Does one-party government make America nearly ungovernable?

Great Debates
1

Again Jonathan Rauch pens a thought-provoking piece.

If you don’t want to read it (though why wouldn’t you? Rauch is pure pleasure to read) his thesis is this. The Republican and Democratic parties have changed since the 1960s from broad coalitions embracing a number of different ideologies into distinct groups who have very little in common ideologically. The result is that the ideological center of each party is far removed from the ideological center of the country. Under one-party government, the president has to lead from the center of his party, which alienates about two thirds of the country. The opposition party has very little to gain by compromising, since the credit for the result, if positive, will go to the party that dominates government. When the minority party dominates at least one branch of government, there is a greater incentive for compromise. Rauch argues that Reagan, Clinton and Bush II (from 2001 to 2002) all fared best with divided government, and thinks that Obama’s ability to govern from the center of the country and forge forward will be improved if the Republicans take back at least one house this November.

I have some trouble with Rauch’s attribution of Bush’s collapse in popularity to the one-party government that came on in 2003. The Republicans did pass another tax cut that year, and they did manage to stay the course in Iraq, and Bush did beat Kerry with a clear, if narrow, majority. I would say that Hurricane Katrina, and the perception of incompetence and cronyism in the response to it, was what did for Bush’s popularity, not one-party Republican government. But in every other way, Rauch’s description of the dynamics of one-party government versus divided government looks spot on.

As to Rauch saying that the country will be more governable and Obama more successful if the Republicans take back one or both houses in November, my answer is “yes, IF.” Right now, the Republicans are dominated by their most extreme elements, which was their predictable response to the defeat of John McCain, who was seen as one of the Republicans’ most moderate leaders. If 2010 brings in a crop of Palinite Republicans, it won’t do a thing for Obama or the country. The GOP will (rightly) say that its hard-line, no-compromise strategy has been a brilliant electoral success, and will go right on doing the same thing in the hope that it will bring them the White House in 2012. On the other hand, in 2006 it was not extreme Democrats who profited most from the anti-Republican backlash, but the more moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats. If the same thing happens in November with the Republicans, with a crop of moderates giving the GOP its new majority in at least one house, then I could see a reasonable chance for deals to be struck on health care, deficit reduction, environmental policy, and our other major problems.

2

But, that’s not true. The effective ideological center of the GOP is, indeed, very far to the right of the ideological center of the country; but the effective ideological center of the Democratic Party is not very far to the left of the ideological center of the country at all, and, in fact, might even be to the right of it. Both parties are fundamentally dominated by the corporate interests, remember; and the past year has given us neither any reason to doubt that, nor (in light of the recent SCOTUS decision on campaign financing by corporations) reason to hope it will change.

3

I don’t buy it. Even under divided governments, what has been done about America’s big picture domestic problems - the economy, health care, trade, deficits, the environment, taxes, immigration, social security, education, or crime - since 1992? Not much. You could argue for NAFTA, Clinton’s crime bill, SCHIP, Bush tax cuts, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and maybe a handful of other bills as serious attempts to help solve big picture issues. Even the significance of some of those is questionable. Immigration reform failed. Social security reform failed. Health care reform failed once, and might fail again. Nothing serious has been done about air or water pollution or climate change.

Even the arguably major stuff that was passed required, in most cases, years if not decades to pass. And it often passed in unusual circumstances. NAFTA took 15 years to pass, and was ratified by one vote in the Senate. The implementation of NAFTA required so-called “fast tracking” to bypass amendments and filibusters.
Tax cuts were passed using reconciliation, permitting GWB to bypass any filibusters in the Senate. Medicare Part D took six years to pass, and passed by one vote in the Senate. To get it to pass the House, they held open voting all night, amid other unusual House procedures.

Rauch is certainly correct that America has become more polarized, and I would add tht information has become more fractured and filtered. There is no “public opinion.” Instead, there are two extremely polarized American publics, and when you combine their opinions, you get nonsense. Majorities of Americans want government to decrease unemployment, but want less government involvement in the market. The “public” wants government to regulate health insurance, but want doesn’t want government interference in health care. We the People want Wall Street to be more tightly regulated, but also want less government regulation of the economy. The electorate wants lower taxes, the same entitlements, and lower deficits. Republicans watch Fox News, and Democrats watch MSNBC or CNN, and two agree on very little. Independents are either informed and intelligent and therefore rare, or are independents because they don’t know their ass from the Medicare donut hole and they just vaguely dislike both parties.

And that’s just the media-filtered polarization-induced schizophrenia in the area general goal-setting. Add to that what has always been true: that on any actual legislation, or issue more complex than a tax cut or a social security benefit, the vast majority of the electorate hasn’t a clue. People are selfish, and rationally ignorant when it comes to politics. They care more about their cats than their neighbors, and they know far more about American Idol than they do about anything political. So you take what has always been true, an apathetic and uninformed electorate, and you remove any ability to mobilize and inform that electorate on a specific proposal because the polarization and filtering of information, and you get endless and worsening gridlock.

In my view, tt has little to do with having one-party rule, or where their centers are. That was true when the EPA was created, when Medicare was passed, and when Reagan altered the taxation landscape. It has everything to do with an inability to mobilize public opinion in a coherent way on any particular issue.

4

I know this is a debate but loved what you had to say on Raunch. I also say no to interfering with the parties to allow the government move bills through more freely. They are passing enough that are not ethical and legal. I was outraged at the handling of the bank bailouts and the fact that they got an atta boy and a bonus for ripping of home owners out of pure greed. You can’t do something like that and not piss off half of America. Rewarding bad behavior is so wrong on so many levels.

5

I don’t expect the present GOP to do anything with Obama, except inasmuch as Obama, being a weakling, would compromise everything he was elected for to pass “something”–something entirely drawn up by the Heritage Foundation. And of course even that is unlikely, as the GOP won’t take both houses at any point in Obama’s term.

So it would have to be some outside-the-box Republicans, newly minted, who were more willing to work with the Dems than to be ideologically pure. Considering that Arlen Specter gave up & left the party, how many budding politicians want to be called “RINO’s”?

Contrariwise, I think it’s time we became a three-party state after some fashion.

6

Can’t happen until we change the electoral system. (See electoral fusion, instant-runoff voting, and proportional representation. More at FairVote.)

7

The Democratic party is indeed closer to the center of the country than the Republican party is, but not close enough to prevent Obama from being torn in two between centrists terrified of “socialized medicine” (which means whatever the scaremongers want it to mean) and Democratic activists who regard anything short of a European-style single payer system to be a sellout to the corporate interests.

The Democrats to the right of the the country? Maybe on a few isolated issues, like protectionism; economic nationalism has a lot more footing with the guy in the street than with either of the parties. But the Democratic platform as a whole to the right of the country? Especially on big issues like health care and debt reduction? Nope.

No denying that corporate interests of various kinds have the ear of both parties, but corporate interests aren’t monolithic. They have irreconcilably different agendas. There are polluters that have a stake in stopping environmental reform, and environmental companies that stand to profit big time from it. Big companies sometimes support regulations that they expect to squeeze out their smaller competitors. Companies that get capital from foreign banks probably aren’t scared by Obama saying he’ll raise taxes on U.S. banks; companies dependent on U.S. capital probably are scared, and certainly the U.S. banks themselves are scared. Furthermore, corporate money doesn’t always buy what it wants: Bill Gates was a large Democratic contributor in the 1990s, but the Clinton administration dropped the antitrust bomb on him anyway. You can’t say that the Democrats are to the right of the country just because they pay attention to the interests of certain corporations.

8

Welfare reform too, which I would say was bigger than any of those.

OK, so the big important changes required a lot of maneuvering and shoehorning to get done. Rauch’s point is, the will to do the necessary maneuvering and shoehorning came in times of divided government. At least, that was true with Reagan’s tax reform, Medicare Part D, the crime bill, and welfare reform. NAFTA passed under unified Democratic control, I think. But that was a special case, because as I mentioned above, protectionism doesn’t have much hold in either party any more. (Obama’s raised tariffs on tires could be the start of a trend to make the Democrats protectionist again, but I doubt it; Bush’s steel tariffs were a blip on the radar screen too).

9

I spoke of “the effective ideological center of the Democratic Party,” not its platform. I’m looking at what the Dems in power actually do.

10

Well, what have Democrats actually done?

They’ve appointed Sotomayor, passed a multibillion dollar economic stimulus bill, upped the ante in Afghanistan, slapped a tariff on tires, drawn down troop levels in Iraq, and tried their poor best to pass a major health care reform. The only one of those that looks to me like it might be rightward of the American center is deploying more troops to Afghanistan.

They’ve also continued Bush’s bailouts. I’m not sure if we should classify that as right-wing; there are a bunch of right-wingers that are really unhappy about that. It certainly could be interpreted as placing corporate interests above popular opinion; the average Joe, left and right, really hates the bailouts. However, I don’t think the Democrats are doing it because they think it will win the banks over to their side, but because they think pumping government money into the banks will revive the economy, and if the economy revives, the electorate will forgive all.

11

Nor I.

The RINO label only matters if you’re campaigning for the GOP nomination in a state that is already GOP and your rival in the primaries is positioning himself to your right. The general electorate doesn’t care.

In the seats we’re concerned about, vulnerable Democratic seats that the Republicans might pick off, the RINO label won’t hurt the Republican candidate and might help him with the swing voters who are his only hope for victory.

12

IMHO, welfare reform was more about politics than policy. We were never spending very much on welfare.

I’m not sure you can call reconciliation or fast-track authority “maneuvering.” It is bypassing a big part of the problem, a moribund Senate.

That aside, there’s definitely a correlation between the “big” bills in the last three administrations and divided government, with a few exceptions for each administration. But even granting the correlation, is there a causal relationship? I’m not so sure. The chronological order seems significant too. With Clinton and Bush, they tried to pass big picture reforms and failed before attempting the bills that eventually passed. I’d be curious to see what it looks like when they start with divided government and move to unified government. (I guess the Senate was technically divided for a few months post-9/11, but that’s a special case.)

13

The Dems’ health-care reform package is to the right-of-the-public-center because it does not include a public option, which a majority of the people want. See here.

And, if so, they’re probably right on both points. But I think the public would have preferred an approach that did not allow the execs who messed everything up in the first place to keep their jobs, let alone profit from the bailouts.