Quotes About Vetocracy

America has become what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy." The system of checks and balances, replicated at every level of government, ensures that someone, somewhere can always block any positive action. The United States has become a nation of naysayers.

The same process is unfolding in the early twenty-first century with passage of the Dodd-Frank bill regulating the financial sector: Congress delegated to the regulators the responsibility of writing many of the detailed provisions, which will inevitably be challenged in the courts. Ironically, excessive delegation and vetocracy are intertwined.

But it is to say that a basic idea of a representative democracy—one that argues over fundamental choices of policy, through the battle between differently committed representatives—is not the reality of our democracy anymore. We've settled into what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy," where change of almost any kind, whether from the Right or the Left, is practically always stopped.

to eradicate the vetocracy that is paralyzing the system, "political reform must first and foremost be driven by popular, grassroots mobilization.