Chapter 4 Chapter 4 The Unseen Revolution of the 1970s
In the conventional telling of our modern political history, the 1960s represents the crucible—a cauldron of discontent leading directly to the divisions and debates of our present politics. In the words of historian Allen Matusow, the ’60s represented “The Unraveling of America.” Amid the turbulence of civil rights, Vietnam, and rising crime, liberalism crashed. Conservatives, led by Richard Nixon, seized the opportunity. Republicans successfully split the New Deal coalition that had reigned for a generation. White backlash became the cornerstone of GOP rule. To critics of this new order, Republicans pioneered the politics of resentment, turning the United States into “Nixonland”—to use the evocative title of historian Rick Perlstein’s recent book—by realigning the South, rescuing the Republican Party, and road-testing the “us versus them” politics that came to characterize America’s fiercely partisan debates.1
This near-universal narrative is colorful, easy to tell, and superficially appealing. Political threads connecting the ’60s to the present are real enough: from the southern realignment prompted by LBJ’s fateful fight for civil rights to the flight of working-class whites from the New Deal coalition. Nixon’s politics of resentment paved the way for a new sort of campaign, one based on right-wing populism and anger, focused on culture rather than economics, and directed at Washington liberals rather than business. And these shifts directly contributed to two great political trends of our era: a strengthened and radicalized Republican Party and a growing chasm between the GOP and the once-dominant Democrats (or, to use the political science term of art, “polarization”).
Yet despite the familiarity and appeal of this narrative, it has a serious problem: It misses the real story. The Nixonland narrative dates the moment of change in American politics ten years too early, and it fails utterly to explain the epochal transformation that would occur in the subsequent decade. 1968 was not the great switch point in American politics. 1978—a year that stirs no one’s historical passion—was. Understanding why will bring us much closer to a true understanding of how Washington works and why it has turned its back on the middle class.
Watch What It Does
Suppose you tried to get a sense of American politics not, as journalists typically do, by looking at campaigns and election outcomes, but by examining what the government was actually doing. Would 1968 or 1972 emerge as a turning point? Absolutely not. Far from being moments of fundamental change, these elections that supposedly redefined America come smack in the middle of the great “bulge” of government activism that runs from, roughly, 1964 to 1977. When it comes to spending, taxation, regulation, and all the other things that government does, nothing unraveled during “The Unraveling of America.” Washington just kept on doing what it had been doing.
We know that LBJ helped usher in a period in which the federal government greatly expanded its reach not just in civil rights but in broad areas of domestic policy ranging from social programs (Medicaid and Medicare) to consumer and environmental protection. What we often forget is that, in all these areas and more, Washington remained on course following the “crucible” elections of 1968 and 1972.
In fact, the surge of government activism actually accelerated under Nixon—exactly the opposite of what the conventional story would lead you to expect. Nixon, not Johnson, oversaw the most rapid increase in domestic spending since the New Deal. He signed on to a huge expansion of Social Security, as well as to the creation of a national food stamps program. Nixon also approved the transformation of Old Age Assistance into a much larger and fully national Supplemental Security Income program.
Nixon, not Johnson, signed into law the huge extensions of national regulatory policy that marked this period, creating the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (1970), the National Traffic Safety Commission (1970), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (1972), and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (1973). And while Nixon had been forced out of office by the time that the massive Employee Retirement Income Security Act (1974) made it through Congress, his successor, Gerald Ford, signed the bill, which transformed the entire system of employer-provided benefits for workers.
Of course, Democrats ran Congress at the time. But Nixon was no mere bystander. Even as he moved to challenge Democrats from the right on matters of race, culture, and crime, he was convinced that competing for the center required a strong dose of economic populism and a willingness to use government to manage or moderate markets. Compared to leaders of today’s GOP—or even many current Democrats—Nixon looks like a full-throated Social Democrat. Although he attacked George McGovern’s position on welfare, he, too, supported a guaranteed annual income for the poor. His health-care proposals would look like very respectable Democratic fare today (actually, more ambitious than what President Obama proposed in 2009). Nixon actively cultivated the head of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, and enlisted liberal social policy experts like Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
The blueprint for this domestic strategy was laid out in Kevin Phillips’s influential The Emerging Republican Majority.2 Phillips (who ironically would emerge decades later as a fierce critic of Republican contributions to mounting inequality) dedicated his work to “the emerging Republican majority and its two principal architects: President Richard M. Nixon and Attorney General John N. Mitchell.” Phillips argued for a coalition grounded in “middle-class realpolitik.” He stressed that a Republican majority would need to be responsive to middle-class economic concerns and gave no hint of a platform challenging the New Deal economic agenda. For Phillips, it was liberals who had repudiated the New Deal by moving “beyond programs taxing the few for the benefit of the many (the New Deal) to programs taxing the many on behalf of the few (the Great Society).” The main obstacles to Republican inroads among northern blue-collar workers were “[f]ears that a Republican administration would undermine Social Security, Medicare, collective bargaining and aid to education.” If a Nixon administration could “dispel these apprehensions,” it would gain the political loyalties of the white working class.3
The Nixon we remember was the “law and order” president who cultivated working-class cultural anxieties. But Nixon cut a far different figure when it came to most of the essential aspects of domestic governance, especially those related to the economy and social welfare. On the lunch-pail concerns of Middle America, Nixon represented not backlash but broad acceptance of the liberal consensus. And while the Watergate scandal weakened Nixon and the Republicans more generally, it had surprisingly little effect on governance. As Nixon faltered, he acceded to some legislative items that he might not have supported earlier (and left his successor, Gerald Ford, facing tough times after the 1974 election, when Democrats added forty-nine House members and five new senators to their already significant majorities). Yet most of the big domestic expansions had already occurred. Nixon’s fall brought a wave of new Democrats to Congress, but it did not change the fundamental contours of what government was doing.
Carterland
Indeed, once one looks past the continuities of Nixon and Ford to examine the Carter presidency, the puzzles associated with our traditional, election-focused narrative only multiply. In 1976, after an eight-year interregnum, a Democrat entered the White House. With the Republican veto threat gone, the opportunities for liberals to control the political agenda greatly expanded. Within his party, Carter was regarded as a moderate, but he had staked out liberal positions on a range of major economic issues, including health care, taxes, and labor relations. Equally significant, the new Democratic president could work with massive majorities in both the House and the Senate.
A view of politics that puts elections front and center would have expected policy to shift sharply leftward. Certainly, liberal activists of the day shared that expectation, sensing new opportunities for ambitious initiatives on taxes, industrial relations, the minimum wage, health care, consumer protection, and a range of other domestic issues. So cocky were Democrats that they rejected Nixon’s (and later Ford’s) overtures for compromises on a range of issues like welfare reform and health care, anticipating that they would be in a stronger position in 1977.
Oops. If one wanted a book title to capture the great turning point in modern American political history, it would be more accurate, if less catchy, to call it Carterland. 1977 and 1978 marked the rapid demise of the liberal era and the emergence of something radically different. Tax reform: defeated. A new consumer protection agency: defeated. Election Day voter registration: scuttled before reaching the floor of the House. Health-care reform: defeated. A proposal to tie the minimum wage to the average manufacturing wage to prevent its future erosion: defeated. An overhaul of outdated labor relations laws: successfully filibustered in the Senate, despite the presence of sixty-one Democrats and a Republican minority containing some genuine supporters of organized labor, not to mention far, far more moderates than in the GOP we know today.
It wasn’t just the string of defeats for liberal policy initiatives, stunning as those were. By 1978, at a time of unified Democratic control of the House, Senate, and White House, the precursors of the Reagan revolution were already visible. Congress passed a tax bill whose signature provision was a deep cut in the capital gains tax—a change that would largely benefit the wealthy. This followed hard on the heels of a decision to sharply raise payroll taxes, the most regressive federal levy. These two initiatives—fully a decade removed from the supposed turning point of Nixon’s rise—marked the beginning of the pronounced reversal in federal tax policy we described in chapter 2. The United States began its long, dramatic move away from the established practice of using taxes as an instrument for tempering market-generated inequalities associated with the outsized earnings of those at the top.
At the same time, Congress and the president embarked on a major shift in economic policy, embracing the argument that excessive regulation had become a serious curb on growth. In the mid to late 1970s the call for deregulation was often bipartisan and narrowly focused. It centered on particular sectors of the economy (transportation, communications, energy). Equally important, it targeted a specific form of regulation that erected barriers to entry, enabling existing firms to raise prices and fostering cozy relationships between regulators and favored firms. Yet this deregulatory stream created an opening for broader action. It would not be long before it flooded over its narrow banks to become an ever-widening attack on the very idea of economic regulation. Here again the story begins in the 1970s, not the 1960s.
So we have a dominant narrative of contemporary American politics, “1968 as crucible,” that fundamentally misses what actually happened in the corridors of power. Moreover, it misses what actually happened precisely when the winner-take-all economy began to emerge. We have tumultuous electoral waves, but the political fortunes of economic interests in Washington seem to be riding their own currents. Republicans win, and the contours of the Great Society continue to expand. Democrats win, and policy shifts sharply to the right. What can explain why Nixonland leaves the postwar governing order untouched, while Carterland turns it upside down?
From Electoral Spectacle to Organized Combat
We need to dig deeper to sort this out. After all, the conventional narrative of election-driven change not only dominates most accounts of our recent past; it also typifies most discussion of our current politics. What is the basic vision of politics that underpins this dominant view? Call it “politics as electoral spectacle.”
At the center of this blinkered vision are the huge shows we call elections, circuses that bring together two broad groups under a red-white-and-blue tent. In the audience sits a fairly inchoate mass of voters. In the ring are the politicians, individual showmen who seek their favor. They succeed or fail in wooing a fickle electorate partly based on events—Vietnam, riots, an assassination, an economic downturn—and partly on their skill in managing the related challenges.
This view of politics is appealing and easily packaged. It’s also reassuring: If politicians are doing something, it must be because voters want them to. There’s just one problem: It misses the essence of American politics.
In particular, this near-universal perspective leaves out two critical things: public policy and organized interest groups. By policy we mean something very simple: what the government actually does. The main reason we care about politics, after all, is because we believe what government does matters. We think that the leaders who exercise political authority, and use it to tell citizens what they can and cannot and must do, make a difference for the quality of people’s lives.
In the last two chapters, we saw that this belief is well founded. Especially in the modern era of activist government, those in positions of power can have an enormous influence over the economy, the distribution of income, and the life chances of citizens. This is most obvious when we think about the enormous system of taxes and transfer programs that all rich democracies operate. Yet, as we have seen, in areas far beyond the scope of taxes and transfers, the exercise of political authority is an extraordinarily powerful means of influencing the structure of “private” markets that determine the economy’s winners and losers.
To take policy out of the picture is to reduce political conflict to the status of sports. Clashes between the “red team” and the “blue team” become no different from a game between the Celtics and the Lakers. This is no doubt why politics as electoral spectacle is so appealing to the media: It’s exciting, and it’s simple. Aficionados can memorize the stats of their favorite players or become experts on the great games of the past. Everyone, however, can enjoy the gripping spectacle of two highly motivated teams slugging it out.
Once we see policy, rather than electoral victory, as the grand prize of political conflict, we see politics for what it is: a contest with big and often enduring stakes—a contest more like the one that gladiators played in the Roman Colosseum than the one the Celtics and Lakers play in the Staples Center. And who are the contestants? Who are the political gladiators? They are not, for the most part, atomized voters. The main competitors, the ones in the ring from start to finish wielding their weapons and enduring each other’s blows, are organized groups.
Call this vision “politics as organized combat.” It is a perspective on American politics that provides a much better way to make sense of the remarkable transformation of the past few decades and of the political world we inhabit today. To see it clearly, we need to step away from the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s for a minute, and move to a loftier height—say, about 29,000 feet.
Who Climbed Everest?
The story of Edmund Hillary, who died in 2008 at the age of eighty-eight, is usually told as one of heroic individual achievement. If the story comes with a twist, it’s the modern one of identity politics—how to apportion credit between Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa guide who joined him at the summit of Everest. The story is rarely, if ever, told as a victory for organization.
But a victory for organization it certainly was. Arrayed below Hillary and Norgay on the slopes was a remarkable display of mobilization and coordination: a team of a dozen climbers, thirty-five Sherpa guides, 350 porters, and 36,000 pounds of equipment and supplies.4 The reality of the first successful assault on Everest is less romantic than the conventional tale but no less impressive: It was a feat of modern management. Without that formidable logistical effort, there would have been no climb to the summit, and no one would ever have heard of Edmund Hillary.
That we tell the Everest saga, and so many others like it, as one of individual initiative is revealing. Such a view is deeply rooted in our culture. Observers of the United States have long identified the tendency to see the world this way as distinctively American. More than most societies, Americans believe that people rise or fall as a result of their own efforts, and therefore get what they deserve. Critically, when we say this is a nation of individualists, we don’t just mean Americans embrace individualism as a social ethic. Underpinning this ethic is a tendency to interpret the world in highly individualistic terms. We distribute blame and praise to individuals because we believe that it is their individual actions, for better or worse, that matter. People get what they deserve.
Our media-driven culture of celebrity reinforces this individualistic outlook. Television, of course, is tailor-made for visual images of larger-than-life individuals. Building up (and tearing down) those who capture the media’s fancy lends itself to the simple storytelling and morality tales that audiences crave. Never mind that, just like on Everest, massive organizational realities lurk behind the individualistic facade. New York and Hollywood are home to huge factories of organized activity that cultivate, produce, and then bloviate about the “individuals” who command our attention. The factories stay in the background, while breathless discussions of Brangelina’s twins get the airtime.
This preoccupation with specific personalities and insistence on attributing everything that happens to the qualities of individuals is a form of blindness. We see individuals, but not the organizations that help to pool their resources and can vastly extend their range of social action. Remember the anguished kid in The Sixth Sense? His “gift,” or curse, was an awareness of what others couldn’t see (“I see dead people”). To understand our politics, and the remarkable transformation it has undergone, we need to cultivate a different sixth sense: a deeper awareness of the powerful role of organizations.
Look carefully, and organizations come into focus. In every walk of life, huge institutions link together individuals, provide standard operating routines, impart and sort valuable information, and allow isolated individual actions to add up to cohesive systemic effects. Most obviously, in the realm of business, idealized as the territory of individual entrepreneurs, giant organizations rule. We extol scrappy upstart competitors even as we drive our Toyotas to Wal-Mart, pick up remodeling supplies from Home Depot, grab fast food at McDonald’s, and check our Bank of America online accounts with software from Microsoft running on an Intel chip.
The clout that huge organizations wield in American life is real, and it is neither accident nor conspiracy. Organizations have formidable advantages, and modern life is unimaginable in their absence. They can marshal vastly greater resources than can any individual. Organizations permit specialization and thus the development of expertise—a critical advantage in a world of staggering and ever-increasing complexity. They allow many different kinds of talent to be combined and directed toward some big task. They can operate simultaneously in many different arenas. Perhaps most important, they are durable, even relentless, where individuals are flighty and, of course, mortal. Organizations can learn from experience. They can sustain a focus for decades if need be: watching, waiting, planning, and then seizing opportunity when the time is right.
At one level, of course, people know this. They talk about “big oil” or “special interests” or “Wall Street,” and overwhelmingly decry their perceived influence in Washington. Yet these generally remain distant abstractions, vaguely malevolent but obscure. They pop up in campaign ads. They are grist for a faux-populist discourse that works great in movies like Michael Clayton or Erin Brockovich. The ironies of these populist epics are rich. Each is the product of a huge media factory, each stars a celebrity carefully cultivated by these factories, and each tells the tale of a heroic individual. Through grit and savvy, George Clooney and Julia Roberts ultimately triumph over a faceless, malevolent organization.
Despite our tendency to sneer at “special interests” however, attention to organizations rarely features prominently in respectable punditry or political analysis. Indeed, the tendency to see the world in highly individualized, organization-free terms may be even stronger in political commentary than it is in the way we discuss other parts of the social world. Popular accounts of politics focus on the Hillarys (Clinton, not Edmund). We endlessly analyze the great personalities who dot the political landscape, their psychologies and strategic acumen, their personal appeal and personae, their eloquence (even if manufactured for them by a stable of speechwriters) and gaffes (even if substantively trivial).
No sign of this individualistic focus is more telling than the American media’s fixation on elections—and, within their treatment of those political contests, their preoccupation with the “horse race” elements. This intense concentration on the most circus-like aspects of political life is now so thoroughly institutionalized that we hardly notice it. But we should.
As political circuses go, of course, there is nothing like a rip-roaring election. Unlike just about everything else in politics, elections are made for TV. They involve head-to-head competitions between dueling personalities. For most Americans, and, it seems, for more and more reporters, the day-to-day business of governing is frankly boring. Policy can be mind-numbingly complicated. One night after the first televised presidential debate between Bush and Gore in 2000, Ted Koppel was on Larry King Live talking about the heated disputes between the two candidates over tax policy. Gore had complained that Bush’s proposals simply didn’t add up and would lead to massive deficits. “You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush,” Koppel admitted. “I can’t pretend for a minute that I’m really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about.”5 This is not some local news intern speaking. It’s Ted Koppel, the host of the former late-night wonkfest Nightline. And he’s not speaking about rocket science, or even climate science, but a subject where relatively definitive answers can be reached without much technical heavy lifting. But no heavy lifting at all is required to say who’s up and who’s down in an election.
Worse for media executives constantly looking to attract “eyeballs” to their product, government policy is excruciatingly slow to develop. Headline: “Obama’s Tax Proposals Are the Same As They Were Yesterday!” The great health-care debate of 2009 was one of the most important domestic policy discussions of a generation—more important even than the debate over President Clinton’s health plan in the early 1990s given how much further it progressed in Congress. And yet, to many in the news industry, it was, in the candid words of MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan, “bad for ratings.” When health care is under discussion, Ratigan fretted, “cable networks’ ratings go off a cliff.” “It’s not only not a cable TV–friendly story,” agreed John Harwood, chief Washington correspondent for CNBC. “It’s not a journalism-friendly story.”6 For all the changes in Americans’ lives that health-care reform could produce, to many in the news business, it looked like something that was very hard to understand happening too slowly.
By contrast, elections are fast-moving and easy to follow. Even better, they can be covered and dissected in a manner that closely resembles the way the press covers sports (Was that ad effective? Who will he pick as a running mate?) or entertainment (Where is Obama going on vacation? Does that backdrop make McCain look old?). For the media, governing often seems like something that happens in the off-season. Even then, much of the conversation focuses on how it sets things up for the next election. For too many reporters, the struggle to shape life-or-death decisions in the corridors of Washington is treated as the political equivalent of training camp. Campaigns can still generate ratings. Health-care reform can’t.
Organized interests see the world the other way around. Elections are training camps; daily action in Washington is the regular season. Let’s pursue that tax reform example a little more. When pundits and columnists feel like singing a hymn to American government, one of their favorite examples is the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Two skilled reporters at the time dubbed this the “showdown at Gucci Gulch.”7 Gucci Gulch is the gauntlet of well-heeled lobbyists that lawmakers have to run in the corridors outside the House and Senate chambers where tax legislation gets written. Somehow, against all odds, the Erin Brockoviches won. The showdown ended with the good guys celebrating as the Gucci gang fled town.
The law Reagan signed was hailed as a bipartisan triumph of public-spiritedness over the special interests. It sharply reduced tax breaks—aka corporate welfare—for the Gucci Gulch folks in order to finance lower tax rates for the vast majority of Americans without increasing the deficit. Economists of very different stripes lauded the new law as a triumph for transparency and efficiency over pork. Voters, not special interests, seemed to come out ahead.
Seemed to. Moving forward a few years, the story looks very different. If you take a good look at the tax code now, you’ll see that it is chock-full of new tax breaks, far more expensive than the ones eliminated with such fanfare. In hindsight, the venerated Tax Reform Act of 1986 resembles the ill-fated Roanoke colony in early Virginia. Like that colony, visitors returning to the act after a long absence would find it had vanished without a trace.
In contrast to the mystery surrounding the settlers of Roanoke, however, we know what happened. The attention of voters and the press wandered elsewhere. Gucci Gulch, the lobbyists’ hunting ground, remained. The organized groups who had taken such a political hit in 1986 simply went back to work. Year after year, out of the spotlight, they lobbied to advance their interests. Year after year, they succeeded in adding back loopholes—one unnoticed provision at a time. They could do so not because public opinion had drifted rightward (it hadn’t), but because they were organized and their opponents were not. Backed by organizations, they pushed politicians to respond to their concerns. And nobody pushed back.
Organization Matters
The story of organizational triumph over popular concerns has been repeated time after time, especially in the last thirty years. A possibly apocryphal story about FDR has him responding to a delegation imploring him for action: “Fine, you’ve convinced me. Now make me do it.” What he meant was, “Get some organized pressure behind you, so that I will be rewarded for doing the right thing and punished for doing the wrong thing.” Struggles over policy—over what the government actually does for and to its citizens—are almost always long, hard slogs. They involve drawn-out conflicts in multiple arenas. They involve extremely complicated issues where only full-time, well-trained participants are likely to be effective. They involve stakes that can easily be in the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Inevitably, organized groups are crucial actors—and often the crucial actors—in these fights.
Against these forces, voters often find themselves in the position of the farmer in that famous scene in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath when a man on a tractor arrives to destroy the homes of tenants. The farmer comes out and threatens the man with a gun, but the tractor driver says he is not at fault; he is just doing his job. The farmer responds that in that case he will shoot the driver’s boss, only to hear that that man, too, is just following instructions. And so the conversation goes, back and forth, up an endless chain of command. The helpless farmer ends up standing there as his home is destroyed, asking, “Who can we shoot?”8
Those who see politics as electoral spectacle frequently assume that it’s easy for voters to figure out who to “shoot”—that is, which policies to support or oppose, which politicians to vote in and out of office. But to form grounded views and votes, citizens need important resources that are too often lacking. Perhaps the most important is knowledge: knowledge of the problems that concern them, knowledge of what politicians do—or don’t do—to address these problems, and knowledge of what those actions mean for citizens. If voters don’t have this knowledge, then they need to get signals from figures they trust that give them a reasonable prospect of rewarding or punishing politicians as necessary. In short, they need access to reliable organizations.
Optimists about American democracy too often presume that all this is relatively straightforward. The truth is much more unsettling—so unsettling that even in serious political discourse it is usually considered bad manners to point it out. The truth is that most citizens pay very little attention to politics, and it shows. To call their knowledge of even the most elementary facts about the political system shaky would be generous. To take just a few examples, less than a third of Americans know that a member of the House serves for two years or that a senator serves for six. In 2000, six years after Newt Gingrich became House Speaker, only 55 percent knew the Republicans were the majority party in the House—a success rate only a little superior to a random guess. Just two years after he presided over Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate, only 11 percent of those surveyed could identify William Rehnquist as chief justice of the United States.9
Crucial and basic matters of political process are equally opaque to most voters. In early 2010, as Republicans brought Washington to a halt as effectively as the unexpected winter snowstorms, most Americans had no idea that not a single Republican senator had voted for health-care reform (two-thirds either put the number at between five and twenty or said they didn’t know), and less than a third could correctly identify the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster (sixty). Well over half of Americans either said fifty-one votes were sufficient, or confessed they had no idea.10
About policy, most voters know even less, and are prone to staggering mistakes. Roughly half of Americans think that foreign aid is one of the two top expenditures in the federal budget (in reality, it consumes about 1 percent of the budget). In 1980, in the midst of the Cold War, 38 percent of Americans surveyed believed that the Soviet Union was a member of NATO—the anti-Soviet defense alliance. Two years after the huge 2001 tax cuts, half of Americans were unable to recall that there had been tax cuts at all.11 Most of the famous “swing voters,” whom journalists tend to idealize as standing above the fray, carefully sorting among the strengths and weaknesses of each party’s offerings, are actually the least engaged, least well-informed citizens, reaching a final decision (if at all) on the flimsiest grounds.
This is the dirty little secret of our profession. Among political scientists, that most voters are woefully ignorant about politics is completely uncontroversial, and has been for decades. The survey evidence on this subject is overwhelming. Yet it is not something widely disseminated, and a good deal of effort in the discipline is devoted to scrounging for reasons why the severe knowledge deficits of voters don’t matter all that much, and why Washington will be attentive to voters’ demands even if most voters are not very well informed and not paying all that much attention.12
What does it take for weakly informed and aware voters to attract Washington’s sustained notice? It takes organization. To be more than bystanders in American politics wondering whom to shoot, voters need strong organizational mooring and consistent cues to recognize and respond to changes in public policy. Yet, on economic matters, this mooring and these cues have eroded just as they have become more crucial. This erosion hasn’t just made it harder for voters to know whom to shoot. It has also dramatically undermined voters’ confidence in government and politicians, especially their sense that elected officials are looking out for their interests. Trust in government has plummeted, and cynicism about the effectiveness of the representative process has grown. In the mid-1960s, less than a third of Americans agreed that “government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” Over the last couple decades, more than two-thirds have. In 2008, the share was more than 70 percent.13
Unrepresentative Democracy
These polls reflect an underlying reality. New research by political scientists suggests that there is plenty of reason to question the clout of ordinary voters, especially those who have most clearly been on the losing end of the winner-take-all economy. Two professors working separately at Princeton University, Larry Bartels and Martin Gilens, have been studying the correspondence between what politicians do and what their constituents of differing economic backgrounds say they want them to do in opinion polls.14 Are the opinions of wealthier Americans more likely to be heard and heeded than those of less affluent Americans?
The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is yes. But the scale of the disparity may shock those used to thinking that everyone’s opinion counts. Bartels looked at how closely aligned with voters U.S. senators were on key votes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It turns out there is a pretty high degree of congruence between senators’ positions and the opinions of their constituents—at least when those constituents are in the top third of the income distribution. For constituents in the middle third of the income distribution, the correspondence is much weaker, and for those in the bottom third, it is actually negative. (Yes, when the poorest people in a state support a policy, their senators are less likely to vote for it.) Bartels also found that while senators in both parties were more likely to vote for a policy when it was supported by better-off voters, Republicans were much more responsive to high-income voters than were Democrats. Senators may pledge to represent everyone in a state, but they do not, Bartels’s analysis suggests, represent them equally—or sometimes at all.
Gilens took Bartels’s investigation a step further. In a truly mammoth research undertaking, he collected almost two thousand survey questions fielded since the early 1980s that ask people to say whether they wanted government policy to change. Then he looked at whether government policy actually did change. Like Bartels, Gilens did not just look at people in general, but broke the population down into income groups. Did it make a difference, Gilens asked, whether a policy had strong support among the poor (in Gilens’s analysis, someone with income greater than just 10 percent of the population), the middle class (the median income), or the well-off (income greater than 90 percent of the population)?
It turns out it makes a huge difference. Most policy changes with majority support didn’t become law—itself an important reminder of how hard it is to change policy in our fragmented and increasingly polarized politics. But they only stood a good chance of becoming law, Gilens found, when they were supported by those at the top. When the opinions of the poor diverged from those of the well-off, the opinions of the poor ceased to have any apparent influence: If 90 percent of poor Americans supported a policy change, it was no more likely to happen than if 10 percent did. By contrast, when more of the well-off supported a change, it was substantially more likely to happen.
But what about the middle class? They did not fare much better than the poor when their opinions departed from those of the well-off. When well-off people strongly supported a policy change, it had almost three times the chance of becoming law as when they strongly opposed it. When median-income people strongly supported a policy change, it had hardly any greater chance of becoming law than when they strongly opposed it. As Gilens concluded acerbically, “Most middle-income Americans think that public officials do not care much about the preferences of ‘people like me.’ Sadly, the results presented above suggest they may be right. Whether or not elected officials and other decision makers ‘care’ about middle-class Americans, influence over actual policy outcomes appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution.”15
The apparent weakness of the link between what elected representatives do and the opinion of middle- and working-class Americans reminds us that there is nothing automatic about democratic responsiveness—even in a nation, like the United States, where formal political equality is more or less universally guaranteed. Gilens’s and Bartels’s results suggest a startling disconnect in American politics, a chasm between voters and policymakers.
Yet this only deepens the mystery, since neither has much to say about what creates that chasm. Opinion surveys are largely devoid of information about the lobbying and organizational activities that really make politics tick. And they don’t reach many of the truly rich, so they are not going to help us understand the political activities and positions of the small slice of Americans who’ve made out so well in the winner-take-all economy. To figure out what has been happening, we need to unpack the politics of organized combat.
The Politics of Organized Combat
Where “politics as spectacle” concentrates on voters and politics, “politics as organized combat” focuses on groups and policies. Voters are hardly powerless. But their attention to what government actually does is limited and typically brief. And given the complexity of our political institutions, they can have a devilishly hard time determining whom they should hold accountable when they are discontented. In our fragmented political system, victories without enduring organization are almost always fleeting. To influence the exercise of government authority in a modern democracy generally requires a range of formidable capabilities: the capacity to mobilize resources, coordinate actions with others, develop extensive expertise, focus sustained attention, and operate flexibly across multiple domains of activity. These are the attributes of organizations, not discrete, atomized voters.
The peculiar institutions of American democracy that we looked at in the last chapter reinforce the exceptional advantages of organized groups. Our institutions were designed to fragment power among multiple sites of political authority—local, state, and federal; legislatures, presidents, and courts. Stasis rather than change is the natural expectation. Moreover, leaders with limited time and resources face many competing demands. They will generally make something a priority only if they see big opportunities, or expect to face substantial risks if they do nothing. Moving the mountain of our huge, complex government typically requires coordinated action on a broad scale. Stopping government initiatives, by contrast, often requires not mass support but only effective mobilization at one point in the complicated and mostly invisible chain of decision-making. The ear of a crucial committee chair may suffice.
Don’t get us wrong: Organized groups care deeply about elections, and they try very hard to swing them their way. But they are also shrewd enough, and experienced enough, to place the competition for votes in proper perspective. For most organizations engaged in politics, the fruit of all this effort is not the winning of office for its own sake but influence over policy. Fundamentally, what interest organizations care about is not the trappings of office but the substance of governance. Elections are only a means to the true end: control over political authority and, with it, the capacity to make policies.
We know what groups care about because of what they do, and especially because of what they spend money on. Organized interests convey their priorities and their sense of how politics works most clearly when they reach for their wallets. And in recent decades they have been reaching a lot deeper into their wallets—but not principally to shape elections. Of the billions of dollars now spent every year on politics, only a fairly small fraction is directly connected to electoral contests. The bulk of it goes to lobbying—sustained, intense efforts to shape what happens in Washington. Officially, over $3 billion is now spent every year by lobbyists. This figure has nearly doubled in just a decade and almost certainly dramatically understates true expenditures to influence policy. For powerful groups the center of action is in Washington, not the swing states. And more and more over the last thirty years, Washington has become their playground.
“Who Are Those Guys?”
We’ve always had a fondness for buddy flicks, and one of the best captures the central message of this book. Really.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a film about the West. Like many of the great westerns, it is really about the death of the frontier. Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) are charming rogues of moderate talent. With good humor, they exploit the disorganization of frontier life. Fronting a gang of ne’er-do-wells, they pick off isolated banks, or trains steaming alone through the prairies. Relying on little more than guile (mostly Newman) and bravado (mostly Redford), they find a market niche, and without breaking much of a sweat they build a nice little business.
Initially played mostly for laughs, the mood changes midway through the film. What looks like simply the gang’s latest prey turns out to be a trap. Their motley crew dispatched in shockingly rapid fashion, the two heroes beat a stunned and rapid retreat, with a mysterious and sinister team in hot pursuit. Newman and Redford employ every escape trick they know, and they know quite a few. But each one fails. After each failure they watch their relentless pursuers close in and, with growing apprehension, repeat the same question: “Who are those guys?”
“Those guys” are a modern, efficient organization—bringing with them the death of the old West, and more specifically the death of amateur thieves like the film’s heroes. Butch and Sundance eventually learn that the banks and railroads have grown tired of the nagging interference of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. In response, they have recruited, equipped, and deployed a team of superb specialists (trackers, sharpshooters, and so on) to bring the source of the corporations’ modest irritation to an end.
Hopelessly cornered and desperate, Butch and Sundance make a spectacular, death-defying escape. Given a chance to regroup, they conclude that their only bet is to find a new frontier, and they head for Bolivia. There they repeat some of their earlier successes against disorganized targets, reprising the light tone of the film’s first scenes. But it is only Indian summer. Even in Bolivia, the machinery of modernity is advancing. Before long, the charismatic bandits are literally outgunned—spectacularly so—by another organization, composed of what seems like half the Bolivian army.
“Who are those guys?” is, in a sense, the underlying question of this book. Why has Washington made the rich richer and abandoned the middle class? Because of the relentless effectiveness of modern, efficient organizations operating in a much less modern and efficient political system. Our story begins when these organizations were built, during the tumultuous years in which the unexpected liberalism of Nixonland turned into the unexpected conservatism of Carterland.