I think the author of this opinion does a pretty good job of identifying the problem and a lousy job of proposing how it might be solved. To whit:
In analyzing these polls in the United States, I see clearly that voters feel ever more estranged from government — and that they associate Democrats with government. If Democrats are going to be encumbered by that link, they need to change voters’ feelings about government. They can recite their good plans as a mantra and raise their voices as if they had not been heard, but voters will not listen to them if government is disreputable.
The problem Democrats have here is that as the government moves more towards a central/national model and away from the republic/coordinate model that was intended, Democrats will be unable to disassociate themselves with that migration; mostly because it corresponds with their views on what the government should be - national, not federal, in nature. National, centralized government - the kind that Democrats champion - is disreputable and breeds the very corruption the author complains about later on. You can't, after all, make chicken salad out of chicken scat.
This distrust of government and politicians is unfolding as a full-blown crisis of legitimacy sidelines Democrats and liberalism. Just a quarter of the country is optimistic about our system of government — the lowest since polls by ABC and others began asking this question in 1974. But a crisis of government legitimacy is a crisis of liberalism. It doesn’t hurt Republicans. If government is seen as useless, what is the point of electing Democrats who aim to use government to advance some public end?
The reason there is so little optimism regarding our current system of government is that the current system is unrecognizable as being related to that which was put into place by the Constitution. That can only be altered by altering the power and scope of the current government headquartered in DC. When it is returned to its original, strictly limited, role of busying itself with representing the union of states as a single entity only in certain areas (international trade, defense of the states that belong to the union from insurrection or attack, keeping the common monetary unit all states use strong as compared to other nations) the legitimacy it has lost pursuing other avenues of exercising power will be returned to it. Until then, the current feelings of illegitimacy will continue to grow among the citizens of the states.
GOVERNMENT operates by the wrong values and rules, for the wrong people and purposes, the Americans I’ve surveyed believe. Government rushes to help the irresponsible and does little for the responsible. Wall Street lobbyists govern, not Main Street voters. Vexingly, this promotes both national and middle-class decline yet cannot be moved by conventional democratic politics. Lost jobs, soaring spending and crippling debt make America ever weaker, unable to meet its basic obligations to educate and protect its citizens. Yet politicians take care of themselves and party interests, while government grows remote and unresponsive, leaving people feeling powerless.
This passage touches on brilliance in dissecting the root cause of the current problems. Government is rushing in to help the irresponsible, it has made that its primary focus while it spends 2/3 of the annual budget in areas it has inserted itself into and only 1/3 of the budget addressing the primary role for which it was created. The government headquartered in DC was never intended to get involved in education of the populace - that was supposed to be left to the citizens of the independent and sovereign states to address themselves. While we all may agree that a more educated population is more desirable than an uneducated one is, the education of the youth is not a federal concern. The citizens of New York should not be subsidizing the education of the youth in Colorado, and visa versa, with the tax revenue received by the federal government. Removing that line item from the federal budget leaves open an ability, and a strong argument, for the states to raise their tax rates for that purpose.
The problem that Democrats have, and why they are being tuned out, is that the minority of governance, not the majority of it, should be occurring at the federal level. The federal government should be levying and collecting the minority, not the majority, of the taxes that the citizens of the states pay. The state and local governing agencies should be the ones collecting the lion's share of the taxes that the citizens of the states pay. Unless and until the Democrats get this message, unlikely given their choice of mascot, they will suffer only further marginalization and greater association with the illegitimacy of our current system of governance.
