In some sense, this post is a response to a recent column by Nicholas Kristof, Desperately Seeking Principled Republicans. Kristof cites several prominent conservatives who have said, in so many words, that the Republicans have gone off the rails. It is time to vote for Democrats, just to restore some sanity. Kristof's piece makes it seem that the failure is primarily a matter of character in those Republicans who currently hold office. I certainly don't want to rule out the importance of character, but I think it necessary to consider the political environment as well. Thinking about the political environment gets you to consider changes in it, some which are not that recent, that surely have had an impact on the behavior of our elected officials, and on the electorate as well. It also gets you to consider the long term impact of those changes (by looking back historically at them) and separate that from the more immediate intended effects. Doing this, at least for me, makes the current situation seem less likely a consequence of some grand conspiracy and more likely the result of insufficient prescience in making those past decisions, so a gradual withering away at institutions that, while not perfect, were at one time reasonably functional.
I should also note here, for the reader who otherwise is unfamiliar with me, that I'm not a political scientist. I am a retired, but once well trained, economist. I don't believe the social science is all that different, regardless of the perspective. So, with that, I will offer up an annotated list of factors that seem important to me and that are not focused on the very recent past. There's been enough written about those more recent factors that I don't need to include them here.
The End of the Fairness Doctrine/The Old Oligopoly of Network News
The Wikipedia entry is interesting in that it explains the fairness doctrine as a rule imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on broadcasters (radio and TV, but apparently not on newspapers, which were outside the FCC's jurisdiction) to present controversial issues in a fair and balanced manner. We did once have that in our country. Whether watching Walter Cronkite (CBS), Huntley and Brinkley (NBC), or Howard K. Smith (ABC) for the nightly news, the essence of the content was pretty much the same. It seems clear that we no longer have anything close to that.
The doctrine was ended in 1987 and the argument at the time was that with the advent of cable television, the oligopoly of news provision would be broken. New providers would emerge. With greater competition, the fairness doctrine was no longer necessary.
Now I want to consider newspapers a bit, even though they were outside the scope of this regulation. Newspapers have a separate section for opinions/editorials/and other columns that are not subject to the requirement of being balanced in the way the fairness doctrine required. But the news was supposed to be the news, the reporting of factual information of importance and current interest. This means that while the editorial pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal could be wildly different, their front page news should have been pretty much the same. I'm unaware of anyone who has done a serious study to test whether that was ever actually true, or if instead the front pages themselves were slanted, even back in the early years of Reagan. I do recall ongoing complaints from conservatives about liberal bias in the news. I always thought that was sour grapes, as they weren't seeing the coverage they wanted to get, perhaps with a strategic element thrown in to try to influence future such coverage.
With television and radio news, the separation of news from editorial isn't as clean, at least conceptually (way back when 60 Minutes had Andy Rooney giving opinion near the end of the show, but that was not true of nightly news) so there is reason to believe that some editorial content gets inserted into news pieces. Purely as a social scientist, this idea of complete objectivity and that the news is just facts, I believe to be an illusion. There is an important selection issue, which facts to emphasize and which to push to the background. This requires a point of view to decide. The point of view is fused then with the reporting of news. Nevertheless, one might expect the variation in how the news is reported to not be too great, so a regular reader of the New York Times could have a discussion with a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal about the news and find areas of what they agree to be true, as well as points of disagreement. We are not close to this now with TV news.
There has been Yellow journalism long before the current morass. (We learned about it in grade school history class regarding the Spanish-American War. It was the precursor to fake news.) What may not be well understood is that there is a kind of market failure in news that is ad-funded or funded by subscription. In the competition for eyeballs, sensationalism that produces "addicted" viewers is a winning business strategy, even as it tarnishes the news itself. With a limited number of possible entrants, the fairness doctrine can then be seen as a counter to this market failure.
There is the question of whether we can return to something like the fairness doctrine now, with the advent of the Internet strongly suggesting otherwise. I will point out that if TV is regulated but the Internet is not, that will simply expedite the movement of programming to the unregulated environment. So one might ask, is is possible to impose the fairness doctrine on Internet news as well as on TV news. From my vantage, that would be desirable, but I don't see how it might happen.
As a social experiment, possibly one that might be done if we have a Democrat in the White House, I would like to see Fox News, and for fairness MSNBC as well, off the air for an extended period of time, say four to six months. I'm interested, in particular, in whether regular Fox viewers might willingly turn to other news programming that is "more balanced." If the answer to that is no, then one might reasonably conclude that audience is captured by those politicians who make appeal to them. This captured audience is one reason for the tribalism that has been so heavily reported.
The Hastert Rule/The End of Bipartisan Compromise in the House
The Wikipedia entry makes clear that the rule was actually first imposed by Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert's predecessor as Speaker. But the entry fails to point out that the rule served quite different purposes for the two. Gingrich was much more of an ideologue and a firebrand. For Gingrich, the rule was a tool for wielding power. Hastert, who is now probably remembered more for his sexual indiscretions while in office than for his politics, was much more of a conciliator, as was his successor John Boehner. Indeed, Paul Ryan might also fit in the conciliator category.
The purpose of the rule for the conciliator as Speaker, is to preserve job security and not face the threat of a challenge from the right flank. More generally, one might argue that the scarcity of principled Republicans, broadly considered, is because they have had to defend themselves against the right flank rather than take as their opponents those from across the aisle. Let's consider this specifically as it applies in the House.
In an ideal word scripted by Anthony Downs, legislation from the House should reflect the median voter in the House, aggregating across all representatives: Democrats, Republicans, and others. Next, we modify that ideal by noting that the Speaker is a politician with the power of setting the agenda, as described by Duncan Black. So the Speaker's preference matters in determining the legislation and one should then predict the legislative outcome to be somewhere between the true median of the entire House and the Speaker's preferred point, with the location depending in part on the size of the majority that will vote in favor of the legislation. If the Speaker is wary of threats to his leadership from his own caucus, that can influence the Speaker's preference, but it does not preclude having legislation emerge that has bipartisan support.
Seen in this framework, the effect the Hastert rule, when Republicans have a majority in the House, is to move proposed legislation to the median of the Republican Caucus rather than to the median of the House as a whole, and to block legislation that would require bipartisan support to pass.
One might envision a more important dynamic consequence. Compromise, with the Democratic caucus, gets cast as disloyalty among Republicans, rather than the necessary "sausage making" part of politics. This is another factor contributing to tribalism, as practiced by our elected representatives.
I think it worthwhile to consider what being principled means, from the perspective of this analysis. Is the Speaker who sticks to the party line principled or is it the Speaker who compromises with the other party the principled one? There are many different ways to answer the question. I will answer that with the following question. Which mode would be better for us all, as a long term proposition? So I'd like to entertain the following counterfactual. Suppose that Hastert or Boehner abandoned the rule entirely, which was then followed by a challenge to their own leadership from the right wing. Suppose that challenge was effective enough to remove the then current speaker. What would happen after that? Would the Republicans in the House then find themselves in disarray and as a consequence lose their majority in the next election?
If so, maybe the experience would actually be liberating for future Speakers. The threat from the right wing, like the threats of many bullies, would be seen as not decisive. Those future Speakers would have more freedom to negotiate, because the entire Republican caucus would fear another bout of disarray. Alas, we haven't yet had this experience. I'm afraid that with a conciliator as Speaker, we never will, and with a hardliner as Speaker, then of course it won't happen.
The Undemocratic Effects of the Primary System Coupled with Low Voter Turnout
If the Median Voter Model held full sway and voters voted their preference rather than voted strategically (e.g., opt for their second choice if they felt their first choice had no chance of winning in the general election) then the winning Republican candidate in a Congressional district primary would look like the median Republican voter in that district, and likewise on the Democratic side of the equation. Then this observation needs to be coupled with the Paradox of Voting. If voting is costly (from the point of view of opportunity cost of time) and an individual voter's vote will likely not sway the outcome, then voting becomes irrational. Given this, the candidate who wins the primary should reflect the median only of those voters who do vote. Such voters overcome the seeming irrationality suggested in the Paradox of Voting.
It is known that voter participation rates in the primary are lower than voter participation rates in the general election. Moreover, Republican voters further to the right are more inclined to participate (as are Democratic voters further to the left). The primary system itself is polarizing. Adding the voter participation issue to the primary system increases the polarization.
This issue does have some obvious remedies. Enabling crossover voting in the primaries, especially for those of the other party who have an eye on the general election, would help keep extreme candidates from winning. And making voting mandatory would counter the Paradox of Voting. How to get those remedies as outcomes, however, is far from obvious.
The Decline of Private Sector Unions
Let me begin this section by engaging in a stereotype from 1970s TV, Archie Bunker. He worked on the loading dock, was a union member, and voted for Nixon. (This last one is best explained because Archie Bunker was a proud American, believed that America is always right, and thus was for the War in Vietnam.) More generally, Archie Bunker is emblematic of the hard-hat type. I don't know whether that type is representative of current Trump supporters in many respects, but among urban, males who voted for Trump, I think it a useful stereotype to keep in mind.
It's the union membership aspect that I want to focus on here. While union members are now quite often depicted as lefties, that never was fully true, even when unions wielded power and the majority of union members voted Democratic while the unions themselves contributed more to the campaigns of Democratic candidates. Unions should be considered in a quite different light. They were a normalizing force with respect to social attitudes, particularly about minorities, even if not a perfect one. Because union power was related to the size of union membership, there was incentive to include minorities in the union. Unions were also also guilds and helped members - skill-wise by encouraging senior members and junior members to have a master-apprentice relationship, and socializing-wise by providing members with a ready peer group for after work-hours fun. This put unions in a paternalistic role with respect to their members. The politicians understood this. Republican politicians might garner some union votes, as long as their politics wasn't explicitly anti-union.
I don't want to sugarcoat what it is that unions did. There were, of course, serious issues about connections with the Mafia and corruption among union leadership. But, and this is the important point for what is being argued here, unions served as a force from outside the political arena that the politicians needed to confront (and perhaps be fearful of). In that way strong private sector unions steered Republican politicians towards the center. This force is absent from our current politics.
The Rise of Hostage Taking as a Strategy by Organized Special Interest Groups
Lobbying has been around at least since U.S. Grant was President. That special interests would shower gratuities and attention on politicians situated on the right committees, so that when legislation the special interests cared about was being considered, they could influence the writing of that legislation in a way favorable to themselves. While I find the practice unsavory, as I'm sure many others do as well, it has been with us for such a long time that you might think it part of the process. In particular, I would be hard pressed to consider the shift in the Republicans that Nicholas Kristof wrote about and attribute it to lobbying. We need to focus on something else.
I've called the something else strategic hostage taking. An exemplar is Grover Norquist and his organization Americans for Tax Reform. He offers a candidate to take their "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," which in game-theoretic terms can be called a credible commitment device. The pledge says the candidate will oppose any and all measures to raise taxes. Having taken the pledge that gets publicized, so people who monitor the list of candidates who have taken the pledge and who want to support them in their campaigns can do so. Americans for Tax Reform might also contribute directly to the campaign, but the real leverage is in making other high rollers who don't want their taxes raised aware of which candidates are on the list. The hostage taking part comes later. Suppose that later there is a dire situation - a war has been declared, an enormous natural disaster has taken place, or something else in this category and that necessitates substantial additional government spending. The rational response then would be to have a temporary tax surcharge to pay for that spending. But legislators who took the pledge and who want to run for reelection can't vote for such a temporary surcharge, because that would mean they've broken the pledge, and they'll be punished accordingly. That is the hostage taking.
The National Rifle Association operates in much the same way and has completely blocked any sensible reform regarding gun control in recent times. Let's note that the Brady Bill did pass 25 years ago, in spite of the NRA, though at the time the Democrats were in control of Congress and the White House. But since then, nada on the gun control front, yet there have been so many publicly known violent gun death tragedies to galvanize voters on the issue.
Let's observe that when politicians find they are hostages to a variety of different special interests, the normal path for them to break the arrangement is to not seek reelection. That may be a principled decision or it may simply represent fatigue from playing the role of a puppet. Surely, it is not principled to promise to surrender one's discretion once in office by abiding by the wishes of the special interests, for the sake of getting their support to assist them in being elected. We might call that by many other names, but principled wouldn't be one of them.
Conclusion
Except for the last section of this essay, I tried to make the argument in as abstract form as I possibly could. The point is that the environment that GOP politicians operate in has gotten more hostile over time, especially to politicians who try to conduct themselves in a principled manner. The reason to present this in an abstract way is to get the reader to focus on that main point, and not get hung up on the issues, which they might otherwise be inclined to do. The reason why I deviated from that script in the last section is that I didn't know a way to tell the story purely in the abstract, yet keep it readily understandable. In this case the examples convey the ideas better than a purely theoretical discussion does. Otherwise, I don't want to elevate the examples, at least not for this post.
I also want to repeat a caveat I gave at the beginning of this essay. I'm looking at changes from a while ago and totally ignoring more recent changes. This is deliberate to make the point that it has been going on for quite a while. It's not that everything was hunky-dory until the election of 2016 and then we went over a cliff. Asserting that would be a bad misreading of this history.
Assuming that I am right that the environment for governing has become more hostile for Republicans, one should ask what would Democrats taking control do? Would it reverse any of the hostility in the environment or merely delay the process till Republicans again take over? One might also ask whether Republicans, as the out party, might do anything themselves to reverse the hostility in the environment. That didn't happen in the past, but in the past prominent conservatives weren't ashamed of the Republican party. Now they are.
Let me conclude by saying we sometimes focus on the wrong period in our history. Recently, the 1920s have been considered because it was the last time where there were such great disparities in the income distribution. And the 1930s have also been considered, both because of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Yet I think we should look at an earlier time, to the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. TR was a Republican, but he also was a reformer. The problem then was the power of the trusts. TR came to be known as the trust buster. Power is distributed differently now and while Antitrust Law, still on the books, may be one tool to combat concentrated power, I suggest we need 21st century tools that take on the political analog. Here I don't want to speculate about what those tools might look like. My hope with this essay is to get some readers to do that and push the discussion along that way.
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