Back in July, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg published a wide-ranging op-ed in the New York Times on pervasive discontent with center-left parties, with a focus on Democrats in the United States. Greenberg writes:

In analyzing these polls in the United States, I see clearly that voters feel ever more estranged from government — and that they associate Democrats with government. If Democrats are going to be encumbered by that link, they need to change voters’ feelings about government. They can recite their good plans as a mantra and raise their voices as if they had not been heard, but voters will not listen to them if government is disreputable.
Oddly, many voters prefer the policies of Democrats to the policies of Republicans. They just don’t trust the Democrats to carry out those promises.
When we conducted our election-night national survey after last year’s Republican sweep, voters strongly chose new investment over a new national austerity. They thought Democrats were more likely to champion the middle class. And as has become clear in the months since, the public does not share conservatives’ views on rejecting tax cuts and cutting retirement programs. Numerous recent polls have shown that the public sides with the president and Democrats on raising taxes to get to a balanced budget.
But in smaller, more probing focus groups, voters show they are fairly cynical about Democratic politicians’ stands.

This struck me as interesting, but not entirely surprising. If one embraces a public choice critique, cynicism about the ability of Democrats to carry out their promises reflects a set of basic, empirically-grounded beliefs about how the world works, e.g., that there is a “grabbing hand” dynamic in which actors in the public sector, like actors in the private sector, are rent-seeking, etc.

One argument I hear very often from Democratic friends is that Republicans are deliberately sabotaging government — by underfunding government, Republicans actually make government incompetent, thus sowing public distrust. The beauty of this argument, from the perspective of progressives, is that all government failures can be blamed on conservatives, because of course we can never fund any government program generously enough. (If that is not the case, I’d want to see a detailed budget proposal, like those from the Peterson Solutions Initiative. The plans from EPI and the Roosevelt Institute give some indication of the kind of changes progressive wonks would like to see. The plans are eye-opening. That is, the scale of the tax and spending increases envisioned in both proposals will likely give moderates and conservatives pause.)

Regardless, Greenberg goes on to offer solutions to the Democratic dilemma:

What should Democrats do?
The Democrats have to start detoxifying politics by proposing to severely limit or bar individual and corporate campaign contributions, which would mean a fight with the Supreme Court. They must make the case for public financing of campaigns and force the broadcast and cable networks to provide free time for candidate ads. And they must become the strongest advocates for transparency in campaign donations and in the lobbying of elected officials.
IF they want to win the trust of the public, Democrats should propose taxing lobbyist expenses and excessive chief executive bonuses and put a small fee on the sale of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments. By radically simplifying the tax code to allow only a few deductions, the Democrats would generate new revenue and remove the loopholes that allow special interests to win favorable treatment. The ordinary citizen, according to our surveys and focus groups, feels there is no way to play that game and views simplifying the tax code as an important reform.
To show that government can protect the nation’s interests, Democrats should advocate policies that would control the borders and address problems of undocumented workers.

What I found most dispiriting about this discussion is that the core idea here strikes me as a very bad idea. Tightening campaign finance regulation will (I strongly suspect) narrow rather than expand the kind of voices we are likely to hear, while freeing political parties to raise funds more freely will reduce the growing reliance on self-funders and savvy fundraisers and shadow groups like 527s. Campaign finance regulations have weakened the parties and thus shifted power to the candidates with the ability to raise funds most effectively, which in turn has tilted our political systems towards a narrower range of voices. Stronger parties, in contrast, would have the ability to cultivate a wider range of talent, and they’d also be more accountable.

This isn’t to say that Greenberg isn’t right as a political matter, which is why I suspect we’ll hear more calls for counterproductive campaign finance regulations in the near future.