Reply to Rauch, Part III

I seem to be making a (small) cottage industry replying here and here to Jonathan Rauch’s arguments in his freebie book Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy, which casts a longing backwards look at the good old days on Capitol Hill, when House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s words of political wisdom, “If you want to get along, go along,” actually meant something.¹ In an interview with Reasonette Nick Gillespie about the book, Rauch “explained” why neither liberals nor libertarians get it.

“One of the things that a lot of libertarians and progressives share is looking with utter contempt and disdain on appropriations committees. Liberals think they’re closed, they’re smoke-filled rooms. Libertarians think these are logrollers, this is pork at its worst. In fact, what appropriations committees did was fairly quiet meetings of grownups to apportion the budget, not perfectly, but they were actually a force for restraint. And when we blew them away and substituted entitlements, or chaos, which is what we’ve got now, we lost a lot of the control that we used to have over where the money went. And that’s a challenge to people who think smoke-filled rooms are always the wrong answer.”

Appropriations committees did “work” back in the day, but not just because they were “fairly quiet meetings of grownups”. From about 1940 through 1972, the U.S. enjoyed constant economic growth. It’s pretty easy to split up a pie when it gets bigger every year. Contrary to Rauch’s statement, there were entitlements back in the day, first Social Security, which dated back to the thirties, and then Medicare, in 1965. But they were managable, because there were tens of millions of young people paying in, and not so many old folks drawing out. Back in those ancient times, a lot of people didn’t even make it to 65, and, even if they did, they didn’t collect for more than few years before cashing out.

The U.S. economy stopped growing in 1973, but federal revenues continued to increase, as the Baby Boomers, the largest “cohorts” in American history, piled into the job market. The size of the labor force was further increased by the feminist movement, which added millions of women. Furthermore, inflation pushed millions of taxpayers into higher tax brackets, which meant that Congress could hand out tax “cuts” every year and still see revenues increase.

Well, pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. After some 30 years of “no brainer” fiscal policy, Americans politicians made the transition from pigs to hogs. In 1972, congressional Democrats and President Nixon got into a bidding war for old folks votes that resulted in a 20% bump in Social Security benefits, which were also indexed for inflation. By the late seventies, both inflation and unemployment were high, and “fairly quiet meetings of grownups” weren’t working any more. The slices were getting bigger, but the pie was getting smaller. Splitting the difference no longer worked, because there wasn’t any difference to split.

It was once angry young man David Stockman, then a (disgusted) congressman, who decided that the existing process was “corrupt” and had to be changed, and it was the massive Republican victory in 1980 that set the stage for a fiscal “revolution,” shutting down those “fairly quiet meetings of grownups”. Stockman worked with Reagan and others to craft a means of rolling all the government’s discretionary spennding into one big ball and passing it (or “ramming it”) through Congress with little or no compromise. The decline of inflation, along with cheap oil, made life a lot easier for everyone by the late eighties, but Park Avenue Republican Peggy Noonan inadvertantly threw a monkey wrench into the works when she wrote a line for then Vice President George Bush–“Read my lips. No new taxes”–which came back to haunt poor George after he won election as president and ended up having fairly quiet meetings with the Democratic leadership in Congress.

Conservative outrage over that deal led to the “no compromise” fetish and demonization of “corrupt” Democrats (and RINOs) that has proved to be a consistent vote-getter and fund-raiser for the Right ever since. It was Newt Gingrich who invented the idea of holding the government hostage as a means of achieving policy changes without having to go through the tedious and self-defeating deal-cutting process that is necessary when passing legislation the old-fashioned way, accommodating the whims and egos of committee and subcommittte chairs, majority and minority leaders, and even the president himself.

Why has the obession with “no compromise,” with “corruption”, and often “treason” become so wide-spread and persistent on the Right? I have no good answer. The social liberalism on the left, which has now pretty much exhausted itself, because there’s no one left to feel sorry for, is one possibility, but I feel reluctant to attribute such long-lasting passion to “cultural issues.” The unrelenting Clinton hatred among the Right, at a time when the U.S. was enjoying both peace and prosperity, remains a puzzle to me. But its roots lie deep in the American psyche, and have nothing to do with a shortage of “fairly quiet meetings of grownups”.