By Lee H. Hamilton
People who care about the United States’ place in the world often fret about challenges to representative democracy from other countries. I’d contend that the more formidable challenge comes not from abroad, but from within.
For starters, it’s hard to make American representative democracy work. Our country is large, growing, and diverse, and we rely on a bewildering array of branches and units of government to run it. The system rests on the consent of a public that often wants mutually contradictory things—to shrink the deficit, for instance, but without cuts in defense spending or entitlements, and no additional taxes.
Two of our basic governing institutions, Congress and the presidency, are not at the top of their game. Congress has adopted some unfortunate political and procedural habits: it governs by crisis, fails repeatedly to follow time-tested procedures that ensure accountability and fairness, panders to wealthy contributors, and too often erupts in excessive partisanship. Meanwhile, the president presides over a bloated executive branch that has too many decisionmakers and bases to touch, lacks accountability, and desperately needs better, more effective management.
The decades-long march toward increased presidential power at the expense of the legislative branch severely undercuts our constitutional system and raises the question of how far down this road can we go and still have representative democracy.
We face other challenges as well. Too much money is threatening the core values of representative democracy. And too many Americans have become passive and disengaged from politics and policy. Representative democracy is not a spectator sport.
Yet our political system forms the core of American strength. It enshrines fundamental power in a body elected by the broad mass of the people and is based solidly on the participation and consent of the governed. Allowed to work properly, it is the system most likely to produce policy that reflects a consensus among the governed. Above all, it has the capacity to correct itself and move on.
In other words, we don’t need to reinvent our system, but rather use its abundant strengths to find our way through our problems and emerge stronger on the other side.
It is not written in the stars that representative government will always prosper and prevail. It needs the active involvement of all of us, from ordinary voters to the president. Each of us must do our part.
Lee Hamilton is Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University; Distinguished Scholar, IU School of Global and International Studies; and Professor of Practice, IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
