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Professor Glenn Reynolds suggests that -- short of outright war -- recall elections might be just the thing for breaking up the stranglehold of special interests. Quotable:

.. people who criticize the whole idea of recalls as anti-democratic are missing something .. Recalls aren’t anti-democratic. They are, if anything, anti-republican — by which I mean that they’re inconsistent with the “republican principle” of representative government over direct democracy .. And representative government, for reasons that Madison, et al., spelled out in The Federalist, is a good thing. But it’s not the only good thing. A danger faced by all governments — including representative governments — is the danger that they will be taken over and paralyzed by what economist Mancur Olson, in a famous book titled The Rise and Decline of Nations, called a “web of special interests.” Because it pays for special interest groups and politicians to collude, lining their pockets at the taxpayers’ expense, Olson argued that nations — and perhaps especially representative ones — would tend toward paralysis over time, as special interest groups locked up government revenues and fought off changes. That sounds a lot like what has happened in California, where the power of public employee unions and other special interests has gotten the state into a political and budgetary crisis from which it’s now trying to escape, but where the very same political structure, pre-recall, made it impossible to fix things because any serious change would threaten too many powerful interests. Olson wrote that it would take a major shock to break the web of special interests — he noted that Germany and Japan recovered so well after World War II in part because pre-existing special interest relationships were disrupted — and wondered at America’s comparative freedom from special interest webs given its long history of the same kind of government ..

But the bottom line is that, short of a war, the recall process is a pretty good method of breaking up the web of special interests. All the cozy lobbyist-and-campaign-contribution relationships that existed under the Gray Davis regime will be rather drastically changed in the Schwarzenegger administration. And that’s probably a good thing for California’s long-term prospects, regardless of whether you think Arnold will be a good governor or not.

The recall process has hit the California political community like a thunderbolt. It’s the voters’ way of signaling that they’re mad as hell, and don’t want to take it anymore. And it’s a way for them to shake up a political apparatus that (as California voters certainly seemed to think) has been serving its own needs, not theirs. And it’s better than a war!