On Health Care, Parliamentary Democracy, and the Tyranny of the Majority

Lots of excellent "Day After" thoughts out there, as the final hurdle in the way of establishing some kind of (still too minimal, still private-insurer-based, still poorly funded...yet still, I think, very much worth passing!) national health coverage system retreats into history. I am intrigued by Jacob's idea here (will the positive freedom enabled by the greater security provided by health care reform weaken other forces which similarly push for security against the free market?), Matt's observation here (by standing on their principles and refusing to compromise whatsoever, are the Republicans the unsung heroes of pushing the Democrats towards comprehensive reform?), and Ross's question here (will health care reform will turn out to be the last peak liberal egalitarianism will be able to climb before an era of global retrenching forces a long, slow, climb-down?). All are worth reading. But let me focus on something which comes up on Megan McArdle's and Laura McKenna's blogs.

Has the long and often ugly struggle over health care reform in essence made our national government (or at least Congress, or at least the Democratic party) more parliamentary? Megan thinks so:

Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn't want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all....I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care. Not because I think I will like his opponent--I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama's opponent says. But because politicians shouldn't feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them. We're not a parliamentary democracy, and we don't have the mechanisms, like votes of no confidence, that parliamentary democracies use to provide a check on their politicians. The check that we have is that politicians care what the voters think. If that slips away, America's already quite toxic politics will become poisonous.

This is, to be blunt, stupid. Laura knows it:

Not everything that gets passed in Congress needs to be bipartisan. This vote represents a major failure of the Republican party to come up with a better idea for how to deal with rising health care costs and how to deal with the millions of uninsured Americans waiting in line in emergency rooms across the country. With the lack of policy imagination, all they had left was a "no" vote and that's what they did. It was the cowardly way out of this problem.

That's all that really needs to be said...but I like to talk, so let's pick apart Megan a little bit more. First "lie to the voters, and then ignore them"? The first part is simply false; while obviously the sausage-making process which is legislation has contorted the promises and specifics which many people, both Democratic and Republican, debated regarding health care reform over the past year, President Obama's basic intentions were laid out from the very beginning of his campaign. No one doubted that this was going to be a priority of his (and of Pelosi's and Reid's) from Day One. As for the second part...ignore which percentage of voters, at what point, regarding which issue? The best measurements suggest that the opinion of the American people in regards to the specific bill voted on last night breaks down at about 50% opposed, 42% in favor. A significant difference, but not a huge one--and moreover, a difference moderated by the fact that increasing awareness of the bill's specific provisions increases its popularity across the board.

Second, Megan seems to do be making use of a strange double-standard here. On the one hand, we clearly do not have a direct, plebiscitarian democracy in the U.S.; we have an indirect, representative one. Political representatives obviously should be expected to attune themselves to the will of their constituents, but--as Megan herself notes--we do not have the structural mechanics in place for voter approval or disapproval to be directly (or, at least, more directly) rendered via popular party actions like votes of no confidence. All we have are, well, elections--the most recent one of which gave the Democratic party enough votes (though just barely) in both houses of Congress to push through their agenda. But, on the other hand, Megan seems to consider this "tyrannical," and attacks the Democratic party's rule by majority as failing to "care what the voters think." Does she actually want our system of government to be a direct and plebiscitarian one? Because, if she does, the types of reforms that would make it so are...parliamentarian, with the pursuant lessening of the power of the Senate and its filibuster, the very thing which most slowed health care reform down (and forced strange compromises in it) in the first place. I could, perhaps, get on board with that.

In a recent discussion on Front Porch Republic, talking again about the possibility of "Red Tory" ideas here in the U.S. in connection with Phillip Blond's visit, one commenter observed that those who really want to see a more subsidiarian and communitarian politics emerge in America ought to note that "Front Porch or Red Tory principles are more congruent with parliamentary rather than presidential democracy, with coalitions rather than majority rule, and with variable decentralisation based on subsidiarity rather than rigid federalism." I agreed, commenting that parliamentary democracy is one way of bringing to life certain populist democratic principles: namely, that "that people can form coalitions, that coalitions can create majorities on appropriate levels of government, and that said majorities ought to be able to rule...Parliamentary democracy arguably strikes a better balance between the needs to respect individual rights and to empower majority coalitions than does our own separation of powers system." Now, to be sure, the great bulk of those (at least in American history) who have styled themselves as "populists" have not spoken a parliamentary language. But the overlap is, I would argue, undeniable: the populist demand for local empowerment against distant entities invariably involves an expectation of democratic accountability and responsiveness--that a majority of people can rightly control their government, express their views, and defend their places through collective action....such as a coalition of those being rendered insuranceless because of pre-existing conditions and their sympathizers demanding access to insurance markets, perhaps? Some people, of course, might call that "tyranny of the majority"; I wonder if it would have been the sort of tyranny (a tyranny much more responsive to "what people think," such as what they thought when they elected the health-care-reform-supporting Barack Obama over John McCain by 53% to 45%--which, interestingly, is about the same percentage spread over health care approval today--in the first place) that Megan would have been more approving of.

The United States of America, with its size, its consolidated and corporate media, and its atrophied party system, is arguably not particularly well suited to parliamentary rule; very likely any such reforms would, in our present socio-economic and geo-political context, simply result in a change in the structure and nature of political representation, not make our representatives markedly more democratic. But still, it would be more direct; it would be more responsive, and more accountable, to "what voters think." If Megan thinks the lack of direct plebiscitarianism in our democracy, and the ability for an elected majority to pass laws in the face of an up-to 8% point range in relative popular disapproval--if, that is, she thinks the lack of a parliamentarian democratic attitude amongst our representatives--is a serious problem, there is a easy way to fix that: embrace parliamentarian reforms! But somehow, if the matter involves legislation she doesn't like, I suspect Megan would find "tyranny" in that as well.

[Update, 3/23/10, 3:57pm CST: Nate Silver runs down 14 different arguments which people like Megan make to argue that there was something "tyrannical" about the passage of the health care bill; I don't agree with all of this comments, but his last one, #14, is dead-on accurate, not to mention specifically germane to this post here:

[W]ere the Congress closer to a direct democracy--such as by having proportional representation of Senators, non-gerrymandered congressional districts, and a norm for majority-rules procedures in the Senate [in other words, needless to say, if it were more...parliamentarian!]--health care reform would have been signed into law months ago and would likely be substantially more liberal and sweeping than the reforms that have in fact been enacted.]