Both of America's bumbling political parties accuse the other of temper tantrums.

It's a common theme in public discourse: My side is full of passionate idealism -- your side is just a bunch of angry fruitcakes. Both sides play the game, but some progressives manage to achieve a level of disdain that approaches the Olympic. The Tea Party movement's proletariat and its de facto leader, Sarah Palin, seem to bring out the worst among those who profess to care about the little guy. Calling her and her supporters dimbulbs and buffoons only stokes populist resentment, of course, so the mockery plays right into her note-covered hand.

Could all this talk of the angry mob represent a case of projection bias? After all, the mob is largely made up of working-class folk like Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, who had the temerity to question candidate Obama's proclivities about the redistribution of wealth. Progressivism purports to protect the toiling and exploited masses from the amoral rapacity of big banks, big insurance, big tobacco, and whatnot. It must be exceedingly frustrating to have the toiling and exploited masses turn against the policies you have designed for their own good.

But, who protects the toiling and exploited masses from the amoral rapacity of government and its pampered unproductive bureaucrats?

It is bad enough to have the proles reject the specific policy proposals of the good and the wise. But what may infuriate those liberals who have been castigating the idiocy of the angry mob even more is as follows. Their program is premised on believing a select group of superior people should be empowered to organize everyone else's affairs. The Tea Party proles who reject the interference, reject also the premise that the Obama administration and its progressive supporters constitute a superior class: America's would-be overseers really are no better than anyone else. For those who profess to care about equality, this must be terribly hard to hear.

I think that this is the real issue. I object in principle to the idea of rule by technocrats, and there is a small minority who feel similarly, but we are a definite minority. Many, many more object to the current technocracy because it is venal and incompetent, though I suspect that they would go along quietly if the technocrats were actually any good at what they do and had proposed sensible policies. The current pressure for subsidiarity isn't a principled objection to the concentration of power so much as an exasperated work around for a dysfunctional technocracy.

This isn't something that can be fixed by changing rhetorical tack. It's a real problem. The ranks of the technocracy and the political class are populated by mediocre hacks who rose through the ranks as time serving yes-people rather than due to merit. In business terms control must be devolved to the operational units because the corporate management team is incompetent and needs replacement. Cut their pay and send them home.

Claims that the US has become ungovernable should be examined in this light. It isn't ungovernable but it has firm ideas about how it wishes to be governed and is not shy about calling bullshit on bumblers.

America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.

Broad support from the voters is something that both the health bill and the cap-and-trade bill clearly lack. Democrats could have a health bill tomorrow if the House passed the Senate version. Mr Obama could pass a lot of green regulation by executive order. It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours. If, instead of handing over health care to his party’s left wing, he had lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might have got health care through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may now stand a chance of getting a climate bill. Once Mr Clinton learned the advantages of co-operating with the Republicans, the country was governed better.

Everyone wants reform, but they have different ideas about what constitutes reform. The design of the federal government facilitates multiple concurrent reforms varying by region. This is a feature, not a bug.

American democracy has its peaks and troughs; attempts to reform it dramatically, such as California’s initiative craze, have a mixed history, to put it mildly. Rather than regretting how the Republicans in Congress have behaved, Mr Obama should look harder at his own use of his presidential power.

It is better to limit the scope of dramatic reforms such as those in California. The US isn't a boutique sized European nation, it's huge and diverse. Legislation at the federal level should be limited and restricted to ideas that have been tested on a smaller scale. But even this isn't proof of virtue since not every idea can scale up to the federal level.

Our current crop of technocrats lacks the competence to grasp these relatively simple ideas. This is a failure of their intelligence and education, and an implied failure of our education system that passed them along untouched, never bothering to bother them with insights or evidence.