Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager of Detroit, transferred control of the city’s water and sewage board to Mayor Mike Duggan on Tuesday.
Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale, cites that move as he delivers one of the most far-ranging considerations to date of the city's emergency management on the New York Times Opinonator blog.
Jason Stanley: "Michigan has undertaken a remarkable course to deal with the inefficiencies inherent in democratic accountability." (Facebook photo)
He writes:
Orr’s provisional move of transferring authority back to an elected official is a step in the direction of recognizing the wisdom of our founding fathers.
In “Federalist No. 10,” James Madison . . . rejected appointing unelected experts to solve the problems raised by factions, and offered, as the best solution to the thorny difficulty of competing interests, the idea of representative government as a way of “controlling its effects.” Madison’s solution to the problem of factionalism is a government of representatives, who are accountable to the people via the mechanism of elections. . . .
The state of Michigan has undertaken a remarkable course to deal with the inefficiencies inherent in democratic accountability by appointing “emergency” managers who are essentially free from such accountability, in the hopes that they will be able to make politically unpopular decisions for the sake of overall efficiency — and allegedly the public good.
It’s worthwhile to examine Michigan’s experiment in challenging the wisdom of our founding fathers with an eye toward addressing two questions. First, has Michigan’s experiment resulted in policy that does maximally serve the public good? And second, in what sense is Michigan’s experiment consistent with the basic principles of democracy?
