Using polls and focus groups, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found that between 25 and 40 percent of Americans (depending on how one measures) have aseverely distorted view of how government and politics are supposed to work. I think of these people as “politiphobes,” because they see the contentious give-and-take of politics as unnecessary and distasteful. Specifically, they believe that obvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding. Not surprisingly, politiphobes think the obvious, commonsense solutions are the sorts of solutions that they themselves prefer. But the more important point is that they do not acknowledge that meaningful policy disagreement even exists. From that premise, they conclude that all the arguing and partisanship and horse-trading that go on in American politics are entirely unnecessary. Politicians could easily solve all our problems if they would only set aside their craven personal agendas.
How American Politics Went Insane
It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse.
The Atlantic | July / August 2016
It’s 2020, four years from now.
The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring
after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at
politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the
White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when
their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s
use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level
that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything
about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three
vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve.
On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving
unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more
speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four
speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe
presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a
social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well,
everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that
have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times,
and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on
the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic
downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it.
As
the presidential primaries unfold, Kanye West is leading a fractured
field of Democrats. The Republican front-runner is Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty
fame. Elected governor of Louisiana only a few months ago, he is
promising to defy the Washington establishment by never trimming his
beard. Party elders have given up all pretense of being more than
spectators, and most of the candidates have given up all pretense of
party loyalty. On the debate stages, and everywhere else, anything goes.
 |
| Former presidential hopeful Jeb Bush called Donald Trump “a chaos candidate.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him. (Charles Rex Arbogast / AP) |
The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has
been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where,
after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the
nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie
Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic
affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only
three months before that election. He surged into second place by
winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to
Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have
collapsed after Super Tuesday. In their various ways, Trump, Cruz, and
Sanders are demonstrating a new principle: The political parties no
longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as
a result, renegade political behavior pays.
Political
disintegration plagues Congress, too. House Republicans barely managed
to elect a speaker last year. Congress did agree in the fall on a budget
framework intended to keep the government open through the election—a
signal accomplishment, by today’s low standards—but by April, hard-line
conservatives had revoked the deal, thereby humiliating the new speaker
and potentially causing another shutdown crisis this fall. As of this
writing, it’s not clear whether the hard-liners will push to the brink,
but the bigger point is this: If they do, there is not much that party
leaders can do about it.
And here is the still bigger point: The very term party leaders
has become an anachronism. Although Capitol Hill and the campaign trail
are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the
underlying reality that there no longer is any such thing as a
party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own
political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited
gas molecules in an overheated balloon.
No wonder Paul Ryan,
taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October,
complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they
see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our
act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much
argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign
sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald
Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.”
Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him.
 |
| In their different ways, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have demonstrated that the major political parties no longer have intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms. (Charlie Neibergall / AP) |
Trump, however, didn’t cause the
chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary
spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.
Chaos syndrome is a
chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for
self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and
brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders
and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to
one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked
self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades,
politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and
unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in
campaigns and in the government itself.
Our
intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many
decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed
it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have
attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or
(usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and
disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like
spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system.
Eventually, you will get sick.
The
disorder has other causes, too: developments such as ideological
polarization, the rise of social media, and the radicalization of the
Republican base. But chaos syndrome compounds the effects of those
developments, by impeding the task of organizing to counteract them.
Insurgencies in presidential races and on Capitol Hill are nothing new,
and they are not necessarily bad, as long as the governing process can
accommodate them. Years before the Senate had to cope with Ted Cruz, it
had to cope with Jesse Helms. The difference is that Cruz shut down the
government, which Helms could not have done had he even imagined trying.
Like
many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes
governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites
political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction.
Reversing the spiral will require understanding it. Consider, then, the
etiology [study of causes] of a political disease: the immune system that defended the
body politic for two centuries; the gradual dismantling of that immune
system; the emergence of pathogens capable of exploiting the new
vulnerability; the symptoms of the disorder; and, finally, its prognosis
and treatment.
- ImmunityWhy the political class is a good thing
The Founders knew all too well about chaos.
It was the condition that brought them together in 1787 under the
Articles of Confederation. The central government had too few powers and
powers of the wrong kinds, so they gave it more powers, and also
multiple power centers. The core idea of the Constitution was to
restrain ambition and excess by forcing competing powers and factions to
bargain and compromise.
The Framers worried about demagogic
excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers
between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of
Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get
into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which
selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would
need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who
chose the president; and so on.
 |
| Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proved unable to rein in Ted Cruz. (Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty) |
The Constitution makes no mention of
many of the essential political structures that we take for granted,
such as political parties and congressional committees. If the
Constitution were all we had, politicians would be incapable of getting
organized to accomplish even routine tasks. Every day, for every bill or
compromise, they would have to start from scratch, rounding up hundreds
of individual politicians and answering to thousands of squabbling
constituencies and millions of voters. By itself, the Constitution is a
recipe for chaos.
So Americans developed a second, unwritten
constitution. Beginning in the 1790s, politicians sorted themselves into
parties. In the 1830s, under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the
parties established patronage machines and grass-roots bases. The
machines and parties used rewards and the occasional punishment to
encourage politicians to work together. Meanwhile, Congress developed
its seniority and committee systems, rewarding reliability and
establishing cooperative routines. Parties, leaders, machines, and
congressional hierarchies built densely woven incentive structures that
bound politicians into coherent teams. Personal alliances, financial
contributions, promotions and prestige, political perks, pork-barrel
spending, endorsements, and sometimes a trip to the woodshed or the
wilderness: All of those incentives and others, including some of
dubious respectability, came into play. If the Constitution was the
system’s DNA, the parties and machines and political brokers were its
RNA, translating the Founders’ bare-bones framework into dynamic
organizations and thus converting conflict into action.
The
informal constitution’s intermediaries have many names and faces: state
and national party committees, county party chairs, congressional
subcommittees, leadership pacs, convention delegates, bundlers, and countless more. For purposes of this essay, I’ll call them all middlemen,
because all of them mediated between disorganized swarms of politicians
and disorganized swarms of voters, thereby performing the indispensable
task that the great political scientist James Q. Wilson called
“assembling power in the formal government.”
The middlemen could
be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, secretive. But they had one great
virtue: They brought order from chaos. They encouraged coordination,
interdependency, and mutual accountability. They discouraged solipsistic
and antisocial political behavior. A loyal, time-serving member of
Congress could expect easy renomination, financial help, promotion
through the ranks of committees and leadership jobs, and a new airport
or research center for his district. A turncoat or troublemaker, by
contrast, could expect to encounter ostracism, marginalization, and
difficulties with fund-raising. The system was hierarchical, but it was
not authoritarian. Even the lowliest precinct walker or officeholder had
a role and a voice and could expect a reward for loyalty; even the
highest party boss had to cater to multiple constituencies and fend off
periodic challengers.
 |
| House Speaker Paul Ryan has already faced a rebellion. The reality is that there no longer is any such thing as a “party leader.” (Cliff Owen / AP) |
The
old machines were inclusive only by the standards of their day, of
course. They were bad on race—but then, so were Progressives such as
Woodrow Wilson. The more intrinsic hazard with middlemen and machines is
the ever-present potential for corruption, which is a real problem. On
the other hand, overreacting to the threat of corruption by stamping out
influence-peddling (as distinct from bribery and extortion) is just as
harmful. Political contributions, for example, look unseemly, but they
play a vital role as political bonding agents. When a party raised a
soft-money donation from a millionaire and used it to support a
candidate’s campaign (a common practice until the 2002 McCain-Feingold
law banned it in federal elections), the exchange of favors tied a knot
of mutual accountability that linked candidate, party, and donor
together and forced each to think about the interests of the others.
Such transactions may not have comported with the Platonic ideal of
democracy, but in the real world they did much to stabilize the system
and discourage selfish behavior.
Middlemen have a characteristic
that is essential in politics: They stick around. Because careerists and
hacks make their living off the system, they have a stake in assembling
durable coalitions, in retaining power over time, and in keeping the
government in functioning order. Slash-and-burn protests and quixotic
ideological crusades are luxuries they can’t afford. Insurgents and
renegades have a role, which is to jolt the system with new energy and
ideas; but professionals also have a role, which is to safely absorb the
energy that insurgents unleash. Think of them as analogous to
antibodies and white blood cells, establishing and patrolling the
barriers between the body politic and would-be hijackers on the outside.
As with biology, so with politics: When the immune system works, it is
largely invisible. Only when it breaks down do we become aware of its
importance.
- VulnerabilityHow the war on middlemen left America defenseless
Beginning early in the 20th century, and
continuing right up to the present, reformers and the public turned
against every aspect of insider politics: professional politicians,
closed-door negotiations, personal favors, party bosses, financial ties,
all of it. Progressives accused middlemen of subverting the public
interest; populists accused them of obstructing the people’s will;
conservatives accused them of protecting and expanding big government.
To
some extent, the reformers were right. They had good intentions and
valid complaints. Back in the 1970s, as a teenager in the post-Watergate
era, I was on their side. Why allow politicians ever to meet behind
closed doors? Sunshine is the best disinfectant! Why allow private money
to buy favors and distort policy making? Ban it and use Treasury funds
to finance elections! It was easy, in those days, to see that there was
dirty water in the tub. What was not so evident was the reason the water
was dirty, which was the baby. So we started reforming.
We reformed the nominating process.
The use of primary elections instead of conventions, caucuses, and
other insider-dominated processes dates to the era of Theodore
Roosevelt, but primary elections and party influence coexisted through
the 1960s; especially in congressional and state races, party leaders
had many ways to influence nominations and vet candidates. According to
Jon Meacham, in his biography of George H. W. Bush, here is how Bush’s
father, Prescott Bush, got started in politics: “Samuel F. Pryor, a top
Pan Am executive and a mover in Connecticut politics, called Prescott to
ask whether Bush might like to run for Congress. ‘If you would,’ Pryor
said, ‘I think we can assure you that you’ll be the nominee.’ ” Today,
party insiders can still jawbone a little bit, but, as the 2016
presidential race has made all too clear, there is startlingly little
they can do to influence the nominating process.
Primary races now
tend to be dominated by highly motivated extremists and interest
groups, with the perverse result of leaving moderates and broader, less
well-organized constituencies underrepresented. According to the Pew
Research Center, in the first 12 presidential-primary contests of 2016,
only 17 percent of eligible voters participated in Republican primaries,
and only 12 percent in Democratic primaries. In other words, Donald
Trump seized the lead in the primary process by winning a mere plurality
of a mere fraction of the electorate. In off-year congressional
primaries, when turnout is even lower, it’s even easier for the tail to
wag the dog. In the 2010 Delaware Senate race, Christine “I am not a
witch” O’Donnell secured the Republican nomination by winning just a
sixth of the state’s registered Republicans, thereby handing a
competitive seat to the Democrats. Surveying congressional primaries for
a 2014 Brookings Institution report, the journalists Jill Lawrence and
Walter Shapiro observed: “The universe of those who actually cast
primary ballots is small and hyper-partisan, and rewards candidates who
hew to ideological orthodoxy.” By contrast, party hacks tend to shop for
candidates who exert broad appeal in a general election and who will
sustain and build the party’s brand, so they generally lean toward
relative moderates and team players.
Moreover,
recent research by the political scientists Jamie L. Carson and Jason M.
Roberts finds that party leaders of yore did a better job of
encouraging qualified mainstream candidates to challenge incumbents. “In
congressional districts across the country, party leaders were able to
carefully select candidates who would contribute to the collective good
of the ticket,” Carson and Roberts write in their 2013 book, Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time.
“This led to a plentiful supply of quality candidates willing to enter
races, since the potential costs of running and losing were largely
underwritten by the party organization.” The switch to direct primaries,
in which contenders generally self-recruit and succeed or fail on their
own account, has produced more oddball and extreme challengers and
thereby made general elections less competitive. “A series of reforms
that were intended to create more open and less ‘insider’ dominated
elections actually produced more entrenched politicians,” Carson and
Roberts write. The paradoxical result is that members of Congress today
are simultaneously less responsive to mainstream interests and harder to
dislodge.
Was
the switch to direct public nomination a net benefit or drawback? The
answer to that question is subjective. But one effect is not in doubt:
Institutionalists have less power than ever before to protect loyalists
who play well with other politicians, or who take a tough congressional
vote for the team, or who dare to cross single-issue voters and
interests; and they have little capacity to fend off insurgents who owe
nothing to anybody. Walled safely inside their gerrymandered districts,
incumbents are insulated from general-election challenges that might
pull them toward the political center, but they are perpetually
vulnerable to primary challenges from extremists who pull them toward
the fringes. Everyone worries about being the next Eric Cantor, the
Republican House majority leader who, in a shocking upset, lost to an
unknown Tea Partier in his 2014 primary. Legislators are scared of
voting for anything that might increase the odds of a primary challenge,
which is one reason it is so hard to raise the debt limit or pass a
budget.
In
March, when Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas told a Rotary Club
meeting that he thought President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee
deserved a Senate hearing, the Tea Party Patriots immediately responded
with what has become activists’ go-to threat: “It’s this kind of
outrageous behavior that leads Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund
activists and supporters to think seriously about encouraging Dr. Milton
Wolf”—a physician and Tea Party activist—“to run against Sen. Moran in
the August GOP primary.” (Moran hastened to issue a statement saying
that he would oppose Obama’s nominee regardless.) Purist issue groups
often have the whip hand now, and unlike the elected bosses of yore,
they are accountable only to themselves and are able merely to prevent
legislative action, not to organize it.
We reformed political money.
Starting in the 1970s, large-dollar donations to candidates and parties
were subject to a tightening web of regulations. The idea was to reduce
corruption (or its appearance) and curtail the power of special
interests—certainly laudable goals. Campaign-finance rules did stop some
egregious transactions, but at a cost: Instead of eliminating money
from politics (which is impossible), the rules diverted much of it to
private channels. Whereas the parties themselves were once largely
responsible for raising and spending political money, in their place has
arisen a burgeoning ecology of deep-pocketed donors, super pacs,
501(c)(4)s, and so-called 527 groups that now spend hundreds of
millions of dollars each cycle. The result has been the creation of an
array of private political machines across the country: for instance,
the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s American
Crossroads on the right, and Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate on the left.
Private
groups are much harder to regulate, less transparent, and less
accountable than are the parties and candidates, who do, at the end of
the day, have to face the voters. Because they thrive on purism,
protest, and parochialism, the outside groups are driving politics
toward polarization, extremism, and short-term gain. “You may win or
lose, but at least you have been intellectually consistent—your
principles haven’t been defeated,” an official with Americans for
Prosperity told The Economist in October 2014. The parties,
despite being called to judgment by voters for their performance, face
all kinds of constraints and regulations that the private groups don’t,
tilting the playing field against them. “The internal conversation we’ve
been having is ‘How do we keep state parties alive?’ ” the director of a
mountain-state Democratic Party organization told me and Raymond J. La
Raja recently for a Brookings Institution report. Republicans told us
the same story. “We believe we are fighting for our lives in the current
legal and judicial framework, and the super pacs
and (c)(4)s really present a direct threat to the state parties’
existence,” a southern state’s Republican Party director said.
The
state parties also told us they can’t begin to match the advertising
money flowing from outside groups and candidates. Weakened by
regulations and resource constraints, they have been reduced to
spectators, while candidates and groups form circular firing squads and
alienate voters. At the national level, the situation is even more
chaotic—and ripe for exploitation by a savvy demagogue who can make
himself heard above the din, as Donald Trump has so shrewdly proved.
We reformed Congress.
For a long time, seniority ruled on Capitol Hill. To exercise power,
you had to wait for years, and chairs ran their committees like fiefs.
It was an arrangement that hardly seemed either meritocratic or
democratic. Starting with a rebellion by the liberal post-Watergate
class in the ’70s, and then accelerating with the rise of Newt Gingrich
and his conservative revolutionaries in the ’90s, the seniority and
committee systems came under attack and withered. Power on the Hill has
flowed both up to a few top leaders and down to individual members.
Unfortunately, the reformers overlooked something important: Seniority
and committee spots rewarded teamwork and loyalty, they ensured that
people at the top were experienced, and they harnessed hundreds of
middle-ranking members of Congress to the tasks of legislating.
Compounding the problem, Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries, eager to
prove their anti-Washington bona fides, cut committee staffs by a
third, further diminishing Congress’s institutional horsepower.
Congress’s
attempts to replace hierarchies and middlemen with top-down diktat and
ad hoc working groups have mostly failed. More than perhaps ever before,
Congress today is a collection of individual entrepreneurs and pressure
groups. In the House, disintermediation has shifted the balance of
power toward a small but cohesive minority of conservative Freedom
Caucus members who think nothing of wielding their power against their
own leaders. Last year, as House Republicans struggled to agree on a new
speaker, the conservatives did not blush at demanding “the right to
oppose their leaders and vote down legislation without repercussions,”
as Time magazine reported. In the Senate, Ted Cruz made himself a
leading presidential contender by engaging in debt-limit brinkmanship
and deriding the party’s leadership, going so far as to call Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor. “The rhetoric—and
confrontational stance—are classic Cruz,” wrote Burgess Everett in Politico
last October: “Stake out a position to the right of where his leaders
will end up, criticize them for ignoring him and conservative
grass-roots voters, then use the ensuing internecine fight to stoke his
presidential bid.” No wonder his colleagues detest him. But Cruz was
doing what makes sense in an age of maximal political individualism, and
we can safely bet that his success will inspire imitation.
We reformed closed-door negotiations.
As recently as the early 1970s, congressional committees could easily
retreat behind closed doors and members could vote on many bills
anonymously, with only the final tallies reported. Federal advisory
committees, too, could meet off the record. Understandably, in the wake
of Watergate, those practices came to be viewed as suspect. Today,
federal law, congressional rules, and public expectations have placed
almost all formal deliberations and many informal ones in full public
view. One result is greater transparency, which is good. But another
result is that finding space for delicate negotiations and candid
deliberations can be difficult. Smoke-filled rooms, whatever their
disadvantages, were good for brokering complex compromises in which
nothing was settled until everything was settled; once gone, they turned
out to be difficult to replace. In public, interest groups and
grandstanding politicians can tear apart a compromise before it is
halfway settled.
Despite promising to televise negotiations over
health-care reform, President Obama went behind closed doors with
interest groups to put the package together; no sane person would have
negotiated in full public view. In 2013, Congress succeeded in approving
a modest bipartisan budget deal in large measure because the House and
Senate Budget Committee chairs were empowered to “figure it out
themselves, very, very privately,” as one Democratic aide told Jill
Lawrence for a 2015 Brookings report. TV cameras, recorded votes, and
public markups do increase transparency, but they come at the cost of
complicating candid conversations. “The idea that Washington would work
better if there were TV cameras monitoring every conversation gets it
exactly wrong,” the Democratic former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle
wrote in 2014, in his foreword to the book City of Rivals. “The lack of opportunities for honest dialogue and creative give-and-take lies at the root of today’s dysfunction.”
We reformed pork.
For most of American history, a principal goal of any member of
Congress was to bring home bacon for his district. Pork-barrel spending
never really cost very much, and it helped glue Congress together by
giving members a kind of currency to trade: You support my pork, and
I’ll support yours. Also, because pork was dispensed by powerful
appropriations committees with input from senior congressional leaders,
it provided a handy way for the leadership to buy votes and reward
loyalists. Starting in the ’70s, however, and then snowballing in the
’90s, the regular appropriations process broke down, a casualty of
reforms that weakened appropriators’ power, of “sunshine laws” that
reduced their autonomy, and of polarization that complicated
negotiations. Conservatives and liberals alike attacked pork-barreling
as corrupt, culminating in early 2011, when a strange-bedfellows
coalition of Tea Partiers and progressives banned earmarking, the
practice of dropping goodies into bills as a way to attract
votes—including, ironically, votes for politically painful spending reductions.
 |
| Donald Trump had no political debts or party loyalty. And he had no compunctions—which made him the perfect vector for anti-establishment sentiment. (John Bazemore / AP) |
Party-dominated
nominating processes, soft money, congressional seniority, closed-door
negotiations, pork-barrel spending—put each practice under a microscope
in isolation, and it seems an unsavory way of doing political business.
But sweep them all away, and one finds that business is not getting done
at all. The political reforms of the past 40 or so years have pushed
toward disintermediation—by favoring amateurs and outsiders over
professionals and insiders; by privileging populism and self-expression
over mediation and mutual restraint; by stripping middlemen of tools
they need to organize the political system. All of the reforms promote
an individualistic, atomized model of politics in which there are
candidates and there are voters, but there is nothing in between. Other,
larger trends, to be sure, have also contributed to political
disorganization, but the war on middlemen has amplified and accelerated
them.
- PathogensDonald Trump and other viruses
By the beginning of this decade, the
political system’s organic defenses against outsiders and insurgents
were visibly crumbling. All that was needed was for the right virus to
come along and exploit the opening. As it happened, two came along.
In
2009, on the heels of President Obama’s election and the
economic-bailout packages, angry fiscal conservatives launched the Tea
Party insurgency and watched, somewhat to their own astonishment, as it
swept the country. Tea Partiers shared some of the policy predilections
of loyal Republican partisans, but their mind-set was angrily
anti-establishment. In a 2013 Pew Research poll, more than 70 percent of
them disapproved of Republican leaders in Congress. In a 2010 Pew poll,
they had rejected compromise by similar margins. They thought nothing
of mounting primary challenges against Republican incumbents, and they
made a special point of targeting Republicans who compromised with
Democrats or even with Republican leaders. In Congress, the Republican
House leadership soon found itself facing a GOP caucus whose members
were too worried about “getting primaried” to vote for the compromises
necessary to govern—or even to keep the government open. Threats from
the Tea Party and other purist factions often outweigh any blandishments
or protection that leaders can offer.
So
far the Democrats have been mostly spared the anti-compromise
insurrection, but their defenses are not much stronger. Molly Ball
recently reported for The Atlantic’s Web site on the Working
Families Party, whose purpose is “to make Democratic politicians more
accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare party
primaries enable, much as the conservative movement has done to
Republicans.” Because African Americans and union members still mostly
behave like party loyalists, and because the Democratic base does not
want to see President Obama fail, the Tea Party trick hasn’t yet worked
on the left. But the Democrats are vulnerable structurally, and the
anti-compromise virus is out there.
A second virus was initially
identified in 2002, by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln political
scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, in their book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work.
It’s a shocking book, one whose implications other scholars were
understandably reluctant to engage with. The rise of Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders, however, makes confronting its thesis unavoidable.
Using
polls and focus groups, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found that between 25
and 40 percent of Americans (depending on how one measures) have a
severely distorted view of how government and politics are supposed to
work. I think of these people as “politiphobes,” because they see the
contentious give-and-take of politics as unnecessary and distasteful.
Specifically, they believe that obvious, commonsense solutions to the
country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these
obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or
self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding. Not
surprisingly, politiphobes think the obvious, commonsense solutions are
the sorts of solutions that they themselves prefer. But the more
important point is that they do not acknowledge that meaningful policy
disagreement even exists. From that premise, they conclude that
all the arguing and partisanship and horse-trading that go on in
American politics are entirely unnecessary. Politicians could easily
solve all our problems if they would only set aside their craven
personal agendas.
If
politicians won’t do the job, then who will? Politiphobes, according to
Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, believe policy should be made not by messy
political conflict and negotiations but by ensids:
empathetic, non-self-interested decision makers. These are leaders who
will step forward, cast aside cowardly politicians and venal special
interests, and implement long-overdue solutions. ensids can be politicians, technocrats, or autocrats—whatever works. Whether the process is democratic is not particularly important.
Chances
are that politiphobes have been out there since long before Hibbing and
Theiss-Morse identified them in 2002. Unlike the Tea Party or the
Working Families Party, they aren’t particularly ideological: They have
popped up left, right, and center. Ross Perot’s independent presidential
candidacies of 1992 and 1996 appealed to the idea that any sensible
businessman could knock heads together and fix Washington. In 2008,
Barack Obama pandered to a center-left version of the same fantasy,
promising to magically transcend partisan politics and implement the
best solutions from both parties.
No
previous outbreak, however, compares with the latest one, which draws
unprecedented virulence from two developments. One is a steep rise in
antipolitical sentiment, especially on the right. According to polling
by Pew, from 2007 to early 2016 the percentage of Americans saying they
would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who had been
an elected official in Washington for many years than for an outsider
candidate more than doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. Republican
opinion has shifted more sharply still: The percentage of Republicans
preferring “new ideas and a different approach” over “experience and a
proven record” almost doubled in just the six months from March to
September of 2015.
The other development, of course, was Donald
Trump, the perfect vector to concentrate politiphobic sentiment,
intensify it, and inject it into presidential politics. He had too much
money and free media to be spent out of the race. He had no political
record to defend. He had no political debts or party loyalty. He had no
compunctions. There was nothing to restrain him from sounding every note
of the politiphobic fantasy with perfect pitch.
Democrats
have not been immune, either. Like Trump, Bernie Sanders appealed to
the antipolitical idea that the mere act of voting for him would prompt a
“revolution” that would somehow clear up such knotty problems as
health-care coverage, financial reform, and money in politics. Like
Trump, he was a self-sufficient outsider without customary political
debts or party loyalty. Like Trump, he neither acknowledged nor
cared—because his supporters neither acknowledged nor cared—that his
plans for governing were delusional.
Trump, Sanders, and Ted Cruz
have in common that they are political sociopaths—meaning not that they
are crazy, but that they don’t care what other politicians think about
their behavior and they don’t need to care. That three of the four final
presidential contenders in 2016 were political sociopaths is a sign of
how far chaos syndrome has gone. The old, mediated system selected such
people out. The new, disintermediated system seems to be selecting them
in.
- SymptomsThe disorder that exacerbates all other disorders
There is nothing new about political
insurgencies in the United States—nor anything inherently wrong with
them. Just the opposite, in fact: Insurgencies have brought fresh ideas
and renewed participation to the political system since at least the
time of Andrew Jackson.
There is also nothing new about insiders
losing control of the presidential nominating process. In 1964 and 1972,
to the dismay of party regulars, nominations went to unelectable
candidates—Barry Goldwater for the Republicans in 1964 and George
McGovern for the Democrats in 1972—who thrilled the parties’ activist
bases and went on to predictably epic defeats. So it’s tempting to say,
“Democracy is messy. Insurgents have fair gripes. Incumbents should be
challenged. Who are you, Mr. Establishment, to say the system is broken
merely because you don’t like the people it is pushing forward?”
The
problem is not, however, that disruptions happen. The problem is that
chaos syndrome wreaks havoc on the system’s ability to absorb and
channel disruptions. Trying to quash political disruptions would
probably only create more of them. The trick is to be able to govern through them.
Leave
aside the fact that Goldwater and McGovern, although ideologues, were
estimable figures within their parties. (McGovern actually co-chaired a
Democratic Party commission that rewrote the nominating rules after
1968, opening the way for his own campaign.) Neither of them, either as
senator or candidate, wanted to or did disrupt the ordinary workings of
government.
Jason Grumet, the president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and the author of City of Rivals,
likes to point out that within three weeks of Bill Clinton’s
impeachment by the House of Representatives, the president was signing
new laws again. “While they were impeaching him they were
negotiating, they were talking, they were having committee hearings,”
Grumet said in a recent speech. “And so we have to ask ourselves, what
is it that not long ago allowed our government to metabolize the
aggression that is inherent in any pluralistic society and still get
things done?”
I have been covering Washington since the early 1980s, and I’ve seen a lot of gridlock. Sometimes I’ve been grateful for
gridlock, which is an appropriate outcome when there is no working
majority for a particular policy. For me, however, 2011 brought a
wake-up call. The system was failing even when there was a
working majority. That year, President Obama and Republican House
Speaker John Boehner, in intense personal negotiations, tried to clinch a
budget agreement that touched both parties’ sacred cows, curtailing
growth in the major entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security by hundreds of billions of dollars and increasing
revenues by $800 billion or more over 10 years, as well as reducing
defense and nondefense discretionary spending by more than $1 trillion.
Though it was less grand than previous budgetary “grand bargains,” the
package represented the kind of bipartisan accommodation that
constitutes the federal government’s best and perhaps only path to
long-term fiscal stability.
 |
| Former House Speaker John Boehner explained to Jay Leno before he resigned: “You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.” (Steve Helber / AP) |
People still debate why the package
fell apart, and there is blame enough to go around. My own reading at
the time, however, concurred with Matt Bai’s postmortem in The New York Times:
Democratic leaders could have found the rank-and-file support they
needed to pass the bargain, but Boehner could not get the deal past
conservatives in his own caucus. “What’s undeniable, despite all the
furious efforts to peddle a different story,” Bai wrote, “is that Obama
managed to persuade his closest allies to sign off on what he wanted
them to do, and Boehner didn’t, or couldn’t.” We’ll never know, but I
believe that the kind of budget compromise Boehner and Obama tried to
shake hands on, had it reached a vote, would have passed with solid
majorities in both chambers and been signed into law. The problem was
not polarization; it was disorganization. A latent majority could not
muster and assert itself.
As soon became apparent, Boehner’s 2011
debacle was not a glitch but part of an emerging pattern. Two years
later, the House’s conservative faction shut down the government with
the connivance of Ted Cruz, the very last thing most Republicans wanted
to happen. When Boehner was asked by Jay Leno why he had permitted what
the speaker himself called a “very predictable disaster,” he replied,
rather poignantly: “When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this
way. You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a
walk.”
Boehner was right. Washington doesn’t have a crisis of
leadership; it has a crisis of followership. One can argue about
particulars, and Congress does better on some occasions than on others.
Overall, though, minority factions and veto groups are becoming ever
more dominant on Capitol Hill as leaders watch their organizational
capacity dribble away. Helpless to do much more than beg for support,
and hostage to his own party’s far right, an exhausted Boehner finally
gave up and quit last year. Almost immediately, his heir apparent,
Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, was shot to pieces too. No wonder Paul
Ryan, in his first act as speaker, remonstrated with his own colleagues
against chaos.
Nevertheless, by spring the new speaker was bogged
down. “Almost six months into the job, Ryan and his top lieutenants face
questions about whether the Wisconsin Republican’s tenure atop the
House is any more effective than his predecessor,” Politico’s Web site reported in April. The House Republican Conference, an unnamed Republican told Politico,
is “unwhippable and unleadable. Ryan is as talented as you can be:
There’s nobody better. But even he can’t do anything. Who could?”
Of
course, Congress’s incompetence makes the electorate even more
disgusted, which leads to even greater political volatility. In a
Republican presidential debate in March, Ohio Governor John Kasich
described the cycle this way: The people, he said, “want change, and
they keep putting outsiders in to bring about the change. Then the
change doesn’t come … because we’re putting people in that don’t
understand compromise.” Disruption in politics and dysfunction in
government reinforce each other. Chaos becomes the new normal.
Being
a disorder of the immune system, chaos syndrome magnifies other
problems, turning political head colds into pneumonia. Take
polarization. Over the past few decades, the public has become sharply
divided across partisan and ideological lines. Chaos syndrome compounds
the problem, because even when Republicans and Democrats do find
something to work together on, the threat of an extremist primary
challenge funded by a flood of outside money makes them think twice—or
not at all. Opportunities to make bipartisan legislative advances slip
away.
Or
take the new technologies that are revolutionizing the media. Today, a
figure like Trump can reach millions through Twitter without needing to
pass network‑TV gatekeepers or spend a dime. A figure like Sanders can
use the Internet to reach millions of donors without recourse to
traditional fund-raising sources. Outside groups, friendly and
unfriendly alike, can drown out political candidates in their own races.
(As a frustrated Cruz told a supporter about outside groups ostensibly
backing his presidential campaign, “I’m left to just hope that what they
say bears some resemblance to what I actually believe.”) Disruptive
media technologies are nothing new in American politics; they have
arisen periodically since the early 19th century, as the historian Jill
Lepore noted in a February article in The New Yorker. What is new
is the system’s difficulty in coping with them. Disintermediating
technologies bring fresh voices into the fray, but they also bring
atomization and cacophony. To organize coherent plays amid swarms of
attack ads, middlemen need to be able to coordinate the fund-raising and
messaging of candidates and parties and activists—which is what they
are increasingly hard-pressed to do.
Assembling power to govern a
sprawling, diverse, and increasingly divided democracy is inevitably
hard. Chaos syndrome makes it all the harder. For Democrats, the
disorder is merely chronic; for the Republican Party, it is acute.
Finding no precedent for what he called Trump’s hijacking of an entire
political party, Jon Meacham went so far as to tell Joe Scarborough in The Washington Post that George W. Bush might prove to be the last Republican president.
Nearly
everyone panned party regulars for not stopping Trump much earlier, but
no one explained just how the party regulars were supposed to have done
that. Stopping an insurgency requires organizing a coalition against
it, but an incapacity to organize is the whole problem. The reality is
that the levers and buttons parties and political professionals might
once have pulled and pushed had long since been disconnected.
-
Prognosis and TreatmentChaos syndrome as a psychiatric disorder
I don’t have a quick solution to the current
mess, but I do think it would be easy, in principle, to start moving in
a better direction. Although returning parties and middlemen to
anything like their 19th-century glory is not conceivable—or, in today’s
America, even desirable—strengthening parties and middlemen is very
doable. Restrictions inhibiting the parties from coordinating with their
own candidates serve to encourage political wildcatting, so repeal
them. Limits on donations to the parties drive money to unaccountable
outsiders, so lift them. Restoring the earmarks that help grease
legislative success requires nothing more than a change in congressional
rules. And there are all kinds of ways the parties could move insiders
back to the center of the nomination process. If they wanted to, they
could require would-be candidates to get petition signatures from
elected officials and county party chairs, or they could send unbound
delegates to their conventions (as several state parties are doing this
year), or they could enhance the role of middlemen in a host of other
ways.
Building party machines and political networks is what
career politicians naturally do, if they’re allowed to do it. So let
them. I’m not talking about rigging the system to exclude challengers or
prevent insurgencies. I’m talking about de-rigging the
system to reduce its pervasive bias against middlemen. Then they can do
their job, thereby making the world safe for challengers and
insurgencies.
Unfortunately, although the mechanics of de-rigging
are fairly straightforward, the politics of it are hard. The public is
wedded to an anti-establishment narrative. The political-reform
community is invested in direct participation, transparency,
fund-raising limits on parties, and other elements of the
anti-intermediation worldview. The establishment, to the extent that
there still is such a thing, is demoralized and shattered, barely able
to muster an argument for its own existence.
But there are
optimistic signs, too. Liberals in the campaign-finance-reform community
are showing new interest in strengthening the parties. Academics and
commentators are getting a good look at politics without effective
organizers and cohesive organizations, and they are terrified. On
Capitol Hill, conservatives and liberals alike are on board with
restoring regular order in Congress. In Washington, insiders have had
some success at reorganizing and pushing back. No Senate Republican was
defeated by a primary challenger in 2014, in part because then–Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a machine politician par excellence,
created a network of business allies to counterpunch against the Tea
Party.
The biggest obstacle, I think, is the general public’s
reflexive, unreasoning hostility to politicians and the process of
politics. Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last
universally acceptable form of bigotry. Because that problem is mental,
not mechanical, it really is hard to remedy.
In March, a Trump supporter told The New York Times,
“I want to see Trump go up there and do damage to the Republican
Party.” Another said, “We know who Donald Trump is, and we’re going to
use Donald Trump to either take over the G.O.P. or blow it up.” That
kind of anti-establishment nihilism deserves no respect or accommodation
in American public life. Populism, individualism, and a skeptical
attitude toward politics are all healthy up to a point, but America has
passed that point. Political professionals and parties have many
shortcomings to answer for—including, primarily on the Republican side,
their self-mutilating embrace of anti-establishment rhetoric—but
relentlessly bashing them is no solution. You haven’t heard anyone say
this, but it’s time someone did: Our most pressing political problem
today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way
around.
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