The ever quotable Leo McGarry reminds us, “there are two things in the world you never let people see how you make ‘em, laws and sausages.” But Dave Eggers The Circle uses the idea of a totally transparent government, where everybody sees how the sausage is made as the launching point for making individuals totally “transparent.”
Here I am not going to dive into individual transparency, only making all of government “transparent.”
In the book, a Congresswoman takes the leap and decides to go “transparent” by wearing a camera throughout her day to show who she is meeting with, what they say and what she says. “It’s your right to know how they spend their days. Who they’re meeting with. Who They’re talking to.” The fictional Congresswoman says in the book about elected officials. She continues, “I intend to show how democracy should be: entirely open, entirely transparent…My every meeting, movement, my every word will be available to all my constituents and to the world.”
Eventually over the course of the book, politicians bend to pressure and nearly all become “transparent,” those who don’t become pariahs. Some even make their staff go “transparent” to avoid the appearance that the staff is doing the dirty work.
The goal is to show how the sausage is made. But legislating, it’s hard work. A recent story in The Wall Street Journal highlights that Congress (the real one, not Eggers’s fictional one) is done legislating. It lists three Democratic partly lawmakers retiring at the end of their current terms who together take with them 139 years of legislative experience and at least as many major laws with their names on them.