Lessig's proposals

Lawrence Lessig proposes having the government take the first $50 of a person’s income tax payment, and return it to each individual taxpayer as a voucher to be used to fund political campaigns. The taxpayer would be able to spend this voucher on any candidate he wants, or to spend it on general campaign expenses of the party he identifies with. Each individual would be able to contribute no more than $100 more to any campaign. Your estimate is that this process could potentially generate as much as 6 billion dollars to be distributed to candidates.

This proposal is ingenious, and may even have the effect he and I want, but I have some reservations about it. The first has to do with the issue brought up by the Citizen’s United decision. Is a corporation an individual, a person? If so, as the Citizen’s United decision seems to imply, would the first $50 of a corporation’s tax payment also be returned to the corporation to be used for campaign contributions? Would a corporation also be limited to $100 in additional contributions? This would be an interesting development. If not, how would corporations be treated? Is a constitutional amendment necessary to make sure that a corporation is not a person? There is a separate movement to this effect (see Jeffrey Clements, Corporations are not People).

The second reservation has to do with paying for it. It would involve reducing revenue to the government of potentially 6 billion dollars. That reduction would have to be compensated for by either reducing spending in other areas, or raising taxes to make up for the reduction. Republicans, as they are now, would be attracted to reducing spending, but the Democrats would resist and would want to raise taxes. The measure would thus become just another point of contention between the Republicans and Democrats in their paralyzing war between taxing and spending. The likelihood of getting anything so game changing through the present congress seems vanishingly small. Corporations and the wealthy would fight it strongly. This is not to say that it might not be a good idea, just that it would take a strong external push to get it past the logjam that our government is.

The third reservation is perhaps more philosophical. It has to do with appealing to the government to fix the problems we have with the government. Governments, of course, set the rules for just about everything, including financing campaigns, but to ask them to in addition create an agency to administer a program to provide that financing is a step beyond what seems to be appropriate for a government. Such an agency could lead to a moral hazard problem such as what we have in dealing with large banks, or with the corporate capture of regulatory agencies. Politically also, it is more difficult to create such an agency than it is to merely change the rules for financing campaigns.

Campaign Finance Reform

A friend of mine last week quite adamantly claimed that campaign finance reform is the one overriding issue that we should all focus on, to the exclusion of other issues. For him the goal has to be to take money out of politics. Without that nothing else can be accomplished.

To this I present a syllogism:

Politics, most generally, is the competition for power in government…or business…or love.

Money is power.

Taking money out of politics is an absurdity; it amounts to telling politicians to compete for power without power (money).

Unfortunately it is not just my friend who advocates trying to take money out of politics. Lawrence Lessig has recently written an entire book (Republic, Lost) developing this position. He builds his case on the basis of the notion of dependence corruption. As he defines it, “an institution can be corrupted … when individuals within that institution become dependent upon an influence that distracts them from the intended purpose of the institution. The distracting dependency corrupts the institution.  Lessig, Lawrence (2011-10-05). Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It (p. 15). Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition.’ Given this definition, it is not hard to demonstrate that congressmen are corrupt. I have reservations about his use of corruption as the basis for his argument that campaign finance reform is necessary, but his actual proposals are what are important. As it turns out, he is not so much arguing that we should remove money from politics as he is arguing that the money for political campaigns should be derived from individuals as part of their payment of taxes, in a program administered by the government.

The problem I have with his proposal is that he treats political parties as no more than labels individuals use to check off where they want their money to go. The candidates become central, thus continuing the push to eliminate parties from any role in the political process. To me this is a complete misunderstanding of the political process.

Party continuity

If as Ware claims, there has been more continuity than discontinuity in the parties since 1820, then perhaps parties should be seen as more of an expression of the basic weakness of our government than as a cause of it. The supposed strength of the parties from about 1820 to about 1900 could be seen as more of an aberration resulting from the use of patronage than as a genuine strength of the parties themselves. If we define parties as institutions that aggregate and rationalize the interests and values of their members and adherents, that provide ideologies by which their members can promote programs and policies, then patronage has to be seen a means to the end of developing and promoting this ideology. On the other hand, if patronage is able to overpower the ideology, as I believe it did with the Jacksonian spoils system, then the function of parties in the operation of government is irretrievably distorted.

Granted that technology has added another dimension to the current dysfunctions, but the basic weakness of parties and of government is not something new. It only strengthens my contention that stronger parties would produce a stronger and more effective and efficient government. Perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but many of the recent changes in the parties can be seen as tentative movements toward becoming stronger, and in this sense are positive. The transition from what we have had for the last two hundred years, and a genuinely national, ideological, programmatic party will be difficult and wrenching, but the result will be a more efficient government.

California primaries

According to Ware, the development of the direct primary as a method for nominating candidates for office was not a revolutionary change, but rather an evolution of a system that relied on patronage to motivate and organize party members to support party candidates. The parties were almost completely decentralized, with the power at the state or even the county level. There was no national party organization through which the local parties were organized and disciplined.

Today there are national party organizations, but they do not operate as institutions that organize and rationalize the local parties. They are not in the position of telling the local parties what the positions of the local candidates should be on national issues. They are rather in the position of supporting whatever positions the local candidates take.

Primary elections took the power of nomination away from the party leaders and gave it to the “people”, supposedly the members of the party, but actually and rather amorphously, to anyone who claimed to be a party member. Ultimately the party was forced into being only an organization that supported whoever was able to get nominated in the primary, irrespective of his/her position relative to the issues of the day.

The ultimate expression of this orientation is the California primary system, where effectively the primary functions as a somewhat redundant preliminary to the general election. Party still are able to nominate candidates for the primary, and how this is done is not specified, but the primary election is a competition among all the candidates from all the parties, with the top two going on to the general election. The primary election is no longer a way of choosing who the nominees of the party are: it is essentially only a preliminary to a runoff election of the two top vote getters. How the parties nominate their candidates for the primary becomes an unspecified process internal to the party. It appears that this has just defeated the purpose of having primary elections.

How this works itself out will be interesting. Meanwhile, there continues to be little national discipline in the parties.

Direct Primaries

I have now read both of Ware’s books, one on political conflict, and the other more specifically on the development of the direct primary as a way to nominate candidates for office. I must say that the depth and breadth of his knowledge is impressive.

In his discussion of the development of the primary system, Ware argues that it did not result from a struggle between the parties and those anti-party Progressives who wanted to weaken the influence of parties in government. His analysis of the history of the period between 1890 and 1910 indicates that in contrast there was little opposition within the parties to the direct primary as a method. It presented itself as a method for rationalizing the process of nomination in the face of increasing pressures from population increases. It was perhaps not the best solution, but it was the easiest to sell to party members and the general population. The role of the anti-party reformers was only secondary to the demands within the parties.

Ware’s analysis is detailed and complex. One would think that if the parties were actually supportive of the use of primaries then perhaps primaries did not weaken the parties, as the anti-party reformers wanted. Ware’s argument is that initially primaries did not weaken the parties: the parties adjusted to the new rules, and went on with their dominance of the political process. Over the long term, however, the effect of primaries, along with the development of TV and other technologies, did weaken the parties, and made elections candidate centered rather than party centered.

Given this history, Ware is not very optimistic about returning to party centered elections. He sees the history of the changes in the election process as more or less inevitable, given the character of the American polity, and short of a revolution, no prospect of development away from the candidate centered elections of the present.

My impression is that Ware is not happy with the current status quo, but as a historian it is not his place to suggest changes going forward. In contrast, I have no such restraints, and am free to suggest ways in which the current weakness of the parties could be remedied. Again, my general recommendation is to give to the parties the exclusive control of the disbursement of campaign funds to the candidates. This would have to be done as a matter of law, since the election process has been made so fully into a legal procedure of the state, and this would be the sticking point, but it is not insurmountable.

More on parties

I have now read Alan Ware’s book on political conflict in America. Ware has spent his life studying political parties, and knows a tremendous amount about them. I am not sure about some of his distinctions by which he frames his discussion, such as between liturgicals vs pietisticals, or between libertarians vs republicans, but he does get down to some of the structural, organizational issues about political parties toward the end, and these are important. As he describes it, the Democratic party created by Van Buren in the 1820s was the first real mass party, and it succeeded because of its organization and its use of patronage. Thus it is incorrect to say that the parties at that time were weak. They were not weak as organizations, but they were weak in the European sense of not having coherent national programs and platforms.

Criticism of the parties will have to be more complete and precise. I am now reading Ware’s book on the development of the direct primary between 1890 and 1915.

Mean while, I have learned that there is a movement advocating a constitutional amendment to the effect that corporations are not, and cannot be treated as persons under the law. This is in reaction to the Citizens United decision by the Supreme  Court that allows corporations, as people, the free speech right to express their opinions and feelings in the form of giving money to PACs supporting candidates. Whether or not this will ever happen, or should happen, it is appropriate to correct the previous tendency of the Supreme Court to treat corporations as people, especially with respect to the 14^th Amendment. This would go a long way toward reducing the freedom of corporations and enhancing the power of governments to regulate corporate behavior.

Citizen's United

I have started reading a recent book by Alan Ware, “Political Conflict in America”. Hopefully it will expand my knowledge of parties, but it will be a difficult read. Meanwhile I just read a book by Thomas Edsall, “The Age of Austerity”. It poses the question of whether we are going to have to get used to the loss of abundance, and the consequent growing ugliness of politics. The Republicans have taken advantage of the politics of scarcity to promote fear and an “us versus them” attitude in politics. They have been successful with this tactic, and the Democrats have not been able to counteract it, but the question is whether this is a contrived position, given the Republicans opposition to raising taxes, or is it a harbinger of a more serious worldwide collapse of credit foreshadowing the end of oil, global warming, and general chaos. If the latter, there is not much anyone can do.

In any case, perhaps the world has been too stable for too long. We seem to be reverting to the world before the great depression and the new deal, where racial discrimination was ignored, and the federal and state governments were not allowed to interfere with business. The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, if nothing else, is a sign of the efforts of the Supreme Court to reestablish its role as ultimate arbiter of government actions. The Supreme Court has always taken an activist role in government: the difference is that in the 50s and 60s it ruled about what the government had to do, in a positive way, such as with regard to segregation, reproductive rights, and police procedures, whereas previously it had only been concerned with what the government could not do: enforce individual civil rights, discriminate against businesses, regulate labor relations.

It is time for the government, for congress to stand up to the court, and declare that it, not the court, reflects the will of the people. But if disaster is on the way, as the Republicans claim, perhaps it is too much to ask that we try to improve the way we operate.