American Politics: The Rage Driven Pendulum Part I
A number of smart people seem to agree that Trump is “the symptom not the cause”, but few have worked upstream from that premise to identify the underlying disease. The conclusions of those that have attempted to identify an underlying cause vary widely, and have noticeable tendency to confirm the world view of their sponsor. Barack Obama identified the disease as the willingness of the rich to use reactionary politics to maintain power. Nafeez Ahmed believes this is what happens when an oligarchy faces a decline in Energy ROI and a climate crisis simultaneously. Andrew Yang believes that Donald Trump is a symptom of deindustrialization and automation. A former diplomat thinks Trump is the result the militarization and politicization of American diplomacy. Jeffrey Billman thinks it has to do with the electorate sorting itself based on educational attainment. Others have suggested Trump is the result of a small sector-specific recession in 2016. Few would deny that Fox News was a precondition for Donald Trump’s rise. There is truth to all of these (well probably not the Energy ROI one), but none of them strike me as the sort of thing that should inevitably jeopardize democracy. All the sociological factors in the world are just inputs into the electoral system. The truth is, Donald Trump won because we have a system of politics that makes very little sense. We’ll run through the specifics in a little bit, but first let’s lay out the background.
Polarization
We live in an increasingly polarized country. According to Pew Research in 1994 only 64% or republicans were more conservative than the median democrat! Just looking at the graphs you could be forgiven for thinking these parties weren’t representing particularly different constituencies in the 90s. While attempting to plot multifaceted political views on a single axis like this leads to error the stark differences between 1994, 2004, and 2017 show a country that is rapidly diverging. The exact mechanism of polarization isn’t settled. Whether we’re trapped in feedback loop arising from geographic differences in values and voting or a feedback loop driven by greater access to information via the internet the results are obvious in the both the data and our increasingly frayed political system. Whatever is driving polarization, having parties who disagree shouldn’t be a problem for a competent political system. Unfortunately, our political system isn’t equipped for a high polarization environment.
Primaries and Other Problems
At the national level all politicians enter our political system through a primary. Taking decisions out of the hands of political insiders and allowing the voting public to select their candidates for office sounds sensible; unfortunately, primaries lead to ideological segregation. Republicans vote in one primary and Democrats in the other. The result is general election candidates who are selected for their effectiveness at mobilizing the base of their own party. When polarization is high this almost guarantees that the nominee of the two major parties will be anathema to a significant percentage of the electorate. The republican candidate will seem repugnant to most Democrats and the Democratic candidate will be unacceptable to most Republicans. This isn’t necessarily bad; having politicians that represent the core values of their party is sensible. The problems arise when the two major party candidates interact with our winner-take-all electoral system (a system in which voters can only indicate preference for one candidate and the candidate with most votes is the winner). Under other electoral systems third parties could arise by appealing to disaffected moderates or other groups that feel poorly represented by the two major parties. Currently third party gatecrashers can only harm the candidate with which they agree the most. This is called the “spoiler effect”, and is self evident enough that most voters steer clear of third parties despite high demand.
Layered on top of our polarization and outmoded voting system are a series of institutions that make government more erratic, the most benign of which merely add randomness to outcomes. Other institutions systematically advantage some groups of Americans over others. For brevity’s sake I’ll save the specifics and the fixes for later. For now it suffices to say: the Electoral College, gerrymandered congressional districts, and the Senate are all impediments to fair and effective governance.
Divided Government and Voter Ignorance
Once politicians are elected all of aforementioned defects are filtered through the logic of a two party political system where a zero compromise strategy may actually be dominant. The result is an unsteady, unresponsive, and unproductive political system. In times of high polarization passing all but the most banal laws requires control of all three branches of the US government as well as favorable rulings from the supreme court, but unified control of the government is rare.
Unified government, once the norm, has been declining in the post war era. From Clinton’s first term onwards unified control occurs roughly one third of the time (5 out of 14 sessions of congress). Clinton, Obama, and Trump have all gotten one session of unified control to start their term and divided government thereafter. During the post 9/11 feelings of fear and solidarity President Bush saw two consecutive terms of unified government sandwiched between Democratic control of the Senate. The last time a single political party controlled the White House, the House of Representatives and had 60 votes in the Senate was the first two years of Jimmy Carter’s term.
I suspect unified government occurs infrequently because Americans have fairly low baseline knowledge about the powers and constraints of the federal government’s branches, and little familiarity with the political machinations of the the recent past. With little to go on, attributing all successes and failures to the political figure they are most familiar is the default schema. For example, in 2012 a majority of Americans believed gas prices were something the president had direct influence on . In 2020 Troy Aikman and Joe Buck, two men who have participated in professional sporting events for decades, appeared to believe military flyovers were a waste of money that could be attributed to the Trump administration. In 2018, 83% of Americans knew which party controlled the Senate and 82% knew who controlled the House, but only 41% could identify the number of votes needed to end a filibuster when presented with the options: 51, 60, 67, and 70. Without the assistance of the multiple choice format only about a quarter of Americans could correctly identify the filibuster threshold. In 2015, when more than 3000 Americans were shown four figures and asked to identify the figure with correct distribution of Republican, Democratic, and Independent seats in the Senate 52% identified the correct distribution, another 21% thought Republicans had a filibuster proof majority, 10% believed democrats controlled the senate, 6% indicated the senate was split 50/50, and 11% did not answer the question. A poll conducted in 2018 without a multiple choice format found that more than half of Americans didn’t know which party controlled the house and the senate. Taken together these polls imply that a significant fraction of Americans functionally zero knowledge about the state of affairs in Washington D.C.
I write all this not to denigrate American’s civic or political knowledge (this genre is well established), but instead to point out the mismatch between the number of things that have to go right for a party to implement it’s agenda, and the electorate’s understanding of that process. Our political system has 4 major points where a bill can be rejected, one of which is an unusually high (60% majority to overcome the Senate filibuster), and another is not formally responsive to voters at all (the Supreme Court). Additionally we have a maze of potential procedural choke points in committees, senatorial holds, and points of order that, outside of Capitol Hill, only enthusiastic civics teachers know the details of. In past eras, when parties were more ideologically heterogenous, unobjectionable bills tended to slide past these veto points without much trouble. With today’s well sorted parties there is little incentive for compromise, and the majority party can accomplish very little through the Schoolhouse Rock process. The result is that most actual legislating must be done in spurts during moments of unified government. The other two thirds of the tine day to day governing tends to be done via executive order and judicial interpretation.
In contrast to the legislative branches, the public awareness about who occupies the white house is quite high. More recent polling is hard to find, but in 1986 a poll found 99% Americans knew who the president was (page 74 Table 2.3 What Americans Know About Politics and Why it Matters), and it appears that knowledge about the president’s party is quite high compared to other branches of government and decays quite slowly (I suspect polling is sparse because pollsters consider these things too obvious to poll or don’t get interesting results when they do, “100 percent of Americans know who the president is” doesn’t generate much buzz). In 2012 Americans could successfully identify the political party of Clinton and Reagan, who had been out of office for 11 and 23 years respectively, at significantly higher rates than the house majority and minority leaders of the moment, or, as we’ve seen, the party controlling the Senate and House.
As a result of America’s system of overlapping veto points, accomplishing things at the federal level is painfully slow, and figuring out who to blame for governmental failures is complicated. The result is a system where the President has a limited ability to change domestic policy, but the one thing everyone knows for sure is the name and party affiliation of the person in the White House. As a result, down ballot races become a proxy for presidential approval which in turn is a proxy for frustration with the entire apparatus and occasionally the price of gas. This basic process combines with minority party activation (read: fear and anger) and apathetic turnout out of the incumbent’s base to flip seats from the President’s party to the opposition party until the White House flips as well. If this new president is lucky the tide they are swept in on delivers the House and Senate to their party. With a united government this new President, assuming they have the policy positions of the median member of their party, can get started alienating the 90+ percent of the opposition party, annoying their own base by compromising and accomplishing only a fraction of their platform, and taking the blame from the general public for things they have no control over.
This pattern combined with a historically unpopular President makes broad-stroke political prognostication quite easy. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Democrats are going to 1) take the White House in 2020 or if not 2020 then certainly 2024. 2) lose congressional seats in every race thereafter for the next 4 to 12 years until they… 3) Lose the White House, freak out, and start the cycle anew. How do I know this? Because this same basic pattern has played out time and again for as long as I’ve been alive. The American political system has become a rage driven pendulum. Matthew Yglesias, a hot-take artisan employed at Vox, has identified this pattern in the context of healthcare reform pushes:
In 1993, newly elected President Bill Clinton made an ambitious overhaul of the national health care system his top priority. It ended up getting bogged down in complicated congressional negotiations over the many details of the proposal, became unpopular, and didn’t pass, and Democrats got hammered in the 1994 midterms.
Then in 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama made an ambitious overhaul of the national health care system his top priority. It ended up getting bogged down in complicated congressional negotiations over the many details of the proposal, became unpopular, did pass despite poor polling, and Democrats got hammered in the 2010 midterms.
But then in 2017, newly elected President Donald Trump made an ambitious overhaul of the national health care system his top priority. Reflecting the different disposition of congressional Republicans, they tried to skip lightly over all the details and just force members to support a big package that then-Speaker Paul Ryan cooked up rapidly with a handful of allies. This proved to be toxically unpopular, Senate Republicans totally refused to back it, and then at the last minute, they slapped together a totally different “skinny repeal” bill that also didn’t pass. Not coincidentally, Republicans got hammered in the 2018 midterms.
He’s got the right of it, but I tend to think that this pattern would have played out regardless of what issue appeared at the top of each party agenda. It’s just the rage driven pendulum at work. If not for the post 9/11 feelings of patriotism and solidarity I suspect Republican electoral success during the Bush administration likely would have followed the pattern identified above.
The rarely mentioned backdrop of our increasingly polarized and angry country is the tectonic creep of population from rural areas to cities. The pull of hot job markets doesn’t perfectly align with the big state/ little state divide, but if demographic trends hold through 2040 the 68 senators from the 34 least populous states will represent just 30 percent of the US population; accordingly the other 70 percent of the US population will be electing just 32 senators. Democrats (the party of people who move for work) are slowly gerrymandering themselves into under-representation in the Electoral College and permanent minority status in the Senate. Unfortunately, there appears to be little acknowledgement of any of these trends by elected officials. Instead, the American political establishment seems fairly content to sleepwalk into an increasingly divided and dysfunctional future. So, why don’t we go ahead and promise each other that this time we’ll learn the lessons of history and use the next brief window of a united Democratic government to fundamentally change the system for the better? After all it may be our last chance.
Airing of Grievances
Objection 1: I think we should use the next bout of Democratic power to improve healthcare for everyone! When we get that done grateful Americans will flood into the Democratic party.
Response 2: No they won’t. A lot of Americans aren’t paying sufficient attention to accurately estimate which party is responsible for any particular change in their life. Half of those who are paying attention will be angered that a leftist agenda is being implemented and a significant fraction of the other half will be disappointed by the compromised and insufficiently leftist healthcare package that emerges from the senate. Ultimately, success is a demotivating phenomenon in politics. People make time to vote when they feel threatened, but aren’t as motivated when they think things are generally going well. Meanwhile, demographic trends and the lure of high paying jobs in big cities will continue to erode Democratic representation in a majority of states. With each passing year we slide closer to a permanent Republican super-majority in the Senate, and soon enough we will hit a point of no return. Fixing this means making major structural changes the next time democrats have power.
Objection 2: Why do Democrats have to be the ones to use their political capital to reform the system?
Response 2: Because being a grownup means doing things that are necessary even if you’d rather be doing something else. The Democrats are currently the grownups, and frankly Republicans would be fairly satisfied with a permanently dysfunctional government that only stirs itself to appoint conservative judges.
Objection 3: Despite your criticisms of others you haven’t actually told us what the specific electoral issues are that make the system prone to bad outcomes.
Response 3: What a convenient objection, I’m feverishly editing more posts that will delve in to specifics.
