I Think Scott Walker is a Jerk; and I Hope the Jerk Wins Big

The necessity of a senate is not less indicated by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.” (Federalist #62)

          I don't like Scott Walker. I think he has been a disastrously bad manager who has allowed his state to become become a three-ring circus. And his union-busting in Wisconsin has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility; going after collective bargaining is a ploy to attack a Democratic power base and increase the chance that Republicans will be elected in the future. He has done a great disservice to his state by presenting this as something that has anything to do with balancing budgets. I think he is a colossal jerk, and I really hope that he wins.

           I want the jerk to win, not because I think he is better than the guy he is running against. I think he is much worse. However, I believe, fundamentally, that recall elections are, absent major felonies, very bad things. Furthermore, I believe that the recall madness sweeping Wisconsin during this election cycle is based on seriously incorrect assumption—one that is quickly becoming an article of faith among Americans across the political spectrum. All evidence to the contrary, we believe that our leaders are not responsive to the will of the people.

            What the current debt crisis shows us, however, is exactly the reverse: that our leaders are excessively responsive to the will of the people. And this is a problem because what the people want is more stuff than they are willing to pay for. When people give us stuff and make us pay for it, we get mad and throw them out of office. When people take away our stuff because we can’t afford to pay for it, we get mad and throw them out of office. But when people give us stuff and don’t make us pay for it, we give them power and let them keep it as long as they want. An understanding of how to turn this characteristic into a governing philosophy, I believe, was Ronald Reagan’s most enduring gift to the American way of life. Run up the debt.

             Fiscal responsibility is a good thing to talk about during an election, but it has never actually been a particularly good political strategy. Most people who are really serious about it never get elected; and the few people who do get elected and try to deal with it usually get thrown out of office with all of the subtlety of a mob hit. Deficit spending, on the other hand, is a great political strategy. It gives us(or at least seems to give us) exactly what we want: free stuff.

            We now seem to be groping towards a national consensus that the debt is too high and that we need to do something about it. Wonderful. But there is no such consensus on what to do, and both parties show every willingness to wrench every short-term political advantage from whatever the other side tries. When Democrats suggest raising taxes, Republicans go off the deep end and call them socialists; when Republicans suggest deep entitlement cuts, Democrats take to the air waveand scare senior citizens. The next election is already shaping up to be the ugliest contest of scare tactics and demagoguery since, well, the last election.

            We all know that this is disgusting, immoral, and counterproductive. But they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work. The great tragedy of a democracy is that it gives us the government we deserve.

            But in the rush to blame Democrats, Republicans, Obama, the Tea Party, and every one  else in Washington for the mess that we are in, the vast majority of Americans have steadfastly refused to place the blame where it belongs: squarely on their own pampered shoulders. For years, we have been rewarding politicians who give us stuff and don’t make us pay for it. And we have been punishing anybody who tried to do otherwise. Why would we expect that they would act differently now?

            Hopefully, Walker will win tomorrow with a big enough margin to prevent the recall election from becoming a standard tactic to use against politicians who raise taxes, cut spending, negotiate with the other side (not that the Walker did any of this—it’s the principle of the thing), or otherwise engage in activities that ignite “violent passions” and tick off “factious leaders.” It will be impossible to expect politicians to act like grown ups if they can be fired at any time by a collective temper tantrum. 

       

Gridlock is a Good Thing; It's Agreement we Have to Watch Out For

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party. . . . Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.  –James Madison, Federalist #10

         As hard as I have been on Glenn Beck from time to time (here and here), I do realize, in my more reflective moments, that he (and Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly, and <ugh, do I really have to say it?> Ann Coulter) do play an important role in the system that our Founders established. It is not the role they think they play, of course; they are not the guardians of Constitutional purity or the chosen heirs of the Founding Fathers or anything like that. But they (and, I must admit, many of their counterparts on the left) do qualify as examples of what James Madison, in Federalist #10, calls “the mischief of faction.”

         Since I first read the Federalist Papers as an undergraduate, I have considered Madison’s Federalist #10 to be the high-water mark of the volume—an opinion shared by many who study the original documents. Though it was the tenth paper published under the pseudonym “Publius,” #10 was the first contribution by James Madison; as such, it provides a good introduction to his overall arguments in the series. It has also become a standard anthology piece in rhetoric textbooks (I have actually anthologized it myself) because of the intricate parallelism that Madison uses to frame his arguments about factions, which he defines quite clearly as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

         And what are his arguments about factions? Well, they mainly go like this:

1) Factions cause problems because they tend to produce decisions that are  “not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

What the framers feared most was not an overreaching federal government, but the development of a permanent faction capable of rendering democracy useless by harnessing the power of a majority to oppress a minority. Remember that, in 1776, "democracy" was a dirty word in most of the world. People saw it as, potentially, the most oppressive form of government around. A slim majority, they reasoned, could vote themselves into power and do just about anything they wanted to the other 49% of the people. Experience since that time has confirmed that this is precisely what happens when permanent majorities are allowed to form--think of the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, or, to a lesser extent, the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq. Majoritarian tyrrany, the dark side of democracy, can be as horrible as any dictatorial regime.

2) There is no way to remove the causes of faction without destroying liberty.

Factions exist because people have different ideas about stuff. Even people who have the same ideas about stuff one day have different ideas about stuff the next. Nowhere is this borne out more than in the lives of the two principal authors of the Federalist Papers. Hamilton and Madison collaborated closely to pass the Constitution, but, once it passed, they found themselves on different sides of the most important political issue of the day, which was (much as it is today) the proper role of the Federal government.

Since “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man,” there is no way to control factionalism without changing human nature. And—as we have learned over and over again—the only material change that a government can make to human nature is to change “alive” to “dead.” Otherwise, we are stuck with our primitive tribalism and territorialism. Its just the way that we are. “Liberty is to faction,” Madison argues, “what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency

3) It is impossible to prevent the effects of factions in a democracy, but it is imperative to prevent any one faction from obtaining, and perpetuating, a permanent majority.

Madison believed that controlling the undemocratic instincts of different factions and interest groups “forms the principal task of modern legislation.”  But since there is no way to do away with either the causes or the results of factions, the principal function of good government is to prevent any one faction from being in the majority for too long. This is not done by shrinking factions (which is impossible anyway) but by multiplying them—by structuring the government in such a way that it encourages too many factions to ever coalesce into a permanent majority.

This means, first of all, that the primary guarantor of rights must be a large federal government rather than a smaller regional one. In a large country like the United States, it is much less likely for any one faction to gain permanent control of the legislature than it would be in a smaller, relatively homogenous state (think of the way that African Americans became a permanent oppressed minority in many Southern states from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement). It also means that the constitutional apparatus of a society should do what our First Amendment indeed does: guarantee the freedom to have, to speak, and to distribute as wide a variety of ideas as possible. The more factions we have in the country—be they religious, political, cultural, or any other –al—the less likely any of us will ever be on the minority end of a permanent majority.

        What all of this ultimately means is that most of the things that people hate about our government were put their on purpose. They are not what’s broken; they are what’s working. The way to keep freedom secure, Madison knew, is to make sure that the political process has large doses of gridlock, stalemate, demogaugury, acrimony, and mutual recrimination. A functional democratic system must encourage interest groups to form, coalitions to arise and win majorities. As soon as they have won a majority, though, a coalition must be structurally encouraged, to overreach—to push for greater and greater ideological purity until the majority breaks apart and the pieces reassemble themselves into new coalitions and new majorities.  

It also means that Glenn Beck et. al are doing exactly what they should be doing: forming coalitions, demonizing their opponents, attracting followers, ticking people off, and doing their best to advance the interest of their faction.

And it means that people like me feel compelled to try--quixotically to be sure--to “break and control the violence of [this particular] faction” by staying up nights and blogging to the wind.

Making a Liar out of Madison: The “McConnell Plan” and the Separation of Powers

“It will not be denied, that power is of an encroaching nature, and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”— James Madison, Federalist 48

          Over the last few weeks of budget negotiations, we have seen partisan bickering raised to an art form. We have seen factionalism within one major party destroy a potential compromise and demagoguery from the other party destroy almost any hope of a negotiated settlement. We have seen legislators use their power over government borrowing to press for unreasonable concessions from the President, and we have seen a President use the threat of a veto to thwart the will of the people, as expressed in the most recent Congressional elections. 

         We have, in other words, seen the government work exactly as the Founders designed it.

          Government is supposed to be messy. It was designed to be contentious and inefficient. One of the clearest things that comes through in the Federalist Papers is that we are supposed to have a hard time changing big stuff. This is because the Constitutional design sets different interests against each other in an infinite variety of combinations, requiring constant negotiation, revision, and compromise. Madison especially believed that power had to be diffused through a very elaborate system as a check on the natural ambitions of human beings:

 Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. (Federalist #51)

          Madison’s gist here—which became a central design element of the Constitution—is that power will always seek more power, and that pretty much everybody in any branch of government can be counted on to want to increase their own power at the expense of others. The entire Constitutional system is built around this assumption.

          This means that the system can handle any amount of partisan bickering and obstructionism. That's what it was built for. What it cannot handle, however, is one branch voluntarily giving up power to another branch because it fears the political consequences of exercising that power. The way the system is designed, you are supposed to want more power than you have, but you absolutely have to be willing to exercise the power that you've got. Otherwise, whoever is willing to take responsibilities that nobody else wants will end up with the power as well and have a clear path to dictatorship.
          The current Congress, however, appears more than willing to protect Americans from its own failure to govern by transferring to the executive branch the responsibility (and therefore the power) to make politically difficult decisions. We saw this last month in the vote to condemn the US mission in Libya (the symbolic vote) while, at the same time, caving completely on the issue of paying for it (the meaningful vote). As a result, the mission in Libya continues, and the executive power to commit troops without a Congressional declaration of war remains unchallenged. 
          While Congress frets and fumes about the War Powers Resolution, nobody has ever pursued a lawsuit about it long enough to let the courts weigh in on its Constitutionality. Nobody wants a clear Supreme Court victory giving Congress back its authority to declare war would--least of all the members of Congress, who would then have to start exercising the tremendous responsibility of doing so. Better to take a purely symbolic vote against the action in Libya and then abjectly refuse to take responsibility for that belief by actually doing something about it. 

          Given this dynamic, nobody should be surprised about Mitch McConnell’s plan to prevent America from defaulting on its debts and triggering another global financial crisis. The essence of the plan is simple: Congress transfers the responsibility for the debt limit to the President and gives itself a veto only if 2/3 of the members of both houses can agree (which, of course, they never will). The debt ceiling gets raised, America keeps its AAA bond rating, Obama takes the heat, and the Republicans can faithfully report back to their core constituents that they “voted against raising the debt ceiling”--even thought they will have done nothing of the sort. 

          The plan is good politics, and I suspect that it, or something very similar, will win the day. But it is bad statecraft. It represents yet one more legislative concession of power to the executive branch, not because the President wants the power, but because the Congress does not want the responsibility. And that is a very bad reason to make a liar out of Madison.