I liked this. The summary verion is that prior to about 1970, federal office candidates were selected largly by party conventions, which were controlled by party bosses. The bosses were generally corrupt, but not highly ideological, being more concerned with appeasing broad constituencies so that they could get their candidates elected and then reap the rewards. In an effort to end the corruption, most states went to a primary system for selecting candidates. What the reformers didn't anticipate, though, is that most ordinary citizens don't really care that much about federal politics. So the majority of the people who participate in primary elections are ideologues and thus we now have a much more polarized government, with less and less ability to reach consensus and compromise. Seems to explain a lot.
If the premiss is that only the ideologues care enough to vote then I don't see how open primaries fixes that. This goes back to the changes that moved the senate elections to public vote as well.
I don't see how anything could be passed that goes away from the current system; it would be attacked as curtailing freedom in one way or another (remember who we're dealing with here...) The only solution I see is encouraging the non ideological portion of the general public to start participating in elections. I fear that's a tall order though.
Anything that weakens the parties strengthens the money. "Nonpartisan" is anything but.
In Washington State, there are now fewer choices and the cost of races have sky rocketed. The Top Two primary has become another form of incumbency protection.
If you had proposed actual election reform, like approval voting or proportional representation, sign me up. Ditto campaign finance reform, like restoring the Fairness Doctrine or public financing of campaigns.
No, non-partisan blanket primaries make things worse; you end up with the same bias toward the hypercommitted ideologues in general election candidate selection (primary voting) as with the normal primary system, with the added issue that if closely-related factions are overrepresented enough in the pool of hypercommitted ideologues in a region, only candidates from those factions (which are often indistinguishable to anyone other than hypercommitted ideologues) end up available for voting in the general election.
The real solution isn't to change how we select candidates for what amounts to a "choose one of two options" general election, the solution is abandoning election methods which make the general election into a "choose one of two options" elections.
For legislative elections, replacing single-member districts with 3-5 member multimember districts and using a candidate-centered (not party list) election method using preference ballots that tends to produce proportional results (Single Transferrable Vote or something like it would be the obvious choice) would be ideal.
For state-level executive elections where there is a constitutional designated successor (e.g., Governor and Lt. Governor), electing both from the same ballot, using a preference voting system -- pretty much any sane single-winner preference voting system, including Instant Runoff, though a Condorcet method would probably be preferable -- where the normal winner is elected to the top slot and the winner from the same ballots with the first winner eliminated is elected to the second spot would be an improvement (preference voting minimizes the incentive to vote tactically among parties, having two offices to fill from the same ballot encourages each party to provide more than one candidate.)
For elections that must be single winner without a designated successor (such as, I dunno, State Insurance Commissioner), using the same single-winner preference-ballot system as for executive with designated successor -- in its straight, one winner form -- is probably the best available choice. OTOH, as these are often executive officers, it may be better (with a decent election system for chief executives) to eliminate separately-elected executive officers so as to minimize split attention and focus accountability.
For all elections, using partisan primaries but using a preference ballot system that selects the appropriate number of candidates for the election (rather than FPTP) would be the best choice. While you'll inevitably always have a bias toward the more engaged in non-general election, preference ballots minimize the influence of the most pure faction within the most engaged subgroup that votes in primaries, and fixing choice problems in the general election mean that there are more parties whose primaries matter.
Presidential elections, assuming that the electoral college is retained -- and that's the hardest change to make since it requires a Constitutional change, while most of the others do not -- are the hardest fix. Changing to preference ballots with a sane single winner system for primaries would help choice issues, but would probably end up turning actual candidate selection back over to party insiders at conventions, since it would make it much harder for a single candidate to get a majority of delegates through the primary process.
Changing primaries to preference ballots and using a system that outputs a complete preference ranking of candidates by state -- such as iterating a single-winner system eliminating the winner after each round until a complete preference ordering is achieved -- and having convention delegates vote preference ballots (that are, in the initial ballot, required, for regular state delegates, to be cast in accordance with the outcome of the state primary on the first ballot) would be one alternative which would both mitigate the power of extremist factions and preserve popular rather than insider selection.
Politics in America have always been ideological, bitter and partisan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLj6yY4P_Rg). 150 years ago this country split in two over ideological issues and then we fought a horrendous war to figure out who was the winner.
And everyone keeps talking about default, but failing to raise the debt ceiling does not cause us to default. There's plenty of revenue, and plenty of other spending to cut before we get there.
>>> There's plenty of revenue, and plenty of other spending to cut before we get there.
The sequester should take care of some those spending cuts. Getting a Democratically controlled government to cut spending is pretty hard considering they believe the way to stimulate growth is to spend and increase taxes.
EDIT: Not saying Democrats are the only ones who like to spend - Bush pushed the debt up quite a bit while he was in office so Republicans are not blameless either. However, most Republicans believe in smaller government, less taxes, and being fiscally responsible.
Republicans only pay lip service to those ideals, once in office they're far bigger and more irresponsible spenders than democrats. Democrats reduce deficits, republicans increase them, that's the reality.
I would question the downvote, considering my post is just a link I grabbed from the first google search on 'deficit spending by year', but then I realized that cognitive dissonance is a harsh mistress. I won't judge if you lash out with your mouse. Aaand I just broke my own rule about replying to downvotes...
No, my reality is factual and your link supports what I said, it shows Bush ballooning the deficit and Obama reducing it. You'll find the same thing with the previous Bush and Regan ballooning the deficit while Clinton reduced it.
Hah, this is a laughable claim. The final year of the Bush administration (partially shared by Obama, fiscally) being higher and Democrats 'reducing it' is a word game. So are you saying if Democrats give themselves a 1 trillion deficit (via their own policies) and then reduce it by half, this is somehow better than Republicans giving themselves a 500 billion deficit and reducing it by 10 percent?
Bush reduced the deficit over several years too, did you ignore that? Gods, you partisans are hilarious.
Your bias is showing. I didn't down vote you, as I replied to you I'm not even allowed to down vote you. And to then presume I did it because I'm liberal, you're clearly not the type for a rational discussion.
It's pretty typical of how humans argue. This doesn't make it a good idea, but painting your opponents with it is a cheap shot. You can find plenty of examples of this on every side of any issue.
Unfortunately, the computer systems used for government payments do not have the capability to prioritize payments, so that wasn't an option. We would stop paying at least part of our debt, and that puts us in a state of default.
Granted, government-run computer systems have not impressed lately, but a claim that they are this outrageously awful should link to a reputable source. Otherwise it just seems like you pulled it out of your ass. No private corporation would tolerate an A/P system that fails to provide a prioritization and approval process.
"Pulled it out of my ass"? Harsh words for something that's common knowledge, especially as it's almost constantly mentioned (albeit often ignored) anytime anyone brings up prioritization of debt payments.
Thanks for the operating the Google! I don't normally read the LA Times. The crux of it seems to be the proposition that bills are paid without human approval. I simply don't believe that. I realize the government has anti-fraud options unavailable to the private sector, but such a house of cards would have collapsed a long time ago.
"Lew would not commit to prioritizing payments on government bonds if the debt limit is not raised. He said the decision would be up to Obama."
No, I don't have a source to back up any of this. Sorry about the "ass" comment; I shouldn't have phrased my point in that manner.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
― George Washington, George Washington's Farewell Address
Even George Washington saw political parties as a great threat to the nation.
Politicians seek to remain in office - either out of a drive for personal ambition, the need for public validation, or through bright-eyed idealism to 'change the world'. The best way to stay in office is to align yourself with support - and most get this from their political party. But in order to keep the support of a party, you've got to go along with all of the things your party supports. This leads to group-think ... compromising your personal values for the sake of supporting your fellow politicians. There's no way that the members of the House and Senate agree on all of the issues they vote together on, but their party needs support, so they vote along ... abdicating their responsibility for the sake of party unity. And since their party has an opponent, part of their job as a good party member is to demonize those opponents. Now the media has set themselves up to promote this conflict. One network slants one way ... another slants the other way ... and they'll split their screen down the middle to make sure the yelling from both sides is captured. Lobbyists like career-politicians. It means their campaign contributions can be redeemed over more than one term, and they don't need to start over each election.
What's the solution? I'm not exactly sure, but the list includes term limits, changing gerrymandering, reducing the influence of money in politics, making politics less of a "contact sport" than its being presented as by the media, and probably all sorts of things I haven't mentioned or thought of. The problem is, much of this change cannot happen without the support of either the Supreme Court, or the very people whose careers will be impacted (likely negatively from their perspective) by such a change - and there's the rub. Democracy allows voters to remove a Cancer - but lately the replacement organs are metastasizing upon implantation.
Per Duverger's Law (1), winner takes all voting systems begat a two party system. Because belligerents seek the smallest winning coalition.
The saving grace of the USA's winner takes all elections is that we vote on absolutely everything, local, county, state, and federal. We have a great deal more involvement in local government.
What's the solution?
I'm glad you asked.
Most of the infighting is in the margins. So eliminate the margins.
First step is fair redistricting, maximizing competitiveness, so there are no "safe" seats.
Second step is universal voter registration. No more caging, provisional ballots, and other quirks.
Third step is campaign finance reform. I favor public financing of campaigns as a cure all. But there's so many other things which would help. Restore fairness doctrine, limit campaigning and fund raising to a small window before elections, any and all contributions are public records (no more shadow money), etc.
Fair redistricting? Who gets to define "fair"? Unless we just lay down a grid and subdivide quadrants by population, there will always be stark differences over what constitutes "fair redistricting".
Campaign finance reform, as commonly understood as you describe, is anathema to the fundamental right of free speech. Any attempts to regulate, limit, and document facilitation of free speech will be subverted. Better to go the other way, ensuring nothing and nobody actively hinders anyone's political speech: small players aren't stymied by high costs of compliance, loophole tunneling, or short-run big-cost campaigns. And again, what constitutes "fairness" in the badly-termed "fairness doctrine"? a lofty-sounding regulation, it empowers someone biased to decide how much of which view is promoted by what outlet - to wit, telling speakers what they can say when. "Freedom of the press" is a fundamental principle: you may buy a printing press (however broadly defined) and you may use it to facilitate whatever speech you choose at whatever cost you can raise money to fund it with; don't subvert that, or we'll have to repeat what enumerated that right in the first place.
Who's competing? Who decides what's competitive? How can you assure no bias by those on whom there is tremendous pressure for bias?
Speaking to more than a dozen people at a time costs money. If you're going to try to persuade 50,000,000 people to vote for you (about how many voters needed to win a US presidential vote), that's going to cost a LOT of money. If your message is a tough sell, it will take even more money to sell it.
Your example proves my point. Precisely because regulations exist to limit political speech, those seeking to fund more speech than allowed have to launder campaign money thru Super PACs et al; those who hit the regulatory limits on political speech but don't have the huge sums available for such "laundering" are stuck. The more you try to tighten limits on political speech, the greater the cost to bypass those limits - and the greater the rewards to those who do, seeing their competition impeded by regulation. And those limits WILL be bypassed, as there will ALWAYS be some way, given enough money, to bypass them.
Libertarians are primarily for less governance, removing barricades erected where there is no need for them in the first place. There is no need for regulatory accountability in political speech if the regulations exist for oppressive purposes: restore liberty by removing the regulations, and there is nothing to account for. No need to make barriers open, transparent, and accountable if you remove the barriers entirely.
Sure, you have to use your real name when petitioning the government. When citizens speak to other citizens, it's not the government's business.
It's a three way cage match between the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. No holds barred. We all decide by TXTing to vote while watching the pay per view live telecast.
Serious question. Take a contentious branch like the "tea party": much of the political spectrum view them as marginal nutcases with no chance of winning and a dangerous threat if they do ... but win they do, and those "deciding who's competitive" may be motivated to see to it they can't.
Voting and election reforms must be partisan neutral. To better serve the voters, vs serve the parties.
Currently, districting carves out safe seats. Part of the horse trading that goes on. Serves the existing parties, but not the voters.
Competitive in Wyoming means taking the partisan index for the state and dividing it down the middle (per Durverger's Law). The most "liberal" elected in Wyoming is probably far more conservative than the "conservatives" in California. Which is okay. The people deserve representatives that reflect their values.
The point of fair redistricting is to ensure that all of these campaigns, no matter where, are competitive.
Right now, the only serious challenge to many candidates, both Ds and Rs, come during the primaries, which are low voter turnout elections. So the candidates have become ever more extreme.
I have no problem with any extremist position, eg Tea Party, so long as it reflects the will of the people. The People should get the government they deserve.
Maximal competitiveness in FPTP elections inherently means maximizing the proportion of citizens that are maximally dissatisfied with the representative of their district, by maximizing the proportion of the population who are represented by a member of their least-favored major party.
Which illustrates the "there are no good districting methods in FPTP" issue, and why focussing on how you draw FPTP district lines is a waste of time.
Maximal competitiveness means making elections closer, outcomes more uncertain. Every election race should be a knife fight. (A side effect of this will be to boost voter turnout, increasing the legitimacy of the elections.)
My views are informed/inspired by the lessons learned BC's Citizens Assembly on Election Reform's efforts.
I've been following your other comments re FPTP vs proportional. Good stuff. While I support proportional representation for assemblies (eg council, House), it conflicts with my support for direct democracy, which I haven't fully reconciled yet. I'm sure you understand.
> Maximal competitiveness means making elections closer, outcomes more uncertain.
Yes, it does.
That also means, in FPTP, maximizing dissatisfaction with the outcome.
> Every election race should be a knife fight.
I disagree. Every election should produce effective representation of the electors; FPTP elections -- metaphorical "knife fights" or otherwise -- do not do that, and engineering them for maximal competitiveness invokes one failure mode (maximal general election dissatisfaction) in order to minimize another (the failure mode wherein the general election is non-competitive, so the real choice is made in the process which selects candidates for the general election.)
> While I support proportional representation for assemblies (eg council, House), it conflicts with my support for direct democracy, which I haven't fully reconciled yet.
Direct democracy is proportional representation taken to one extreme. I don't see why supporting PR for what representative offices exists should conflict with a preference for direct democracy.
My first concern is about precincts which straddle demographic voting boundaries. If you'll look at fine-grain voter maps, you'll see a bright line delineating urban vs rural voters, with the urban voting dominantly Leftist (they're not liberal by any means) and rural voting conservative; by drawing that boundary to include about 45% rural and 55% urban, you can "maximize competitiveness" in a way that assures the outcome will be almost always Leftist, while subjecting the dissenters to that outcome. Heck, make it 50/50, knowing that redistricting is rare and urban populations grow, and the distribution is allegedly fair and competitive...but with an assured political result.
> Even George Washington saw political parties as a great threat to the nation.
It's important to note that, while the Farewell Address is all too often cited as a warning against the future emergence of parties or party-like factions in some general sense, it is, in fact, Washington's view of the threats from the then-present two-party system, which began forming almost immediately after the Constitution went into effect, and crystalized around the end of Washington's first term.
> I'm not exactly sure, but the list includes term limits
Term limits do nothing to reduce the power of factions; indeed, by limiting the individual influence of politicians acheived through long tenure in position, they increase the power of organized factions that are not directly accountable and which provide support for politicians between offices, and offer new cookie cutter candidates for offices.
> changing gerrymandering
Gerrymandering is a distraction; while its one failure mode of single-member districts with FPTP elections, its not the problem, just a symptom. Single-member districts with FPTP elections is the problem.
> reducing the influence of money in politics
Economic power is inherently the ability to get people to do what you want, and money is simply a symptom of economic power. Its arguable whether economic power and political power are even meaningfully different concepts.
You may want to consider whether the root problem is really the influence of money on politics, or the degree of economic inequality in the society.
> making politics less of a "contact sport" than its being presented as by the media
I believe that cable news broadcasts, where many Americans get their version of the news, do a poor job of informing the populous.
Instead, these broadcasts provide politically-slanted editorialized coverage of issues that may do well in ratings, but likely do little to advance the awareness of Americans about what's actually happening in their world. News agencies are afforded capabilities and access to the nation's political leadership that other Americans do not have, but I feel they're mis-using these rights in-exchange for ratings - what ultimately sells commercials. I don't watch cable news anymore - but when I did, it was full of guests talking over one-another, interrupting one-another, or waiting for the other person to stop so they could ignore whatever the other person had said so they could get their speaking points across. All the while, the host is cutting everyone short in order to say their 24-hour news network is just about out of time. And somehow a 6 minute segment split between two guests yelling at each-other, jammed between a commercial for a pill designed to make your penis harder, and a commercial telling us how much a too-big-to-fail bank cares about the families of this nation, is supposed to leave us with an informed nation capable of understanding why they're voting for the politician they're voting for next time they step into a voting booth.
I wish the news was less editorialized, and more factual ... but it's essentially been divided into two versions of the facts, and you choose which channel you want to watch for the version you'd like to receive. I realize there's other outlets to receive news - and I personally believe those hold the most hope for the future.
they increase the power of organized factions that are not directly accountable and which provide support for politicians between offices
That's one factor, sure, but you have to consider that tenured politicians are both a force in their political seat as well as a force in the "organized factions", so they magnify the power of those factions and reduce the need for those factions to expend effort. Once a faction owns a candidate, the candidate helps them maintain power so the faction can gather more candidates with less marginal cost.
At least with term limits, there are chances for citizen legislators to attain office. Organized factions have to expend much more effort to keep their candidates elected and in check.
Besides, term limits are just one problem. Dealing with the organized factions is another one.
Many of the founding fathers feared such things. That's why they attempted to design a government that avoided centralized power. Granted, there were many of the founders that liked the idea of centralized power, it was sometimes a bitter dispute.
In the end, many of their intentions have been ignored or corrupted, even demonized, and many of their decisions have been reversed over the years. It's a matter of debate over whether these changes from the original vision made things better or worse.
One problem is that they had a number of interlocking visions for a civil society, many of which have also not been realized. So then it's less clear what they would do in response.
For example, Jefferson's set of ideals was roughly:
- Decentralized government, so people can rule themselves at a local level.
- Universal literacy and civic knowledge, through free public education, so a civil society would exist and have the knowledge to govern itself wisely.
- Relatively good economic equality, as it was envisioned as primarily a nation of independent individuals who own their own tools and/or land, trading with each other of their own free will: yeoman farmers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, etc. (excluding slaves, it must be said...).
It's not clear what his alternative proposal would be if those conditions didn't all hold. For example on #3, Jefferson viewed the social tensions produced by industrialization in Britain with alarm, but thought the U.S., with its large amount of free land and different culture, could avoid them just by just avoiding centralizing, factory-based industrialization. Instead he hoped machines would be introduced in a more decentralized manner, with farmers and tradesmen owning a few machines here and there, as was the case with the printing presses. That would avoid the problem of poor masses of urban workers and be consistent with the ideal of decentralized free men governing themselves. But of course, he was wrong on that, and the U.S. got mass industrialization anyway, just a bit later than Britain.
"Avoiding centralized power" is a bit too simplistic. The Constitution was the result of people realizing the Articles of Confederation had too little central power in many ways.
I'd say that "checks and balances" were more important to them than the inability for the government to do things in the first place. Unfortunately, the forces described in the OP have compromised many congressional districts to the point where they have to be unthinking, uncompromising ideologues in order to stay in office.
The Constitution was the result of people realizing the Articles of Confederation had too little central power in many ways.
Yeah, because the Articles had the central government at about a 0.4 out of 10 (on the North Korea == 10 scale) and they begrudgingly turned the dial up to about a 1 with the Constitution. They were shooting for the least amount of central government possible that could still maintain a defense from outside aggressors and settle inter-state disputes.
Through inevitable power expansion, it's now at about a 6.
While I agree with the article that the disappearance of the party boss system is a factor, I view the current gridlock as being a voter battle between those who would really like government to be at a 4 vs those who would just love to live in a country that had a government at 8.
So your contention is that compared to 1789, we've moved more than halfway (1->6->10) to where North Korea is?
And that ~45% of the country wants to be more like North Korea?
At 8/10, does that still leave room for private toilet paper manufacture, or are we drawing the line at private lemonade stands? Where do the slave labor camps come in, is that at 7.5 or closer to 9?
Naturally, my 1-10 scale is loose and collapses a number of dimensions into 1... but yeah, I'd say that the government and particularly the federal government is in our everyday lives in bizarre and unnecessary ways. At very least, you could look at government spending over just the last 100 years to see that it's at least 4 times bigger. Add in an extra factor for regulatory burdens and yeah, 6 is about right. The Federal government is a catastrophe and the real shame is that it didn't start out that way.
And that ~45% of the country wants to be more like North Korea?
Unwittingly, yes. They think of it in terms of safety nets, equality of outcomes, security, enforced politeness or political correctness, and government coerced egalitarianism... but to have those things they require strengthened centralized control of the population.
Where do the slave labor camps come in, is that at 7.5 or closer to 9?
You joke, but the recent jackbooted thuggery of the Federal government to shut down parks that have never been a part of any government shutdown (and even some that are privately funded) shows that the Feds are bullies who are high on their power. It demonstrated how vindictive and untouchable they can be when the media helps them. It demonstrated more than ever why we shouldn't allow them to control healthcare more than they already do.
"They think of it in terms of safety nets, equality of outcomes, security, enforced politeness or political correctness, and government coerced egalitarianism..."
Nobody thinks of anything in those terms aside from dreadlocked college communists. Stop listening to talk radio -- we're right here, all around you in this country, you can ask any Obama voter (outnumbering Romney voters) what they think instead of taking Glenn Beck's word for it.
Funny, I listen to NPR and hear those subjects mentioned in those contexts all the time. If the average Obama voter doesn't believe in those things then they voted for the wrong candidate.
How about a supreme court challenge to the mutual exclusivity of political parties? Why can't I be both a democrat and a republican? Once you strip out the collected factions and go to the pure ideas behind each party, they are actually compatible. The problem I see is without a constitutional amendment level changes, more than two parties (or no parties at all) just ends in congress picking the president or odd balls getting elected because their ideology is behind a single candidate and the other ideologies, though more popular, are divided between many. This way there are still two major parties but a candidate must get support from the lesser parties to succeed. Say I'm republican and green. Then during the primary I might vote for the republican that was recommended by the green party over other republican primary challengers. In other words, take those extreme single issue factions and roll them in to separate third parties that are not strong enough to field candidates themselves but strong enough to influence elections.
Party primaries were the answer to closed party candidate selection methods. Those smoke filled rooms. It was considered in the public interest to increase participation. Which is why govts now pay to administer those elections.
This way there are still two major parties but a candidate must get support from the lesser parties to succeed.
"Electoral fusion is an arrangement where two or more political parties on a ballot list the same candidate, pooling the votes for that candidate."
> What's the solution? I'm not exactly sure, but the list includes term limits
Sounds like a good solution to me.
With term limits, you restrict the benefits of lobbying, reduce corruption, and bring a new vitality to the political process.
I can't even think of a single downside. What benefit could there be in keeping a politician in place for decades? Certainly they will learn how to be a better politician, but how does that benefit the populace?
One downside to term limits is that it essentially guarantees more of the revolving-door style of politics. In other words, people would move back and forth from the public to the private-sector ... promoting political agendas beneficial to specific private-sector companies or industries while in-office, eventually to be rewarded with a high-paying job by the very companies or industries they benefitted while in office once their political term ends.
Man this guy is verbose. Here's what he was getting at:
--
From where I sit, there was a massive shift in the 1970s in how the American political system operates. [..] Political bosses controlled the selection of state convention delegates, and therefore the bosses controlled the delegates to the national convention [..] The reformers wanted to break the hold of the party bosses over the system and open it to dissent, something party bosses disliked. [..] This severely limited the power of state and county chairmen, who could no longer handpick candidates.
Money, not the bosses' power, became the center of gravity of the political system, and those who could raise money became the power brokers. More important, those who were willing to donate became candidates' main constituency. [..] Money has always been central to American politics. [..] But with the decline of political bosses, factors other than money were eliminated.
A candidate in either party [..] needs the votes of the majority of voters who will show up. In the past model, voters showed up because, say, they got their job on the highway crew from the county boss, and they had to appear at the polls if they wanted to keep it. [..] Now, people show up because of their passionate belief in a particular ideology, and money is spent convincing them that a candidate shares their passionate commitment.
But it is the senators and particularly the congressmen -- who run in districts where perhaps 20 percent of eligible voters vote in primaries, most of them ideologues -- who are forced away from principle and toward ideology. [..] I would argue that the problem is that the current system magnifies the importance of the ideologues such that current political outcomes increasingly do not reflect the public will, and that this is happening at an accelerated pace.
Maybe if you're deeply familiar with the US political system, I'm not, but still interested all the same, and so liked the "explain it to me like I'm a five year old" verbosity.
One solution never considered in the USA for some reason is what most other Western democracies do, which is public funding for candidates, and limits. Candidates may spend no more than X on their campaigns under penalty of serving penal time. In the UK it was about the equivalent of about $10,000 last time I looked a while back. Accounting must be done. This limits the role of money. The parties can raise their own extra money but only for national-scale media advertising.
However, there are conditions in the US that conspire against this: the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 1st amendment being one of them (e.g. corporations are people); the size of the US and its federal structure being another.
Yet I agree with the author: there is a hack to make the system more representative without breaking it much more. We just have to find one and somehow get it implemented!
"Corporations are people" has nothing to do with campaign spending limits being unconstitutional. Congress can and does legally limit donations from anyone (people, corporations, whatever) to politicians. It can't ban any communication mentioning a candidate for federal office without permission, which is what the McCain–Feingold Act attempted to do.
The Constitution says "shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" and doesn't say it's a particular right of individuals, just a blanket ban on legislation on the topic. Protecting the freedom of the press as an exclusively individual right doesn't even make sense.
To expand on this point, the laws they are attempting to pass and have passed have all been about protecting incumbents. The best way to view many laws out of Washington is to read them as doing the opposite of what their stated purpose is.
I believe you entirely miss the point of that decision. IT was nothing to do with the freedom of the press: it's still free whether corporations are "people" or not in law. What changed was the ability of non-press organisations to use money as a proxy for speech to buy up "freedom of speech" through expensive media campaigns. This is the problem of gross inequality that this decision made.
Good point ... and which is why the BBC exists, and why Italian politics (all big media owned by Berlusconi) is generally worse than other Western democracies in transparency. Germany, France, Scandinavian countries all have state broadcasters which at least attempt some kind of balance, even if with a hegemonic (incumbent) slant. And the private sector still has a health left wing media, which is more cultural.
> In the 20th century, the boss system selected such presidents as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. I was struck at how a self-evidently corrupt and undemocratic system would have selected such impressive candidates (albeit along with Warren Harding and other less impressive ones).
That's very curious. My guess is that the boss system and the petty ambitions that fuel it is easier to game for those with real ambition. I don't think FDR would have been able to do what he did in today's political climate. The best we can hope for is Obama.
If you are appalled by abuses of government power under Bush / Obama then Theodore Roosevelt's record will terrify you. Woodrow Wilson was very friendly and supportive of the Ku Klux Klan and rumored to have been a member. These men should have never been near the Presidency. Much of the problems we face with an over-powered President started with them.
Party bosses are no better pickers of candidates and their influence continues to be a true pain for this country.
I find it hard to get suitably appalled by any amount of power abuse in the USA knowing that at it's very worst it's still not Soviet Russia and the ongoing, depressing culture of corruption its created. Not saying we shouldn't fight it, but power abuse is inevitable so long as we have human beings running things.
I'm reading "Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss", and I'm almost underwhelmed. Bulger managed to capture the Boston FBI and had informants in all the other police services and a brother in the state legislature and all it was good for was a handful of murders and control of some very profitable local rackets. That seems like small peanuts compared to the developing world and even much of the developed world. Someone with Whitey's skillset could have become the richest man in a very large number of countries and wound up running the whole country.
Theodore Roosevelt was made VP because a certain NY senator couldn't stand his political stance and wanted to make him irrelevant. Party boss Mark Hanna wasn't against his selection as VP but TR's overwhelming popularity due to his military actions in Cuba prevented him from inhibiting Roosevelt's momentum at the Republican convention.
"Don't any of you realize that there's only one life between that madman and the Presidency?"
Prophetic. Less than a year after the election, McKinley was killed by an anarchist and Roosevelt ascended to the presidency.
Hanna considered challenging him in the 1904 election (he really hated Roosevelt) but failing health prevented him from doing so—he died of typhoid fever before the campaign was under way, much to the disappointment of business interests (especially J.P. Morgan) who were fearful of Roosevelt's anti-trust tendencies. Morgan supported Hanna partially as retribution for Roosevelt's targeting of his rail combination.
Personally I think there are two things that could be done to limit the influence of overly vocal minorities of any ilk; be it business, ideologues, etc.
1) Proportional representation -
Each district should be bigger and elect a number of representatives, in a similar fashion to the senate but based on equal divisions of the population. This will also have the effect of breaking the two party system.
2) Capped government provided funding for campaigning -
This should limit the effect of money on the ability to disseminate the candidates platform for election, and steer the issues more towards their merit than audio volume.
Yep, let's shut down any minority that chooses to speak out against the status quo. That never causes problems.
1. How is this any different than what we have now? How does this break the two-party system since the Senate you hold up as the example engages in the two-party system just as much as the House? Why is the House the sole problem and no other branches of government are involved in the problems?
2. Government provided funds is not the problem with campaign funds. This would likely increase the amount of money from the private sector which is often the problem. Obama took the ultimate cap on government funds in his first election, he refused all of it. He won handily with a rather large war chest.
>> But in the country our founders bequeathed us, it was expected that most people would concern themselves with private things.
Good to see someone acknowledge that what many look at as unique American problems are there by design. If you see them as a problem, that's a totally valid view, but please, acknowledge that things like the ease of obstruction, difficulty of substantial, long-lasting, transformative chance, and the public disinterest in government are all by design. The founders considered them features, not bugs.
Overall, this is a fascinating look at how what originally was intended as breaking down corruption and opening up participation to the masses had some unintended consequences. I found the following paragraph particularly salient:
>> In the 20th century, the boss system selected such presidents as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. I was struck at how a self-evidently corrupt and undemocratic system would have selected such impressive candidates (albeit along with Warren Harding and other less impressive ones). The system should not have worked, but on the whole, it worked better than we might have imagined. I leave to others to judge how these compare to post-reform candidates like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
Kennedy and Roosevelt were the epitome of boss driven politicians, and while many argue over how effective they actually were, no one can argue that were not highly influential. I'm personally a fan of Coolidge as well. In the modern system, only Reagan and Clinton seem likely to be remembered by history as peers of the Presidents on the first list, and both of them are regarded as some of the most historically charismatic politicians of all time. Very interesting.
My "narrative fallacy" flags went off, as it's always convenient to look for a tidy explanation of complex events, although this post makes a good case that candidate selection changes are at least a very interesting factor that's generally overlooked. I wonder, though, if the common thread between the Presidents listed is that they all pretty much oversaw a century of growth in both government power and within that a growth in consolidated power under the executive branch, and I wonder how that effects the ideological interests of different groups who increasingly have more at stake (or at least think they have more at stake) in what the government does.
It's also interesting to compare, say, European countries which often have the appearance of similar levels of "big government," but they are generally done at smaller scales more equivalent to US states. The US may be more unique in trying to increasingly manage the interests of 300 million people through one centralized and increasingly powerful yet also democratic government. (then again, there may be holes in that tidy narrative as well...)
Good article but I think the issue has deeper roots stemming back to the formation of this country. It's all about the state vs federal issue. If you think about it, conservatives got exactly what they wanted with the shutdown. A small government with no ability to pay its social debts. They are going to keep doing this until there is civil war, again, or until states have all the power, again.
Wait, where was this small government with no ability to pay its social debts? Because I sure as heck didn't see that outcome. Just because a bunch of people on the TV kept talking about this supposed default doesn't mean the government wasn't willing and able to pay on the debt.
Your biased one-sided complaint completely sidesteps the issues at hand. The article that sparked this discussion quite correctly points out the problems that led us here when two sets, TWO mind you, of ideologies refuse to back down and compromise. You say conservatives got what they wanted with the shutdown? I say both groups got what they wanted out of this in their own way and we'll go through it all again in February.
You need to get out of this "us-vs-them" attitude and realize that two different people who strongly disagree with each other may still have a point on the topic at hand.
The only way the states will restore their former power is not through civil war, but through the total collapse of the federal government. Things have gone too far in terms of centralizing power for anything other than total failure to reverse the trend. It's just that no one knows when or if this would be.
Though he may not mean it this way, he has a point about federal power causing this inability to compromise. As a voter in Kentucky, if you get fed up with Kentucky politics, you can move to Oregon or Tennessee.
But when all laws are federal, the stakes are higher for everyone, so drastic measures will be taken.
That is an excellent point. You can still vote with your feet on the federal level, but unfortunately that involves leaving the country which in the end solves nothing.
This shutdown was not caused by lack of compromise. This was a hijacking of a run-of-the-mill spending bill to do an end-run around all accepted legal and legislative challenges to Obamacare championed by a miniscule fraction of fringe politicians. The spending bill is merely approving money for things that already passed, not a forum for legislative challenges. There were no negotiations or compromises to be had, and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out in the next election cycle.
We must have read from different sources, I saw both sides refusing to negotiate. I think there were even a few quotes along the lines of "I won't negotiate". It may be just me, but when someone says publicly that they do not wish to negotiate with the other side, I take that to mean they do not wish to negotiate regardless of what the proposals might be.
Funny that you said there were no negotiations or compromises to be had when in the end that what was done to get the thing passed. Everything in politics that requires voting by multiple parties involves negotiations. By your logic there was no reason to vote on the thing at all because there was nothing to discuss.
You don't have to wait until the next election cycle, all this did was kick the can down the road to early next year. We'll soon be back to the children in the playground playing "who blinks first".
The time for negotiation was before any of the legislation was passed, not at the moment of implementation. In fact, there really has been no compromise at all. The only "compromise" the Republican caucus was able to extract was more stringent income verification of those people who requested financial assistance paying for health insurance. Considering Cruz and co. wanted complete dissolution or delay of the ACA, I would say that this whole display was a complete and utter disaster. The vast majority of his (Ted Cruz's) own party was not behind him. This was simply political posturing for his own presidential aspirations.
You are correct that we are simply kicking the can down the road, but this sideshow was not the way to handle it. Holding the "non-essential" employees of the federal government ransom is ridiculous on its face. What did they expect the outcome was going to be? That Barack Obama would accept a "compromise" that would neuter his landmark piece of legislation? His magnum opus? Please. This is 110% politics.
Ah, so the only time to discuss a law is when it's a bill before it is passed into a law. That's interesting because I'm quite certain that is in no way how it works. Changes in laws are negotiated all the time. Sometimes willingly by Congress, sometimes forced to by the Supreme Court, and sometimes because the law itself was written to cause the occasional discussion about its own future. Sometimes a law is so badly written it just needs someone to stand up and say it is a bad law. There will be people will attack/defend the law to the last day simply because they have a vested interest in doing so. That's politics.
But having the childish attitude of "its the law of the land" only works for one side as long as we're talking about a law they support. As soon as the opposition pulls the same stunt then all of a sudden that's not a proper defense of discussing problems with a law.
Now, to be clear, I did not support the stunt performed in the Senate. I understood the intention behind it but it was a lost cause before it even started. For one, no matter what happened the Republicans would get the blame for the shutdown because that's always the outcome. The other reason being that the ACA was going forward despite what they would do. Notice how when the shutdown happened federal websites went down almost across the board? Notice how the ACA website was still up and running? Or it attempted to at least. Notice how they were arguing over funding the thing but it moved forward regardless? Interesting how they had to shut down parks that cost them next to nothing to run but could keep working on the ACA website that cost much more. That stunt in the Senate was a waste of time simply because it was going to go forward despite anything the Republicans did. The administration has already ignored rules, regulations, and laws in attempts to get it going, did anyone think that stupid stunt would somehow magically stop it?
As for the President's "I won't negotiate" while accusing the other side of not negotiating, which you seem to support this silly notion, was a mistake. Because one day the Republicans may gain control of the three branches of the government and make a "law of the land" that completely removes the ACA from the books. Will they be able to do so and the Democrats just sit idly by to do nothing? After all, when the Democrats have majority they behave as if the minority should sit down and shut up. "We won", "we have the majority". Those things work both ways. When the Democrats are the minority again, will they advise their members to do what they demanded of the previous minority? I don't expect them to and, in a way, hope that they don't. Regardless, we all know they will take that hypocritical stance. That is 110% politics.
It's not clear to me that conservatives want strong state power in general. A small number of hardline libertarians do, but mainstream conservatives have much more mixed views. The mainstream view wants stronger state control of some things, but strong federal control of other things. Which way it aligns often has more to do with other policy preferences of liberals and conservatives, rather than any consistent view of states' rights on either side.
To take one issue on which the conservative/liberal alignment on that question is reversed: conservatives tend to oppose state control over regulation and product liability, and have been strong proponents of uniform federal regulations, which through the doctrine of federal preemption displace state regulations.
The reason is that they consider it impractical to have to comply with 50 mutually incompatible auto-safety laws, since cars are not built separately on a state-by-state basis. Instead, they have lobbied (successfully) for the federal government to "occupy the field" with a comprehensive set of automobile safety and emissions regulations, which, through the Supremacy Clause, preempt any state regulation. This has generally been the "conservative" view in both legislation and jurisprudence: conservative federal legislators have been more willing to explicitly preempt state economic and environmental regulation, and conservative judges have been more willing to apply the preemption doctrine broadly. The "liberal" view, meanwhile, has tended to be more in favor of preserving the prerogative of each state to regulate sales, pollution, and product liability within its borders.
National security is another one where the alignment is typically the opposite. Many liberals would support a return, at least partially, to the classic decentralized view of armed forces: each state maintains a national guard to be used in case of invasion, and the federal government provides basic coordinating and informational services, but doesn't maintain a large standing army in peacetime. Conservatives generally oppose any significant reduction in the size of the federal armed forces.
It's not clear to me that conservatives want strong state power in general.
Conservatives don't in general, only for some minor social issues like abortion. But Republicans generally do. There is no classically conservative party in American politics now. Hasn't been since the Bush administration's response to 9/11. Both major parties now stand for expanding state power as much as they possibly can.
edit: child comment is correct, I misread "state" as any government. As for actual states, my perception is that neither party cares about state power vs federal power. Republicans occasionally make noise about it, but only because they're not in power federally at the moment. The next time the presidency goes Republican, the GOP will be fully on the federal side.
I think you might be misreading. "State" here means a U.S. state, like Alabama or Ohio, and "state power" means the power of these states relative to the power of the federal government. Perhaps "states' rights" would be a clearer term, but it has some baggage.
I think that is also a very good point. Nobody wants to take America over, they just want to divide and make us weak. This goal is being facilitated by the political and financial elite for some diabolical end which is very likely to be mass secession. Long live confederate America!
>> the American people did not care nearly as much about politics as the reformers thought they ought to
This is something that the politically active simply cannot grasp. Most Americans really do not care at all about politics unless it is currently impacting their life. They can talk all they want about how important it is, but most Americans have jobs, kids, a mortgage, friends, and sports teams to pay attention to, all of which are more urgent concerns than what goes on in politics, especially given that we only get a chance to participate so sparingly.
>> Citizens frequently don't know or care who their congressman is, let alone who their state senator is.
I know who my hometown congresswoman is, mainly because he is well known in the community. Same with my hometown state senator, who is a family friend. I have no idea who any of those people are for the 3 other Congressional districts I have lived in, except knowing that Henry Waxman was my representative in college, since he was an alum.
I don't know that the conclusion that pre-reform candidates were more moderate and/or effective is as self-evident as he seems to believe. It's hard to brush off the fact that our opinions of them are not only colored through the lens of history books, but also through a vastly different culture.
In addition to the distortion of perception through second-hand accounts versus perception through actively participating in the modern scene, I'd argue that no small part of the perception of modern presidents is affected by the proliferation of media sources and the formation of specialized media outlets with a particular ideological audience that didn't exist as widely in the past.
I have repeated it numerous times to a variety of people across the political spectrum -- cooperation is not capitulation. Few people (especially elected representatives) realize this.
Our elected representatives are supposed to be pragmatists, and what does a pragmatist do when faced with a difficult problem? Compromise. Instead we're left with ideologues that shout from the highest mountaintops about "bipartisanship" however it's just bluster and posturing.
With respect, I wonder if pragmatists are really what we want. A pragmatist is someone who, as you say, seeks to compromise on principles in order to achieve some outcome. I want politicians who will refuse to compromise on principles, and I want those principles to be about protecting the rights of the individual.
Just my two cents. Thanks for an interesting comment.
> I want those principles to be about protecting the rights of the individual.
Seems like a concept that most Americans can get behind, but the rubber doesn't meet the road until you ask which rights of which individuals need protecting.
Is abortion law about the rights of the mother or the rights of the fetus? Is campaign finance law about the rights of the rich person or the poor person? Is business regulation about the rights of the employer or the employee? Etc.
Different people will answer these questions in different ways, so if everyone just sticks to their principles, nothing will ever change or get done.
I think it depends on the issue. When it comes to something like abortion or the death penalty I would rather see a politician hold their ground and never compromise on it. If it is about spending some money on health insurance then it should be compromised on.
I wonder even about the seemingly simple case you mention, that of spending some money on health insurance.
In this case, it seems like the principle has already been compromised, and now the two parties are simply haggling over the price, so to speak. The principle that I think has been compromised is whether the government should take by force from some individuals in order to give an unearned benefit to some others.
Good article. Why does he conclude with "I have no idea what I could do to help change matters" after writing a whole blog post about how not enough average people vote in primaries?
Go vote in primaries, get your friends to go vote in primaries and maybe even reach out to particularly ideological districts to make sure the moderates there go vote (this might be a good idea for a web app 'Passionate centrist - email a centrist encourage them to vote').
Because the point of the article is that we have a system in which ideologues vote. In order to get average people to vote, either the system has to change to reward non-ideologues for voting (e.g., previous system with party bosses) or people have to become ideologues. He rightly concludes that these are both unlikely and he doesn't have another answer.
Why didn't the author didn't just suggest mandatory voting? It seems like he was building up to it but never got there. Not like it's politically feasible to implement, but it appears to be a solution to wash out ideological extremes all the same.
Isn't Australia a good counterexample? Going by their struggle to keep their government's hands off the Internet, they seem to have as many loons in government as we do, if not more.
