Democracy Dies in Ineffectiveness with Richard Pildes

Is a return to good, effective governance not just a glaring need in blue cities but a key to saving liberal democracy? NYU law professor Richard “Rick” Pildes is the author of an insightful scholarly article that recently caught our attention titled, “The Neglected Value of Effective Government.” A leading scholar of constitutional law and democratic governance, Rick is a Guggenheim Fellow, Carnegie Scholar and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After reading his article, we asked him to join us on the latest BCB episode to make the case for making government work. 

If you’re a regular listener you’ll know that it’s been a recurring theme – and indeed a foundational premise – of this podcast that the quality of governance in blue cities has atrophied over the last 15 years. Blue cities were on a roll in the Obama years. But now, not so much. 

Well, it’s not just a problem at the local level, Rick tells us. Public dissatisfaction with governance has emerged as a global phenomenon in the liberal democracies of Europe as well as here in the US. And people who care about reinvigorating the liberal democratic center against the rising tide of extremism need to pay a lot more attention as to why. 

In our discussion, we unpack the forces that have been rendering American government, local and federal, so incapable of addressing the problems they are tasked with addressing. In alignment with recent much discussed arguments made by Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance, Pildes contends that rising mistrust in government on both the left and the right in the late 1960s and ‘70s led to the proliferation of processes and veto points that have made it much more difficult for governments to accomplish big things and address serious challenges. That needs to change, he argues. 

Moreover, we discuss with Rick the role of increasing ideological polarization and purism in rendering government brittle and ineffective, and he offers up intriguingly counterintuitive arguments about why the push for transparency in government process may have gone too far, and how social media's ability to turn politicians into “free agents” who can build bases of power and fundraising outside the party hierarchy and its power structures is a problem that makes it much harder to build coalitions of support for bold legislative actions. 

“We shouldn’t take liberal democracy for granted,” Rick tells us. “It has to show it can deliver. People need to see that it’s delivering for them.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Richard Pildes, "The Neglected Value of Effective Government," University of Chicago Legal Forum (2024).

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

Support the show