Here’s the meat of Ruth Marcus’s most recent column in the Washington Post:
Rules, norms and laws are empty fixtures without decent, patriotic leaders. We cannot survive when one party’s leaders give up on truth, loyalty to country and self-restraint.
Actually, I agree with that statement. However, the context she presents for it is grimly amusing:
Few could argue that Republicans still prize character in their leaders. A 2018 Gallup poll found: “Republicans, by 22 points, were much more likely than Democrats to say it was very important for the president to be a moral leader when [Bill] Clinton was in office.†The pollsters continued, “Now with Trump in office, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to hold this view, by 14 points.â€
Here’s her prescription:
The solution to the tyranny of the minority is a wave of pro-democracy reforms, including elimination of gerrymandering and lifetime terms for Supreme Court justices as well as expansion and protection of voting rights. Republicans, once deprived of the crutches that allow minority control, thereafter will need to appeal to the multicultural, multiracial electorate of the 21st century.
My list would be somewhat different. I think that the “expansion and protection of voting rights” does not have the effect she believes and anyway those have gone about as far as they should be taken. Just enforce the laws we have.
Consider the voting in presidential elections
contrasted with that in primaries:
If expansion and protection of voting rights have increased since 1980, what relation between them and participation do those graphs illustrate? I would say none or an inverse relation if any.
I think we need term limits for all elected offices, elimination of pensions for elected offices, and to double or even triple the size of the House of Representatives. The larger the House, the more democratic, no?
The relationship between virtuous leaders and good government is not original to Ruth or me. Plato pointed it out more than two millennia ago. His “philosopher-kings” were a class apart and did not even know who their offspring were if any. Greed and lust were foreign to them. Not to mention nepotism or providing estates for their heirs—they had none.
The Founders, despairing of finding such paragons in a systematic manner, decided that limiting the power of government to “enumerated powers” was the only way to provide for good government systematically. It’s an idea so wild we might consider trying it.
