Who should drive the public good?

Mitch McConnell was recently quoted as whining about big business functioning as a "woke parallel government." Frankly, if the legislature was more effective in passing legislation pertaining to public goods, it wouldn't be a problem. But we are where we are. For decades now, the Federal legislative branch has ground to a halt as legislators try to ram through one or two big things by reconciliation or some other means of budget brinkmanship while jockeying for position for the next set of elections. The two-year cadence of elections for the House emphatically does not help.

The Democrats do their part, no doubt, but the "cooling saucer" function of the Senate, perhaps most elegantly laid out in volume 2 of Caro's LBJ bio, has been leveraged to a hilt by the Republicans under McConnell, who have ramped up their "tyranny of the majority" rural white people as victims strategy to a hilt. Pity the poor country boy.

So if the legislature won't move things forward, the corporate sector has decided it will. After Citizens' United, after all, corporations are people too. And of course corporations are disproportionately located in blue places and employ Democrats, and are owned by people with money, who vote Democrat. So money ends up winning.

In some ways this is an extension of the "voluntary associations" that de Tocqueville called out as such a distinctive feature of the American political landscape, but it differs by now by the scale of the voluntary associations -- which make reasoned back and forth difficult and also by the fact that social networks are the loci of too much discussion so that people don't look one another in the eye while talking, associate primarily with the like-minded and so generally have a difficult time beginning to see where their opponents are coming from in an argument.

It would really be better in so many ways if public goods were debated and addressed in public fora like legislatures and town counsels. At least then there would be a greater layer of the disintermediation of money. Right now we're not there.