Today in Slate, Jacob Weisberg writes on the topic that has energized and infuriated me for a number of months: the seeming incoherence of the American public about what they want from government. Like I've done on this blog, he compares the interaction between the electorate and the federal government to California, where the people demand services and refuse to pay for them. It's feeling one can't help but come away with after watching Obama's first year and reading the James Fallows story I praised a few weeks ago.

I'm a little wary of the "ungovernnable America" narrative advanced in Weisberg's piece, simply because it feels like a slow-motion shot of liberal consensus congealing. It's an absurdly easy argument to make if you're a progressive who more or less supports Obama's domestic agenda: Americans voted him in to fix these things, and now that they aren't sure about how things are going, they're just childish idiots who can't make up their minds. But while I think there's more to the current political crisis than just American ignorance and double-mindedness, I'm afraid Weisberg is right: people have so little understanding of political reality that they frequently support incompatible ideas, and opportunistic politicians are only too willing to indulge them.

While the Democrats have their own little lies about the costs and effectiveness of government programs, it's the right that is currently preying on the ill-informed electorate. The naked pandering of the Republican mainstream is already well established, so I won't dwell on that. (They simultaneously champion tax cuts and increased Medicare spending, bitch about the deficit and refuse to touch out-of-control military spending.) But even more principled conservatives, who really would make hard economic choices in support of their goal of limited government, have incompatible positions. Health care reform is a fantastic example: they oppose the current reform bill partly because of its impact on the deficit, all while the status quo they idolize has an even more devastating effect on federal spending. Other times, real conservatives are downright politically unserious in assuming we can just let major problems go until the free market decides to do something about them.

But our political crisis isn't just the fault of American idiots and pandering politicians. One of the big reasons the public has soured on Obama legislation, which Weisberg doesn't mention, is that it is fed up with Congressional pork. Nothing made Americans dislike the health care bill as much as the perception that it was a Frankenstein of earmarks patched together to buy off on-the-fence representatives. And that is a legitimate worry. Fallows summarized Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations this way:

Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state.

And therein lies one of the biggest reasons Americans are so loathe to support transformative legislation: they (rightly) believe it will be packed with excessive spending that lines the pockets of special interests, campaign donors, and adds more layers of money and entitlement to Washington politics. It's idealistic to assume major legislation will pass any other other way in the American system, but that doesn't make it any easier to stomach for a public that can't understand why their representatives don't seem to have the people's interests at heart.

So yes, Americans are stupid and most politicians goad them on in their political delusions. As Weisberg sums up, "the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other." But there's an even smaller minority of politicans who are prepared to speak boldly against special interests, earmarks, engrained favors, and all the other sleazy realites of politics that make the public throw up their hands and wonder why they should even bother.