The ratings system in light of our current institutional failures

Main article: Ratings system

The dysfunction of US democratic institutions has been understood for many years. A closely divided and bitterly partisan Congress is unable to pass transformative legislation to fix basic issues (eg campaign finance), the Supreme Court issues partisan decisions of its own that maintain or exacerbate the status-quo, and the President is hobbled by both Congress and the Supreme Court. Even under ideal circumstances, presidents have rarely had the ability or power to effect major change. Meanwhile, the influence of money has never been so dominant in US politics and in a bifurcated media environment which rewards the ability to capture attention through manufactured outrage. Nevertheless it is impossible to adopt a reductionist approach to what is clearly a highly complex systems problem.

Let's focus for the moment on the supreme court, an institution that is supposed to be above the political fray. But, recent and past court decisions are an important reason we are constructing the ratings system. Over time we have realized that the courts, rather than objectively assessing the law, are in fact biased. Our present system of checks and balances, one that was deliberately designed into the system, is breaking down. What better way to prevent this outcome than to have a continuous check, by the people, on institutions using technology that is well established and gives immediate feedback? Our reason for the ratings system is to ensure better governance and, hence, a better society. It is also, it should be emphasized, to ensure a better society and, hence, better governance. We will come back to this point later as we further discuss the CRS and SRS.

It would seem that traditional governance systems are untrustworthy and there is no way to modify them to make them trustworthy. It reminds one of Gall’s law: there is no way to modify a complex system that doesn’t work so that it works. You have to start over with a simple system that works and build from there. Simple/complex is not the same as trustworthy/untrustworthy of course, but we can observe that our governance system is also complex in addition to being untrustworthy and that part of its complexity is due to its untrustworthiness. An untrustworthy institution is more complex than a similar trustworthy one because it must maintain a veneer of respectability while being corrupt. Untrustworthy institutions often put in place mechanisms to prevent corruption which do little but make them more complex. We still can’t prove this statement by starting with Gall’s law but let’s state it anyway: There is no way to modify an untrustworthy system to make it trustworthy. You have to start over with a trustworthy system and build from there.

We might ask the practical question of whether the US constitutional framework generally, or the supreme court in particular, has any hope of regaining the trust it has lost. It probably does. We can imagine a new court with more even-handed judges, a new congress, president, etc. all following reasonable norms. We had these things, to some extent, not too long ago and they could come back. But does that restore trust? Not really. In fact, it merely confirms a simple observation: historical trends tend to repeat themselves. We have periods of harmonious political order and periods of disorder. We are apparently in one of the disordered periods, so disordered in fact that it threatens to undo the entire system. Even if we pull out of our current funk, we will always know how close we came. We can conclude that a system that allows this is never to be really trusted.