In recent decades,
American politics has been dominated, at least rhetorically, by a battle
over the size of government. But that is not what the next few decades
of our politics will be about. With the frontiers of the state roughly
fixed, the issues that will define our major debates will concern the
complexity of government, rather than its sheer scope.
With that complexity has also come
incoherence. Conservatives over the last few years have increasingly
worried that America is, in Friedrich Hayek's ominous terms, on the road
to serfdom. But this concern ascribes vastly greater purpose and design
to our approach to public policy than is truly warranted. If anything,
we have arrived at a form of government with no ideological
justification whatsoever.
The complexity and incoherence of our
government often make it difficult for us to understand just what that
government is doing, and among the practices it most frequently hides
from view is the growing tendency of public policy to redistribute
resources upward to the wealthy and the organized at the expense of the
poorer and less organized. As we increasingly notice the consequences of
that regressive redistribution, we will inevitably also come to pay
greater attention to the daunting and self-defeating complexity of
public policy across multiple, seemingly unrelated areas of American
life, and so will need to start thinking differently about government.
Understanding, describing, and addressing this
problem of complexity and incoherence is the next great American
political challenge. But you cannot come to terms with such a problem
until you can properly name it. While we can name the major questions
that divide our politics — liberalism or conservatism, big government or
small — we have no name for the dispute between complexity and
simplicity in government, which cuts across those more familiar
ideological divisions. For lack of a better alternative, the problem of
complexity might best be termed the challenge of "kludgeocracy."
A "kludge" is defined by the Oxford English
Dictionary as "an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a
particular purpose...a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a
particular fault or problem." The term comes out of the world of
computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place
to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible
with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you
get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle,
is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any
user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept.
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