Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
A contrarian take focuses on the increasing specialization of knowledge and the increasingly fine-grained international division of labor, which has had increasing impact on a government that fails to keep up. A rough history of that:<p>In the 1700s the Western democracies established nominally omnicompetant, unspecialized legislatures.<p>In the last 1800s, given the increasing specialization of knowledge, the first committees are established. At first this process is ad-hoc, one-off, disorganized, and often viewed as temporary.<p>By the early 1900s it is clear that the system of highly specialized committees are the only way for the legislatures to keep up with the rapidly growing complexity of society.<p>By the 1930s, in the USA, there is the growing sense that the general assembly of Congress should only act as a rubber stamp for the committees. All intelligent laws come from committees. In the rare case that a law comes from some random Congressperson, rather than a committee, their law is assuredly badly written, and full of unintended consequences. All good laws from committees, without exception.<p>In 1946 the committee system reaches the peak of its prestige and intellectual coherence with the Congressional Reorganization Act:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;history.house.gov&#x2F;Historical-Highlights&#x2F;1901-1950&#x2F;The-Legislative-Reorganization-Act-of-1946&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;history.house.gov&#x2F;Historical-Highlights&#x2F;1901-1950&#x2F;Th...</a><p>If you follow the trend line, from 1850 to 1950, and then you project that trend line into the future, it seems clear that somewhere around 1970 or 1980 there should have been a Constitutional amendment that shifted the power to make law from the Congress to the committees. A possible system that could have worked well is if the Congress continued to exist only to appoint people to committees, and then the committees themselves gained the power to make law. Rather than asking Congress to act as a rubber stamp, Congress would simply lose its traditional powers, which would shift to the committees.<p>Such a change would have formalized the idea that we live in a complex and highly specialized world, very different from the world of the 1700s, and so only a system of highly specialized committees can offer good government.<p>The failure to push forward with necessary constitutional change means that the whole system began to stagnate, and then it became vulnerable to the accusation that the government no longer worked (more and more pundits then began to suggest that the answer was less government, rather than fixing the process of governance).<p>The committee system was still widely respected till the 1990s. It is often said that Newt Gingrich, when he gained power in 1994, began an attack on the committee system. His goal wasn&#x27;t great government, so it served his purpose to undermine the whole system.<p>There is universal agreement that the committee system is less important now than it was 30 years ago. Republicans have lead the way with a populist style of government in which laws are pushed forward from the floor of Congress, rather than from the committees. Many of these laws seem to be designed to function more as attention getting devices, rather than functioning first and foremost as instruments of governance.<p>If you buy this line of thinking, the answer is to declare the 1700s officially over and close down the nominally omnicompetant, unspecialized legislature, and implement a system of committees, with the committees holding all of the traditional legislative functions.<p>This would require an amendment to the Constitution, which is difficult in the USA.<p>Any Constitution can be transformed into any other Constitution by way of amendment, and therefore, in a sense, there is only one fundamental question of Constitutions, and that is how can they be amended. Every society needs to find a balance between stability and flexibility; every society needs to adapt to change while keeping the important fundamentals solid. Therefore there must be some ideal amount of time over which Constitutional change should play out. Too fast and it might be too easy for one moment of public hysteria to sweep away everyone&#x27;s civil rights, but if too difficult, then people begin to ignore the Constitution because it no longer matches people&#x27;s actual needs.<p>What is the ideal speed at which a Constitution should evolve? At the current moment, the world offers us two countries as examples of the dangers of the two extremes: Hungary and the USA. In Hungary it turned out to be too easy to amend the Constitution, while in the USA it has turned out to be too difficult to amend the Constitution.<p>I wrote an analysis of Hungary versus the USA, which got a lot of comment when I first wrote it. For anyone interested, it is here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demodexio.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;thesis-1-there-is-one-correct-way?s=w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demodexio.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;thesis-1-there-is-one-corre...</a>