Do we need less democracy?

Peter Orszag argues that we do:

Facing this problem is crucially important because our current legislative gridlock is making it increasingly difficult for lawmakers to tackle the issues that are central to our country’s future—issues like climate change, the hard slog of recovering from a financial slump, and our long-term fiscal gap. It is clear to everyone that a failure to act will lead to undesirable outcomes in these areas. But polarization means that little action is possible. This is why I believe that we need to jettison the Civics 101 fairy tale about pure representative democracy and instead begin to build a new set of rules and institutions that would make legislative inertia less detrimental to our nation’s long-term health.

The idea seems dreadfully radical, and ignores the value of basic democratic processes that countries like the United States install to protect its citizens from poor governance (well, more to the point, it appears to advocate abolishing many of them). We should remember: greater problems will come of poking around in the realm of democratic systems, and ignoring the issues themselves. It sounds mawkishly twee, but it's not democracy – it's how we're using it.