constitution

There has been a great deal of hair-tearing this morning in the media.  Why, some are asking, did the Democrats not save poor Kevin McCarthy yesterday?  Why did they not step in and do the “institutionally” correct thing and nail him out?  After all, institution this and institution that … 

Nonsense.  McCarthy is a hardline conservative who cares not a jot for a single policy that might overlap, even by a scintilla, anything the Democrats might also advocate.  McCarthy is a product of modern American Republican politics.  He is not a serious negotiator nor is he a reliable coalition partner.  When, in recent weeks, he has managed to work with Democrats — on keeping the government running — he has immediately vented in public about how awful those Democrats are and how hey are “ruining” America.  

Let’s get aside the childishness of the notion that keeping a modern government functioning is an active of brave policy — it surely is a minimal entry requirement of anyone seeking office as part of that government.  And let’s do away with the stupidity of bi-partisan dreamers who imagine a world where there exists some “center” in Congress capable of doing the political bidding of the majority of American voters.  No such center exists.  We will get to that shortly.

But, first, let’s just focus on the disconnection that dominates American politics.

There is a remarkable disconnect between the voice of the people and the distribution of power on Congress.  This is well known.  The American political system distributes power according to the dictates of a grand compromise reached over two hundred years ago between warring factions within the “founding” generation of the American elite.  No one in that elite can remotely be thought of as favoring democracy.  It was anathema to all of them.  The voice of the majority was dismissed as being one small step away from base mob rule.  It was to be avoided at all costs.  Hence the byzantine arrangement they foisted on the nascent nation.

That arrangement gave immense power to various minority factions.  It protected slave owners against the attacks of abolitionists.  It protected small population states against being outweighed by more populist states.  It gave excessive control to rural areas.  And it made it difficult to establish anything resembling a “national” government.  It is hardly any wonder, therefore, that a couple of hundred years later we are unable to produce a popular government.  

More to the point, the systemic incentives within American politics tend to produce extremists.  Because a minority can control power against the wishes of the majority there is little to no incentive for an extremist to adjust his or her views in order to attract majority support.  On the contrary, there is an incentive to become sufficiently extreme to motivate a minority just large enough to defeat the popular view.  But no more than that.  

American history is short, so making generalizations is dangerous, but this anti-popular bias in American politics has played out on a number of occasions.  We are living through one such now.

There is a bias in democracy, once it is established, to continue to expand rather than contract its benefits throughout society.  The beginning is always the establishment of a basic franchise that includes a portion of society — historically that beginning has been giving the vote to male property owners.  Then, through a series of steps, other segments of society are brought into the fold.  Various “rights” are extended further and deeper into the many layers of society until most, if not all, have equal status in the array of those rights that society deems most important.  Democracy has, therefore, a logic of increasing inclusion.

America, because of its slave-riddled origins, has had great difficulty going down this road of inclusion.  Its current politics are a legacy of those origins.  Not only is its system an echo of the power of slave owners attending those founding moments, but its recent tactical politics have reflected the cynical embrace by its major right-of-center politicians of the residue of racial animosity of the old slave owning states of the Confederacy.  The so-called “southern strategy” of the Republican party was designed to exploit the dissatisfaction within the old Democratic Party strongholds of those states with the civil rights movement and legislation of the late 1960s.  The re-alignment of politics that took place subsequently was thus based on this exploitation of latent — and often explicit — racism.  Racism, in other words, sits full square in the modern distribution of power in Congress.  And the modern Republican Party exists as it does because of embrace of such sentiment.

It is hardly a shock, therefore, when demographic and cultural shifts move the nation towards a more inclusive arrangement of power and status that a minority rises up in resistance.  Such inclusion offends its deeply regarded legacy and reduces its power.  

In a normally functioning democracy — one where majority of votes produces control of policy — this resistance could not disrupt the steady expansion of rights.  It would be an irritant not a roadblock.  In America, however, this is not the case.  With power disconnected from the majority a stubborn minority can prevent and even reverse progress.  It can impose its will and indulge in a nihilistic denial of such progress.  

We are often told that America is “polarized”.  This is not correct.

The majority of American voters fall into a moderately narrow band of political views that stretches from the center-right to the center-left with a tilt towards the latter on economic policies and towards the former on social policies.  The further left is, perhaps, too provocative in its advocacy of ever more progress towards total inclusion and equality of status, but it is not  destructively nihilistic in that advocacy.  It accepts, for instance, election results, even if it finds those results distasteful.  The majority shows steady support for any number of policies that have been controversial in the past.  There is strong support for increased social spending, for more equality, and for litmus test cultural policies such as those favoring access to abortion.  There is fertile ground for compromise throughout this array of policies.

But such compromise cannot be achieved because of the determined opposition of a vocal minority expressed through a political system that disconnects popularity and power.  Democracy is not, therefore, under threat.  That is the wrong interpretation of our current state of affairs.   It is not under threat because it was never fully established in the first place.  

And it is acceptance of this fact that is the starting point from which we must begin.  Our goal is not to protect democracy.  It is to establish democracy.  And to do that we must rebuild, or create anew, the institutions that disconnect the will of the people from the expression of that will in policy.  We must shift our attention from the details of particular political demands towards the much more difficult and larger objective of creating a system capable of adapting to demographic and cultural reality.  

It is often said that we ought govern from the center because that’s where the majority support exists.  If, however, the majority is disconnected from power by a system bent on giving priority to minority voices, there is no practical center from which to govern.  We should expect, therefore, the logic of politics to gravitate towards the extremism of the minority that does, in fact, control power.  

Our centrist friends need to heed this.  They should not to establish “third parties” in an attempt arrive at a politics of compromise and majority support.  Our minority driven system will inevitably frustrate such an effort.  They need to establish a political system that connects majority support with the control of power.  Once that connection is made, power will gravitate towards the middle where a spirit of compromise can flourish in just the manner the centrists long for.

Connecting the disconnected to achieve that end should be our overarching goal.