Representative Government Forces Every Debate to the Wrong Altitude

Here is a complaint about representative democracy that has nothing to do with corruption, money, or the quality of the people we elect. It would apply just as forcefully to a system staffed entirely by honest and intelligent public servants. The problem is structural: we elect people rather than decide questions, and we do it every few years. Everything else follows from that.

The Bundling Problem

Because you get one vote every four years and that vote selects a person, every question you might care about has to be compressed into that single act. You cannot vote for this position on immigration and that position on trade. You vote for a bundle, and the bundle is assembled by someone else.

This forces every issue up to an altitude at which nothing true can be said about it.

Take immigration, which Thomas Sowell discusses at length in Basic Economics. Almost nothing general is true of it. Immigrants from one country have enriched their host economies; from another, strained them. One cohort leans heavily on welfare; another, arriving from the same country a decade later, does not. Sometimes cultural assimilation is frictionless and sometimes it is not. Age structure matters, skill composition matters, the receiving economy's condition matters. It is not one question. It is dozens of separate empirical questions with different answers.

The system permits none of this. You are for immigration or against it.

The same flattening happens to tariffs, defence, foreign policy, and everything else. No intelligent person actually holds a position at this altitude. Nobody who has thought about trade for an hour is simply "for tariffs." They are for some tariffs, on some goods, under some conditions, for some duration, and against others. The system has no way to represent that, so it discards it.

Why Candidates Cannot Fix This

You might think a candidate could simply be more detailed. In practice they cannot, and the reason is mechanical rather than moral.

Candidates must differentiate themselves from one another. That is what a campaign is. But you cannot differentiate on fine-grained positions across forty sub-questions, because no voter will follow it and no news outlet will report it. What you can differentiate on is a side. So candidates pick sides, and the sides get simpler with every cycle, because simplicity is what survives the medium.

Representative government does not merely fail to elevate the debate. It actively pushes it downward, and it does so through the mechanism that makes it representative.

What This Costs

Two consequences, both of which are usually blamed on other things.

Bad policy survives because the argument cannot be held. Sowell argues that minimum wage laws increase unemployment among unskilled and entry-level workers — the people they are advertised as helping. Whether or not you accept that conclusion, notice that the political system is incapable of hosting the argument. It discusses sound-bites, ideologies, and personalities. A system that could examine the mechanism directly might reach a better answer: abolish the wage floor, and supplement incomes that fall below what a modest life requires. That is a proposal with parts, and a system that only does bundles cannot evaluate it.

Coalitions become all-or-nothing. Sam Harris once observed that hard times make strange bedfellows, discussing Douglas Murray's alignment with right-wing movements. But this is not a character flaw. If the only way to have any influence is to align with a large bloc, then you inherit the whole bloc's platform — including the parts you find repellent — because there is no smaller unit of alignment available.

Under a system that decided many separate questions, alliances would be issue-specific and appropriately fragile. You would coordinate with someone on one matter and oppose them on the next, and neither would compromise the other. That is what a healthy alliance looks like, and our system makes it structurally impossible.

The Underlying Point

The objection is not that representatives are bad at their jobs. It is that the job, as constituted, requires them to speak at a level of generality where careful thought is a liability. A politician who gave immigration the nuanced treatment it deserves would be less electable than one who did not, and the difference would be visible in the polling within a week.

That is not a problem you fix by electing better people. It is a problem you fix by changing what the electorate is asked.