Bipartisanship

In this posting I want to respond to two columns and a comment by a listener-follower?-of the blog. I will try to be short and succinct.

The first column, by Jonathan Rauch in the New York Times, is one of those perennial attempts to say that we are better off with divided government, such as we now have after the recent election. His argument is that a unified government succeeds only in producing unhappiness and a loss of popularity for the majority party, whereas a divided government forces both sides to cooperate with each other, letting "meaningful laws stand a likelier chance of passage, because neither side can easily blame the other for whatever is wrong and because any major legislation needs support from both parties to pass." This argument ignores two things.

First, the unpopularity of the majority party in a unified government is not because it is unified, but because in our system the minority in the Senate can prevent the passage of major legislation desired by the majority. The health care reform bill is a good example. It finally got passed, but not until the minority in the Senate was able to force so many compromises and concessions that the end result was that even the majority was not happy with the bill, and the minority was able with some justification say that it is a bad bill. The unpopularity of the majority was because it was unable to do the job for which it was elected, not because of what it did, and the reason it could not accomplish its goals was the system which allows minority obstruction.

Second, in a divided government the likelihood of getting major, "meaningful" legislation passed at all is very small: the more likely prospect is that we will have gridlock where nothing major gets done. In both cases we make excuses by holding up the misguided notion that somehow we should have bipartisan decision making, a covert admission that nothing can get done without caving in to the minority, and allowing them to delay and distort the process and the result.

The second column, also in the New York Times, is by the noted historian David M Kennedy. He points out that the years from 1870 to 1900 were in many ways quite similar to our recent history in that there was divided government for many years, and major shifts in popular sentiment at elections. There were, as there are now, major issues to be dealt with at the time, "Yet the era's political system proved unable to grapple effectively with any of those matters." There was then, perhaps even more than there is now, "abject political paralysis."

Kennedy points out that the so-called Gilded Age ended with the appearance of the Progressive Movement and leaders such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who were able to force the needed changes in our government. Unfortunately, Presidential leadership did not change Congress. It was instead rather like a deus ex machina that swooped in to rescue a floundering system without actually changing anything. The desperate cry for strong Presidential leadership has remained, over the more than 100 years since, the only apparent solution to a dysfunctional Congress, with Imperial Presidents growing stronger and stronger.

Finally, a reader of my blog sent me an email saying that for him and many others, the problem with government is the lack of accountability and effective management of the bureaucracy. He points to the US Postal Service, NASA, the environmental regulatory agencies that failed to prevent the BP oil spill, the overlapping and conflicting regulatory activities of the different agencies, such as those dealing with food production, and so on. First there has always been waste and mismanagement in bureaucracies around the world: it is to some extent just the nature of the beast.

In the case of the Federal bureaucracy, however, there is an additional consideration related to the above dysfunctional Congress. In our system the built in confusion as to who is in charge of the bureaucracy makes effective management very difficult. Is the bureaucracy responsible to the President, who is supposed to execute the laws, or to the House or to the Senate, who make the laws? The poor bureaucrat does not really know, and gets conflicting pressures from all three of these sources, even down to the staffs of individual Senators and Congressmen. It is little wonder that in this situation the bureaucrat, without any clear lines of authority or responsibility, ends up being in the pocket of the industry they are supposed to regulate, and able to get away with poor management. These are not issues separate from the above dysfunctional Congress.

The ultimate conclusion is that we need a new system.  Enough.

Raising taxes

I do not intend to comment on ongoing political issues that basically accept the way things are now, but I cannot resist doing so in this instance. The Republicans complain loudly that the major issue at present is the deficit, and they intend to cut spending to deal with it. They threaten to slash discretionary spending, and decimate social programs such as education, public health, national parks, research, and what they call unnecessary regulation.

If it is indeed the case that the deficit is the major problem for this country, then Obama unilaterally should announce that he will veto any legislation intended to prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, so that rates will automatically return to what they were under Clinton.

First of all, as President, Obama could get away with this move. It is unlikely that two thirds of both houses would be able to overcome such a veto. Second, Obama and his programs were repudiated in this election, so he owes nothing to the middle class. His goal has to be to do what is good for the entire country. The federal government needs the money to pay for its programs, even if the programs are slashed. If he cannot selectively fiddle with the expiration of the tax cuts, he can do so across the board, just as the Republicans talk about cutting spending across the board. He could argue that it is necessary for everyone to share in the suffering necessary to repair the country's credit. In the short term it may damage the recovery, but over the long term, it would prepare the way for a healthier economy. This may deny Obama a second term, but it is the sort of bold move that Obama needs to make to show that he is serious and able to act decisively. My guess is that the Republicans will find it difficult to argue convincingly against it, since doing so would only expose their hypocrisy. On the other hand, it may precipitate the kind of constitutional crisis that we need in this country.

Inequality

Bob Herbert wrote a column in the New York Times about a new book that has just come out by Hacker and Pierson, two political scientists entitled, Winner Take All Politics. It is about the growth in inequality in this country over the last thirty years. Their explanation of this growth is that essentially big business has coopted government, and has relaxed and changed the regulations and rules by which business operates so that the rich have become very much richer, to the detriment of the rest of the people, especially the middle class.

To my way of thinking, this is something that the wealthy naturally try to do-it is in their nature to try to make themselves even richer. The problem has been that there is in our government no functioning counterweight to these efforts of the wealthy. For a short period after the depression labor was allowed to develop power and serve as a counterweight, but it has systematically lost power through the efforts of big business. At present there is effectively no counterweight to big business, and so banks get bailed out and the perpetrators of the financial collapse do not suffer, and in fact are making even more money. One can sympathize with the Tea Party movement on this, but why they should ally themselves with the Republicans, the party of big business is mystifying. Their solution, smaller government, would have the result of only letting big business have more freedom to gain more of the wealth. We need big government to be able to stand up effectively to big business.

What is missing in our government is the absence of strong, effective, competitive political parties who will have to respond to the people, not just business, to get elected. We, uniquely in the western world, have a weak party government, and that weakness is what allows business to control government. Business is able to use the "checks and balances", the constraints on majority rule, to prevent effective, party based control of the government in the interests of all the people, not just the wealthy.

Katrina vanden Heuvel in the Washington Post today has a column about the power of the US Chamber of Commerce in the election yesterday. She points out that the Chamber of Commerce is almost totally a tool of big business, not of commerce in general. "Only 249 of 7000 local chambers are now members." I am not going to argue that the US Chamber of Commerce should be stopped from spending its money, or that disclosure is somehow going to change its behavior. The issue for me is not that they spend so much money, but that there is no one else on the other side to compete with them. Given that today labor is weak and ineffective, there has to be some other organization, working perhaps with labor, to counteract the influence of the US Chamber of Commerce and other such organizations.

To have other such organizations, we have to recognize that business is not a monolithic force. Like any other area of life, within business there are differences about how and what to do. Heuvel points out in fact that one such organization, the American Sustainable Business Council, is in fact opposed to much of what the US Chamber of Commerce promotes. We need such organizations to become more active and outspoken about what needs to be done for this country, but without effective party organizations, such groups have nowhere to go.

Strong political parties, even if both represent only factions within the business community, would be better than what we have now, and would give the people a real choice when they vote. If this is class warfare, then so be it.

politics: getting, keeping, using power

If politics is about getting, keeping, and using power, with a few or many sides competing with each other to control government, then it is curious that in the history of our country politics is not often expressed this way. Politics is not often described as a competition among centers of power in the country. The competition is more often expressed as going on between the federal government and the states, or as it is now, between big (federal) government, and big business--with small government being only a proxy for the dominance of big business.

Samuelson's column in today's Washington Post is an example of the failure to confront the basic nature of politics. Samuelson admits that for its practitioners politics is a matter of power, but then he shifts the argument by saying that "for the nation, the basic purpose of politics is to conciliate." He then goes on to say that politics achieves conciliation by working out a consensus on issues. His basic complaint is that politics especially in the present "has abdicated its central role," as he defines it. He ignores the alternative definition of politics as the exercise of power. For him politics is the process of achieving a bipartisan consensus.

Samuelson admits that there has never been a golden age of bipartisan harmony, but he finds that its present lack is especially troubling, with voter anger driven to just throw everybody out. But if there has never been a period of bipartisan harmony, maybe that is not the purpose of politics. His acceptance of bipartisan consensus then amount to no more than a wishful hope: politics should be bipartisan, even if it never has been. His political theory departs from an objective description of what is, into a fantasy of how things should be, equivalent to the idealism of having a benevolent dictatorship.

His description of a cycle of disillusionment about politics is probably accurate, with initial optimism, but then demoralization. The cause of this cycle, though, is not "that leaders cannot command broad support." in the form of bipartisan agreement. It is just the opposite; disillusionment is the result of the difficulties in making political decisions resulting from the necessity of having a bipartisan consensus.

Decision making by majority rule is the mathematically, morally, and politically the best way to make decisions. The problem with our government is that we do not have majority rule.We avoid confronting this issue by discussing politics as one of big government vs big business, and pretending that consensus is all.

class warfare

E J Dionne in the Washington Post continues his discussion of campaign finance following the Citizens United decision. In his latest column he complains that "the 2010 election is turning into a class war." This strikes me as a totally naive statement. There has always been a class war: the US has tried again and again to deny and hide it, but it has always been there. It is to the benefit of the wealthy to deny it, and so they have. The Progressive Movement of the early 1900s gave the wealthy a way to obscure the issue, and this was the basis of most of the campaign reform legislation. Such legislation has served only to further hide the influence of the wealthy.

Typically Dionne himself tries to deny class war by presenting Obama as a supporter of the wealthy and the market system. Setting up Obama as a supporter of the wealthy leaves Dionne mystified as to why the wealthy would want to attack Democrats. Again, Dionne is being naive: Obama might say nice things about the free market, but the wealthy are not fooled. The wealthy want to control the government, and Obama and Democrats are an obstacle to this control.

Dionne then complains that the Supreme Court has peremptorily "swept away decades of restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections." I have mixed feelings about what the Supreme Court has done, preferring that the legislature make such decisions, but in fact what the Supreme Court did was possibly motivated by the reality that all of those restrictions on campaign finances has not been successful, and has instead distorted the political process.

Dionne talks in terms of corruption, but that term is a very slippery one, easily shading into simple political preferences rather than something criminal. Corruption is supposedly the use of undue or illegitimate influence, but who is to say what is undue? Corruption is buying influence, but if one has money, what else is one to do with it, how else is one to exert influence?

The counterweight to the use of money to gain influence in a democracy is the power of numbers at the voting booth. The wealthy will always have money, and will try to use it in elections. The only power able to counteract the influence of money is the power of numbers, and this is almost by definition the power of the poor, or the non-wealthy. The problem in elections, and in government more generally, is that the US government is not democratic, and thus is not able to counter the influence of wealth. Contrary to Dionne's claims, this country does not a class war; it is not irrational, it is basic.

campaign finance disclosure

It occurred to me this morning as I was reading Politico.com about the Sunday talk shows, where Axelrod again said all we need is to know who is making all these campaign ads. It struck me that the problem with this approach to improving our political discourse is that it allows the consumer of the ads to discount the argument itself by deflecting attention to the source of the argument. In effect for any campaign ad, it becomes possible to say "consider the source" and then to ignore the substance of the ad.     This works both ways. If an ad is sponsored by a liberal group, the consumer is able to say that it is only the liberal point of view, and then ignore the argument. Conversely, if it is a conservative group that sponsors the ad, the consumer is able to say that it is only the conservative point of view, and ignore it. In either case the consumer is encouraged to ignore the substance of the argument, and in general to ignore the discourse itself. In effect we praise and promote political ignorance or non-involvement.

It seems to me that the consumer of political advertising should rather be encouraged to evaluate the substance of the argument, regardless of who is sponsoring the ad. To do so may in fact even require that the source of the argument not be known. In any case, the value of the argument should be more the focus of comment about the ad than its source. To pretend that knowing the source of the ad is going to somehow make the ads more fair and responsible is a stretch, and amounts to no more than saying don't trust the ads because we don't know where they are coming from. We can know whether the substance of the ad is valid and important or not without knowing where it came from.

Restart

I have been away for the last two weeks, so I thought I would start over in trying to say what my book is about.

My book is about what is wrong with our government, and how we can change it. Its conclusion is that we should strengthen our political parties so that they have more discipline and control over their elected members in Congress. This could be done by changing campaign finance laws to require that all financial contributions to political campaigns be made only to political parties. Individual candidates would not be able to solicit or accept contributions from anyone other than their party. This would free the candidate from the burden of fund raising, and allow him or her to focus solely on the issues. More importantly, it would enable the party to discipline its members with the threat of withholding funding for campaigns.

I realize that this proposal is directly contrary to most of the discussions of campaign finance reform, where the focus is on reducing the influence of money and parties on the campaigns and on the candidates. Parties for most people are part of the problem of campaign finance, not its solution.

The effects of such a change in the political parties, however, would be to trigger changes in the dynamic relationships between the House of Representatives, the Senate, the President, and eventually even the Supreme Court. These changes would result in a different kind of government, one more closely resembling the parliamentary government of Britain and most other European governments.

To understand my reasons for this conclusion, it is necessary to take a different look at our history, one that includes our government as a factor in our history, not just as part of the neutral background on which cultural and social forces play out their conflicts. Most of my book is in fact devoted to presenting this view of our history.