The Politics Of "Consensus" Is The Politics Of Failure

Persuading those in power to limit their power via "consensus" doesn't work. Both the legal system and the horse-trading politics of "consensus" have failed.

How do you get "consensus" in politics? You horse-trade. You give everybody something they want. You cut everyone into the deal. That passes for "consensus" in politics: divide the swag.

If you want to understand President Obama's failure as a leader, ask (as my friend G.F.B. did) where did he learn politics? In Chicago. Big-city politics boils down to getting the ward bosses, ethnic-neighborhood leaders, Chamber of Commerce and public unions together and making them all happy with concessions, give-aways or some other slice of swag so they all agree to to support some minor policy tweak of the Status Quo.

Any constituency left out of the swag distribution squeals like a stuck pig and kills the "consensus."

This "making sausage" consensus is passed off as "the only way to get anything passed," but the truth is that it's the politics of failure: nothing meaningful can possibly get done in the politics of "consensus" because 95% of any useful reform must be traded away to get everyone willingly on board.

What you end up with after all the horse-trading "consensus" is 2,319-page monstrosities of self-defeating complexity like the “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act" or the 2,074-page healthcare bill. I have addressed these simulacra "reforms" many times:
What If We're Beyond Mere Policy Tweaks [8]? (February 6, 2012)
America Is Just Going Through the Motions [9](November 19, 2010)

The theory is that tiny baby-steps of hopelessly complex (and thus hopelessly corrupt) "reform" that everyone has been bought off to accept will eventually restore equilibrium to a political and financial system heading for a cliff.

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