layer, public policy becomes more complex and vexing. As a result, organized interests have a much more realistic possibility of shaping policy rather than average citizens. This is especially true when issues are out of the public gaze (3). Moreover, Kludgeocracy reinforces the image of government incompetence and/or corruption by masking the government’s extensive role in our lives through habits of “dishonesty and evasiveness rather than openly making the argument for a muscular role for government.” For instance, the fact that so much of our welfare state is jointly administered by either intergovernmental agencies or through private contractors makes it very difficult to attribute responsibility when things go wrong. This leads to blame for the government in general rather than being “affixed precisely, where such blame could do some good.” One result of kludgeocracy, then, is “diffuse cynicism, which is the opposite of the habit needed for good democratic citizenship” (4). What are citizens to do when they have no idea what agency or agencies to engage about an issue of public importance?

The costs of kludgeocracy lead to questions about what to do in response. This requires that we understand why American politics has so frequently turned to “kludge solutions.” Teles identifies three interlocking causes: the structure of American institutions, the desire to preserve the fiction of small government while also addressing public problems, and the emergence of a “kludge industry” that supplies a “constant stream of complicated, roundabout solutions” (4). The implication of these interlocking issues is that this complexity leaves citizens out of public decisions because our system of government, and the kludge industry intimately connected with it, functions without opportunities to include strong citizen voices.

American institutions generate complex policy partly because of numerous
“veto points for action.” Not only is there separation of power between Congress’ two bodies and the president, but there are also other less obvious veto points such as separate subcommittees. The recently passed health care reform bill went through five separate committees in Congress, for example. This is all in addition to hyper-partisanship and the ability to filibuster within the Senate. This veto power functions less as a roadblock and more as a tollbooth, with “the toll-taker able to extract a price in exchange for his or her willingness to allow legislation to keep moving.” It is through this process that programs don’t get changed or replaced, but added to as “new ideas have to be layered over old programs” (5).

In addition to this “tollbooth” legislative process, once laws are passed the dynamic between levels of government in our federal system is affected by kludgeocracy. The federal and state governments are “pervasively intertwined” and this leads to what has often been called “marble-cake federalism.” The consequence is that domestic policy in the United States lacks clearly defined lines of responsibility. Additionally, spending is also done in a way that is best described as “indirect.” Federal monies come with a bewildering array of regulations and requirements. The result is that Americans have a more active, but also incoherent and frequently ineffective, state (7).

In addition to the kludge of government, an “army of consultants and contractors” has made itself an indispensible piece in the kludge pie; the kludge industry has “significant resources to invest to ensure that government programs maintain their complexity, and hence the need to purchase their services” (7). This expert-focused approach to complex policy issues further diminishes the voice and agency of those outside the kludge industry.

So what gets us out of this mess?  Teles notes that kludgeocracy is not an accident; rather, it is a predictable consequence of deep features of the American regime. Because of this, it would be facile to pretend that “its baleful effects can be reduced without major (and extremely unlikely) changes in our larger system of government and dominant values.” But Teles suggests that subtle changes can occur at the margins and offers his own list of remedies. These include eliminating or radically reducing the filibuster in the Senate and substantially reconsidering our system of federal grants to states, among other recommendations. But his recommendations are squarely focused at federal government and become somewhat perplexing when he admits that significant institutional reform is, at best, a long shot. When is reforming how the Senate functions, for example, not a serious challenge? Nevertheless, Teles suggests that a more plausible target is an attack on the kludge industry, “given that it both lives off of and helps create demand for policy complexity” (8). The most important tool against policy complexity, he argues, is a change “not in institutions, interests, and rules, but in ideas” (8). It is only when politicians are explicitly associated with kludginess that change might begin to occur. To accomplish this, there is a necessary step of increasing the “visibility of policy complexity’s costs” so that politicians and citizens might recognize what is occurring (9).

Making kludgeocracy into a recognized public problem will be an uphill battle, Teles warns, but helping citizens see the manifestations of it in their ordinary lives is an essential first step. Teles writes: “When they get frustrated trying to figure their way through federal education aid programs, or flustered trying to understand their taxes, or perplexed at the complications of our civil litigation system, they need to recognize their problem as a part of a larger system that connects up to other, seemingly unconnected grievances” (9). Teles argues that giving a name to the designed complexity of piecemeal governance—kludgeocracy—is a necessary step if American democracy is to be simpler and more effective. From the standpoint of being concerned about the sidelining of citizens, Kettering can benefit from this line of research because utilizing the term “kludgeocracy” is yet another way of naming the institutional and systemic challenges inhibiting citizens from having a stronger role to play in policy decision-making. Whether the term becomes something used or not, the ideas behind kludgeocracy could be useful to Kettering’s thinking about the challenges of a highly professionalized and expert-driven approach to public problems.

Philosophies for and against FEMA

The continued devastation from Hurricane (and later categorically downgraded) Sandy raises a number of concerns about how and where we live. Amazingly, media outlets have raised the possibility that the extreme weather we've been experiencing globally is connected to changes in our climate. There is still great hesitancy on the part of pundits and politicians (and even the people at The Weather Channel), but it's an improvement. But that's not what this post is about.

Something else has been striking to me the last few days. Jonathan Chait wrote, in New York Magazine, a piece entitled, "Why Democrats Are Right to Politicize Sandy." He began the article this way:

Disasters are inherently political, because government is political, and preventing and responding to disasters is a primary role of the state. But there is an innate tension in overtly politicizing a disaster. At the moment of greatest urgency, emotions run so hot that it’s hard to fairly assess the costs and benefits of disaster response. On the other hand, moments of normality are too cool, and it is far too easy to minimize the costs of preparing for an eventuality that is far from the horizon.
What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They’re right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies.

Regardless of one's politics, it's difficult to argue that such disasters are apolitical happenings. Built into any response to such situations is an inherently political dimension. As I'll briefly note below, these instances bright attention the the tensions and divisions that exist across the political spectrum about how we are to live as citizens in a society. It is because of this reality that praise from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican who has stumped for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for President Obama is particularly noteworthy in a political realm so committed to attacking the other party. You can read more about an appreciative Christie here. A striking contrast is Michael Brown, President George W. Bush's FEMA director who is widely seen as mismanaging the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. He spoke of Obama's administration responding too quickly.

Scott Horsely of NPR adds to the growing discussion about what Sandy brings to light. Romney and Obama embody fundamentally different public philosophies about who we are as a people and what role institutions have in our society. They usually speak of their different visions for America. I guess "visions" are more digestible than speaking about one's public philosophy. Horsely writes,

For Obama, the federal government is a critical vehicle for that kind of help. Republicans put more faith in local government, and even voluntary efforts.

This tension is debated on the New York Times Opinion Page which further illuminates just how differently we view the role of government or the role of citizens self-organizing to respond to such crises. As this debate will surely continue, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves that this question about the role of government isn't something new. We have long questioned how large and powerful a government to have. But as Paul Krugman asked just a few short years ago, what do we do when the private market isn't interested in think like monitoring the threat of natural disasters? And what do we do when there's not profit to be made in helping citizens, communities, and regions come back from complete devastation? It is difficult to make the case for a strong government response when a political party so unabashedly attacked government's role in keeping our society just that: a society.

Wendell Berry and Necessary Wisdom

Photo by Pam Spaulding

In a powerful and passionate invitation, Wendell Berry continues to call us back into a relationship with one another and with our world that is more authentic. With too many lines fitting for critical reflection and sustained attention, Berry's 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture serves as a reminder of the dominance of a worldview that erodes another way of living and being. In one particular passage, Berry wrestles with the question about making sense of scale when issues are so large and abstract that they are simply numbers and not a felt and understood reality. He writes:

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits. This brings us to an entirely practical question: Can we--and, if we can, how can we--make actual in our minds the sometimes urgent things we say we know? This obviously cannot be accomplished by a technological breakthrough, nor can it be accomplished by a big thought. Perhaps it cannot be accomplished at all.

Berry's hope (and mine) is that we might reclaim a way of life that connects us intimately with one another. I long for the world Berry tells about from his account of his family's history in the same place. The local economy. The connected lives.

We have a share in a local farm. We walk (sometimes). But I also want Amazon.com to send me things I've ordered in two days time. I want to have both realities: the manifestation of community that is idealized in my mind and which may not exist and the many conveniences I enjoy today. But Berry challenges me to think more deeply about my decisions. The "cost" of our market mentality goes beyond comprehension, especially when we (finally) acknowledge the irreparable damage we've made to the earth.

Without too much of my own reflections, I would suggest and recommend you take the time to read Berry's words. They are rich and powerful. They capture an essential element of our story as Americans and as human beings. It's important to be reminded of how we've lived and how we might change. It's important to acknowledge the loss of affection in relation to profit or objective answers.

For the text of Berry's lecture, go here. For the video, follow this link.

Half time, looking back and forward

If you're like the estimated 100 million Americans who watched Sunday's Super Bowl, you presumably experienced numerous commercials (many with gratuitous demonstrations of the female body). Yet the one commercial I continue to think about came from the quintessential American--Clint Eastwood. If you didn't get to watch it, you can check it out right here.

Listen to what he says. He speaks about Americans working together, pulling together to save our economy and ourselves from despair. People are hurting and scared. Eastwood asks, "How do we come from behind? How do we come together? And how do we win?" Detroit and American auto manufacturing (and US manufacturing more broadly) was saved by the federal government. 

It was a few years ago so we've presumably forgotten all about that. It was a big deal. People called it the breaking point for American democracy (they were unaware that corporations would soon be citizens, although that didn't seem to bother those most vocal about the "bailout"). The Trouble Asset Relief Program was a big deal. It wasn't just the auto companies. But the biggest banks would much prefer for us to forget about their reception of copious amounts of money. 

Without going on about this, I want to simply call attention to the leading candidate for the Republican Party in this year's presidential election. Mitt Romney wrote an important piece that stands in sharp contrast to the words of Eastwood and the belief that many Americans now have about the role of the federal government with respect to the auto industry. Bailouts weren't and continue to be unpopular. But they served a purpose. In a time when money wasn't to be had, the government stepped up. It played an important role in helping to save and restructure an industry very important to this country. A recent Washington Post story highlights this point. 

Both Chrysler's video and the WP story point us back to Romney's op-ed in The New York Times. You can read that here. America is about more than free markets. It's about people and a way of life that is worthy of support from the government when necessary. Capitalism is very good and important. But we must acknowledge that we stand to lose a great deal when we only look at the numbers; when it's only about winners and losers in the world of competition. Behind the closures of factories are entire communities decimated and broken. People hurt and scared. And while unemployment is now down to 8.3%, we're not there yet. We need to continue to invest and improve this country. What scares me greatly right now as we look forward to the 2012 election is that we stand to shift course dramatically if Obama loses to the Republican candidate (presumably Romney). Being reminded of the differences between these two is important. Don't lose sight of how they view the world and the role of government.

Numb3rs

I really loved the crime-solving drama Numb3rs. I was very sad to see it end with such an abrupt finale. Anyway, this post is not about that show.

It's about my inability to comprehend large numbers. I've just never had a knack for numbers. Not equations. Just numbers. For example, when Ohio State signs a new football coach for an exorbitant price, I don't fully grasp the sheer volume of money involved. But I know it's very high. And I know that it's wrong.

So when I see images making sense of big numbers, I find them helpful.  That's what I'm posting today. Mint.com and Wallstats.com put together some really great images. You can see them here.

But the image that got me thinking about all of this today came from Moveon.org. It provides a graphic that helps me to make sense of why we are seeing the Occupy Wall Street movement emerge. Take a look. Maybe you'll find it helpful as well.

Click on the image to make it larger.

The Challenge of Staying

Jennifer Zickel and her two daughters, Emily, 4, and Natalie, 7.

I was an altar server. I don't remember the age when I started, but I think it was fourth grade or so. Sister Theresa was charged with the task of getting a bunch of kids--literally--to fill the role of aiding the priest (Father Gideon in my case) with Mass. Our parish was amazingly small. I still don't understand how it even stays open. I guess I want to say that, looking back, it definitely wasn't one of these intimidatingly large cavernous spaces. 

You had one of two options: you were responsible for the "book" (or Sacramentary if you're all about accuracy) or the "bells" which were rung during the Eucharistic Prayer. After serving for a while, I got the hang of everything and started to enjoy it. Throughout high school I would help out with various Masses, covering Midnight Mass at Christmas. Looking back, the experience was positive for me. It got me thinking about my religious tradition and enabled me to participate. In all honesty, I think I did like how I was special. I got to wear an alb, swing incense around, and generally be special. As a kid, it's amazing how important such things can be. 

I'm happy to say that I matured in my understanding of Catholicism and was less into bells and smells and more into the deeper, fundamental questions about the human experience. Without going into detail, I immersed myself in theology, ending up with undergraduate and graduate degrees and working as a campus minister. Then I had enough. The ritual. The hierarchy. The basic tenets of the faith didn't align with what I thought. It was only later, years actually, that I was open to returning to the Catholic world in a way that was more than an obligatory visit for one reason or another. I feel much more comfortable in my very nuanced understanding of what it means to be Catholic. 

I've become part of a really amazing parish in Ithaca, New York. It's diverse and welcoming. It's filled with thinking people. It helps that Cornell is down the street. The pastor is genuine and a true friend. Homilies aren't expected fluff or so stale that the homiletics books from 1970 remain central resources. The parish is alive. 

One thing I hadn't thought much about lately is the fact that on most weekends those helping the priest and pastoral associates (who are women) are girls. More often than not, the altar servers are female. One of them often wears headbands that are bright and sparkly. Just as one would expect from a young girl. It almost reminds you of Winnie from The Wonder Years. She makes me smile because she seems to really enjoy participating in the liturgy in that way.

So I think about this because of something I just read in The Washington Post. It's a story about a parish in Virginia that is no longer going to train girls to be altar servers. It's not the first. While the Diocese of Columbus had opened up the opportunity for girls and women to be altar servers quite a while ago, others have been much slower and some still restrict the role to boys and men. It's as if we're still in a time when Studebakers were parked outside and priests had to say daily Mass, even when that meant they were mumbling to themselves.  The Second Vatican Council opened up the church to new approaches to an ancient way of life and practice. Priests turned around, common language was used (although we're about to have some changes to that), and women were more fully embraced by a church that had for centuries relegated them to second-class status. I love that the cool girl here in Ithaca wears her headbands.  

When Mass was a daily necessity for the individual
priest and less about the celebration of a community.

So now, I read this story about a parish in Virginia and it makes me sad about this church that professes to be universal and welcoming. I've never had to deal with exclusion. I'm a white male who is educated and comfortable financially. I don't have many of the worries or feelings that others do because of marginalization. But that doesn't mean I don't care or I don't think of myself as an ally to those who are excluded. As someone who is about to become a parent, I am realizing that such decisions could impact my child if I had a daughter. Yet, even if I had a boy, I still feel like I'll have discomfort being part of a church that excludes individuals because of their sex. I don't think I want to have a son be part of something that reinforces a view of the world that should have faded a very long time ago. 

I guess I don't think about these things often because I do live in a community that values diverse views and experiences. I live in a community that is highly educated and thoughtful. I don't think the sparkly headbands are going away. But the church is much more than simply the parish I belong to these days. What's going on in Virginia and elsewhere is damaging to the whole. The challenge for me is to try to make sense of why excluding women helps to build a more just and peaceful society or even a more dynamic church. Women have long played important roles in the church and that's only continuing to increase with lay ministers and lay leadership. So what's going on with something like this? If there is fear of watering down Catholicism, then I'll have to say goodbye. Jesus wasn't really into excluding people. I'd prefer to follow his example rather than some bishop's grasp for a church and a time that is gone. The challenge of staying is believing that issues such as these, in the longview, will be seen as subtle steps backwards in the long march of a pilgrim people to right relationship with one another and with God. 

Technocracy, democracy, and what it means

Today, print media has published articles exploring an emerging trend in governance--the role of the technocracy. The first article comes from the The New York Times.  It focuses primarily on the recent changes that have taken place in the post-Berlusconi Italy. Elisabetta Povoledo, writing for The Times noted that

Mr. Monti said he hoped the new government could restore market confidence and soothe a tense political climate. “We worked seriously and paid close attention to the quality of the choices,” he said at a news conference. He added that he had been encouraged by Italy’s European partners and the international community and that the rapid formation of the government would relieve the pressure of markets on Italy.

The ministers are drawn mostly from Italy’s academic world, some with strong ties to the Catholic Church, but also banking and the upper echelons of civil service.

Because of the seriousness of the challenges facing Italy, there is little hope outside of turning to experts. The long-term prospects for this apolitical group of academics and business leaders are questionable, primarily because such an approach to governance stands in contrast to the electoral realities for a democracy and its political parties. But for the time being, these leaders are viewed as saviors from a system fraught with political jockeying that, in many ways, has led to this precipice. The Telegraph's Christopher Booker writes that the EU's plan all along was not democracy but rather technocracy. He writes

One of the few pleasures of watching this self-inflicted shambles unfolding day by day has been to see the panjandrums of the Today programme, James Naughtie and John Humphrys, at last beginning to ask whether the EU is a democratic institution. Had they studied the history of the object of their admiration, they might long ago have realised that the “European project” was never intended to be a democratic institution.

The idea first conceived back in the 1920s by two senior officials of the League of Nations – Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, a British civil servant – was a United States of Europe, ruled by a government of unelected technocrats like themselves. Two things were anathema to them: nation states with the power of veto (which they had seen destroy the League of Nations) and any need to consult the wishes of the people in elections.

As Richard North and I showed in our book The Great Deception, this was the idea that Monnet put at the heart of the “project” from 1950 onwards, modelling his “government of Europe” on precisely the same four institutions that made up the League of Nations – a commission, a council of ministers, a parliament and a court. Thus, step by step over decades, Monnet’s technocratic dream has come to pass. 

Phillip Oltermann of The Guardian collects a good number of articles that point towards a technocracy model of governance in the EU.  


Another article comes from The Economist with the appropriate title, "Have PhD, will govern," touching on the appointment of academic economists in Italy and Greece and the shift in contemporary politics to think about new approaches to paralytic stalemates in national political systems. The articles goes on to talk about the unique nature of the "super committee" currently facing a looming deadline here in the United States. The author put it this way:

Perhaps the best example of this is the so-called “super committee” in the United States. Normally, all fiscal decisions are made by Congress, with the approval of the president. But by November 23rd, a special committee made up of three Democrats and three Republicans from each house of Congress, has to slice a mammoth $1.5 trillion off the budget deficit over ten years. Congress must then vote on whatever the super committee proposes—but may only accept or reject the plan as a whole. It may not amend the plan or vote on individual items, as is usual. And if Congress rejects the package, or the super-committee fails to come up with one, then the $1.5 trillion of cuts will be imposed automatically. American politicians, despairing of their inability to reduce the deficit in normal ways, have put a gun to their own heads. There have been partial precedents in American history but nothing quite like this.

In Europe, meanwhile, technocratic prime ministers are only the highest-ranking experts being recruited to help balance budgets and reform economies. Italy not only has an economics professor as prime minister (Mario Monti), it has also agreed that the IMF should scrutinise its reform programme. Greece has accepted that a troika of the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission (the European Union’s glorified civil service) should supervise its austerity measures. So have Ireland and Portugal. Spain is an especially revealing case. On the face of it, its democracy is working as usual. The country is due to hold an election on November 20th and, if the polls are correct, the conservative Popular Party will unseat the ruling Socialists. Yet at the same time, the current government has agreed upon a series of economic targets with the European Commission, and in practice the PP’s leader, Mariano Rajoy, will have to take these targets as a guide to policy, even if he dislikes them (which, admittedly, he doesn’t).

The political environment here in the United States, has seen a long-growing problem with the use of the filibuster (you can check out one article on this increase here). 

To quote from The Economist:

The special factor in America is the dysfunctionality of the political system. The past decade or so has seen a growing use of delaying tactics in Congress—such as the filibuster and so-called “hold” on appointments, so that decisions that were once largely formal or administrative have become mired in politicised controversy. This is the opposite of the problem in Europe, where the emergence of technocrats is supposed to make decision-making less partisan. But it is still a problem, as was seen in the disastrous wrangle over raising the national debt ceiling—an argument which ended in the downgrade of American sovereign debt. House Republicans have said they will not compromise with the president. But since the American political system requires a measure of compromise to work (and since the Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives), parts of the legislative processes have almost seized up. This is likely to get worse during election year.

America and Europe share a common problem: the economic and financial crisis has discredited mainstream politicians. The right is popularly seen as the party of the rich, too close to unpopular bankers, and responsible for the financial deregulation of the 1980s which, on some accounts, was the source of all the trouble. But the left, which might have expected to have benefited from a capitalist meltdown, is no better off. Centre-left governments, at least in Britain and America, are also compromised by their earlier friendliness to finance and the left is seen as having been profligate, running up the debts that austerity is now needed to rein in. The result is that whereas in the early years of the crisis, the left was doing better in America and the right better in Europe (an echo of the 1930s), now there seems no pattern, except growing opposition to incumbents. 

This brief reference back to the 1930s is an important nod because technocracy and technocratic approaches to governance helped to shape much of the thinking during that period. John Jordan's Machine-Age Ideology provides a glimpse into that period. The positive view of technocracy faded in the United States, but, as Oltermann of The Guardian noted 

In many European countries, the word technocrat still has positive connotations. In the 1950s, Jean Monnet envisioned growth as something that required expertise rather than party politics. Smaller democracies, such as Holland, often rely on technocrats as negotiators between unruly coalition governments, or between employers and employees. Belgium, without a government for 17 months and counting,is a technocrat's paradise and has weathered the crisis fairly well so far. In the former communist states of central and eastern Europe, technocrats played a key role in negotiating the transition from authoritarian regime to democracy.

Today, we can see nations wrestling with daunting challenges. We are included in this list. But what are we to think of an embrace of "apolitical" political actors. I realize technocrats aren't popularly elected like our democratic leaders, but we would be wrong to think they exist outside of the political world in which they live and work. It seems to me that maybe we need to look at this issue in this way.

1. We need to explain what we mean when we say "political" or "politicians." We are political animals, and I think we do a injustice to the term when we only use it as a derogatory term about elected officials. Being political can (and I would argue, should) be a positive characteristic of citizens.
2. The role of the expert needs to be understood in a way that positions them as political actors in relationship with elected officials as well as ordinary citizens. There is a benefit to sidestepping the debacle that is the Congress, but democracy doesn't have to mean impasse or partisanship. 

These two points are not simple. Changing such large issues isn't even feasible. But if we just ignore them, then I would submit that we're only going to find ourselves facing issues much like we are today. And while we may think we're living through a very extreme time, I would venture a guess that having elected officials so closely aligned with bug business and big money will continue to block an honest discussion and debate about how we might, collectively, work through some of these very serious and pressing issues. There is a role for the citizen in all of this, as well as the elected official and the technocrat. Finding that balance, however, requires considerably more work.