Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie has a long interview with Brookings dude Jonathan Rauch, bearing the snappy title “The Case For Back-Room Deals, Party Hacks & Unlimited Money in Politics”, a thesis he spells out at greater length in his new book, bearing the somewhat less snappy title “Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy” available free, either as a PDF or an ebook. Well, I am always a sucker for stories about canny old pols in smoke-filled striking deals for the greater good, but Rauch’s paean to the good old days of log-rolling, pork barreling, and earmarking leaves me unconvinced. What worked then will work now because it worked then? Sorry, but I’m a “can’t step in the same river twice” kind of guy. What worked then won’t work now, because now is different than then.
Rauch spins it this way: “In order to organize politics, and for anything to work, you need political machines, or things that function like political machines. These are informal hierarchies that make politicians accountable to each other, because in our system politicians cannot reward and punish each other directly. It’s not like Britain where you can basically be fired if you vote against the party. So you have to create these networks where they incentivize each other, so that followers will follow leaders and that requires stuff like pork barrel spending and political machines. It requires some control of the ballot, so you can protect your people and they can take a tough vote. The problem is that if you’re an idealist, those kinds of machines and structures don’t look really good when you hold them up to the light and say is this perfect, is it beautiful? So we spent the last 40 years demolishing all of that equipment, and libertarians have been a big part of that.”
My take is that our current discontents spring not from changes in equipment but in circumstances. Post-WWII politics in the U.S. were shaped by two things: constant economic growth and the Cold War. If you grew up in the Fifties, as I did, not only could you get a Coke for a nickel, the U.S. conducted above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada; Washington, DC was ringed with anti-aircraft missile batteries; and, yes, air-raid drills were as much a part of the school day as chalk and erasers. The economy stuttered in the seventies, but Ronnie got things back on track and even, to perhaps everyone’s amazement but his own, won the Cold War for us! Peace! It was wonderful! But, you know, so boring!
It was Newt Gingrich who first realized that, with the Soviet Union in collapse, you could blow up DC without blowing up the country. When the Republicans won big in 1994, he came up with the brilliant idea of holding the government hostage as a way to force the Democrats to agree to substantive policy reforms. Gingrich was greatly aided in his efforts by the extraordinary loathing and contempt with which Republicans regarded Bill Clinton, never accepting him as president. There was, in fact, a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against Clinton, and Republicans ultimately used their control of Congress and the federal court system to impeach Clinton for cheating on his wife, even though he spent both of his terms conducting himself, as he himself put it, as an “Eisenhower Republican,” in order to please Alan Greenspan.
Bill Clinton, for his part, also realized that the rules had changed. You didn’t have to kiss the Washington Post’s ass to run the country any more. You could go on Arsenio or Oprah and toot your sax and the folks would love you. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the decline of the “Acela Media,” to which Rauch largely belongs, tended to cut against them. Right-wing radio, Fox news, and then the Internet gave voice to the angry and excluded, to the folks who were never invited to Katherine Graham’s parties. These voices were given political muscle by political pressure groups like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth, which put Republicans under enormous pressure to pursue confrontation as an end in itself.
The success of these groups was in part due to the collapse of the “moderate”–that is to say, “white-led”–Democratic Party in the South, due both to the end of the Cold War and the persistent leftward movement of the national Democratic Party on social issues. The old, “unnatural” alignment, with both parties possessing liberal and conservative wings, which had persisted since the Civil War, came to an end.
Rauch (remember him?) would have us believe that Congress can’t get anything done because earmarking is a no-no these days, but that isn’t true. “But what I worry about is every decade, once or twice in a decade, you get a chance to do a real reform. It should have been immigration reform. That Senate bill wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good and there was a majority of people in both chambers and both parties, and a president that wanted to get that done. It died because a minority of the Republican caucus would not be controlled by their own leadership, and the leadership had no ways to deal with that. That’s a big missed opportunity.”
But the immigration bill that Rauch is referring to, the “Gang of Eight” bill introduced in 2013, was the successor to three immigration bills introduced during the Bush Administration, the first of which was introduced in 2005, when Bush had majorities in both houses of Congress and was earmarking likc a motherfucker. Republicans have been blocking immigration reform because passing it would split the party in half, and Boehner et al. aren’t willing to do that, even to please Acela moderates like Rauch and myself.
Much of the ground that Rauch covers was covered, and covered more accurately, by fellow Brookings boys Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (not a freebie, unfortunately), who make the same argument I’ve made, that the Republican Party has become the “the worse the better” party. They feel no attachment to the existing system and want to wreck it, and they pursued this “ruin, then rule” agenda as aggressively during the Clinton era of peace and prosperity as they do today. Mann and Ornstein say that the solution is to take money out of politics, which I think is impossible, as I said in my reviews of their book. Rauch wants to put more money into the parties, figuring that that will give them the economic heft to protect members who vote the “right” way–that is to say, the Acela way. I don’t think that will work either.
