Under Democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to serve—and both commonly succeed and are right.
—H. L. Mencken
Fools to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right
In the last three decades, republican political activists have moved further to the right, and Democratic activists further to the left. In the process, what had been a competition of ideas between two great political parties became a destructive climate of polarization. Activists, who are practitioners of the politics of polarization, have replaced mainstream party operatives.
Conservative activists control most functions of the Republican National Committee, while their liberal counterparts direct most of the operations of the Democratic National Committee. Each party’s unstated mission is to obliterate the other. The national committees are like two race cars at a NASCAR event trying to push each other into the wall, with their pit crews using every trick, legal or otherwise, to make the cars faster and stronger. The stands are filled with activists screaming for blood, while the political press corps waits expectantly for a fiery crash that will boost circulation and ratings.
Both party cars are covered with the colorful logos of their financial backers. Republican “sponsors” include the National Rifle Association, National Right to Life Committee (and all the other “pro-life” organizations), the Christian Coalition, the Chamber of Commerce, Focus on the Family, The 700 Club, conservative talk radio, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Weekly Standard.
If you think that’s a lot, consider the logos behind the Democratic team: AFL-CIO, NOW, AARP, NARAL (and all the other “choice” groups), Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, the NAACP, NEA, AFSCME, the trial lawyers, and the ACLU.
These organizations are dedicated to promoting the message that America is divided. They have little interest in common ground because that would blur the distinctions between parties and affect the majority status of one or the other. It would also hurt fund-raising.
COMMON GROUND POINT TO REMEMBER: If American politics were united and politics was centered in bipartisanship and consensus, special interests would be less relevant, attract far less “conflict money” derived by promoting polarization, and they would have less political power.
The traditional role of political parties has been to choose candidates, dispense patronage, and get party members to vote on Election Day. Depending on when and where, these responsibilities were well organized, and at other times they were chaotic. As Mark Twain once said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Whether organized or not, it was generally in the party’s interest to keep a low profile since most of their “volunteers” were government patronage workers or the employees of government contractors.
As governments at all levels began to rein in patronage, party organizations lost government workers to do their bidding. When workers owed their jobs to the party and were underwritten by the taxpayer, it was easy for parties to field effective organizations. A party organizer had to perform, or potentially lose his source of income. To the patronage worker, this meant recruiting people to the party and getting them to vote. They had no concern about a particular voter’s political ideology, only that he or she showed up to vote on Election Day (or sent an absentee ballot if dead but still on the voting rolls).
Without patronage jobs, party operations had to depend increasingly on unpaid volunteers to do the political jobs patronage workers once performed. Like any other volunteer, a political party volunteer will work harder if motivated by a cause. The more extreme the cause, the more likely the volunteer will be motivated. That’s one reason why there has been an explosion of social-issue referendums on election ballots. There’s nothing like a referendum on gay marriage or abortion to get election workers motivated and strong partisans to the polls.
To promote the party’s agenda and motivate the base, incumbents in Congress are pressured not to deviate from the party line. We have discussed the various punitive measures for wayward members available to the parties’ congressional leadership. If an incumbent insists on following his conscience, there is nothing quite like the threat of a primary challenge from a more partisan party candidate to move him to the right or left. If an incumbent refuses to adjust to the party line, it’s increasingly likely he will be challenged for the nomination. A prime example occurred in the seventh Congressional District of Michigan in the Republican primary. Republican Joe Schwarz was elected to Congress in 2004. He is a medical doctor who supports the Supreme Court’s 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade. Schwarz wrote a poignant column for the Washington Post on September 17, 2006. Here is some of what he said:
I am the political equivalent of a woolly mammoth, a rarity heading for extinction. Yes, I’m a moderate.
Our plight today is dire. Even though more than half of all American voters consider themselves centrists, the Republican and Democratic parties are finding themselves controlled to an ever-greater extent by their more extreme elements. On the Republican side, the “religious right,” the quasi-theocrats, are infiltrating the party power structure quite effectively. On the left, the moneyed Eastern establishment and California liberals shrilly tell Americans that the sky is falling, that the world hates us and that Republican policies are all wrong. Yet they offer no viable alternatives. As a result, they have managed to alienate much of the traditional working-class Democratic base, good people caught between Republicans they don’t like and Democrats who have abandoned them. What’s a moderate to do?
In my case, lose an election. What did me in was voter apathy, and moral absolutist groups supported by a vitriolic negative-ad campaign funded by organizations on the far right.
Schwarz’s larger point of a bunker mentality and lack of communication across party and ideological lines is a good one. How can anyone expect to find consensus if people see one another as enemies and won’t even consider another person’s point of view? This is the reason politics needs a strong middle. However, as Schwarz learned, activists are dominant, especially in the primaries.
Political activists also exert enormous influence on the selection of the party’s presidential nominee. Not only do activists vote in large numbers, they also provide a pool of campaign workers for the primaries, and raise much of the “early” money so necessary, particularly in recent presidential campaigns. In the 2008 presidential campaigns, “early” money will play an even bigger role. Since there is no clear front runner in either party, the ability to raise early money will be an important indicator of political strength. Additionally, more money will be needed earlier in 2008 than in previous elections since many large states, including California, have moved their primaries to February 2008, and a few to January.
In the modern presidential selection process, no candidate of either party has been nominated without coming in first or second in either Iowa or New Hampshire. Moreover, the winner of the Iowa caucuses gets a huge boost going into the New Hampshire primary. (In 2008 Nevada will hold a caucus between Iowa and New Hampshire.) Party activists have long dominated the presidential selection process in both states. But even in states where activists have less influence, many are still chosen as national convention delegates (although they must vote in a manner that reflects their state’s primary elections or caucuses).
The national party delegates who convene in the quadrennial convention to anoint their presidential and vice-presidential candidates (the nominating process having been concluded by the primary voters months before party conventions) are generally the most partisan of the partisan. Their views are far from the political views of the party rank and file. For two decades, CBS News and the New York Times have surveyed the differences between Democratic and Republican presidential convention delegates on key issues. The survey then asks the same issue questions to representative samples of rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans across the country.
In 2004, the CBS/NYT survey asked if delegates agreed or disagreed with the statement “Government should do more to solve national problems.” The spread between the delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions was a whopping 72 percent. The spread between rank-and-file party members on the same statement was only 13 percent, a 59 percent differential between activists and rank-and-file members of the same party.
On the issue of making “all tax cuts permanent,” the difference between delegates to the two conventions was 88 percent. The difference between rank-and-file party members on the same question was only 35 percent. That’s a 53 percent difference in attitudes between party activists and the members of the parties they purport to represent.
COMMON GROUND POINT TO REMEMBER: Regardless of the answers to the CBS/NYT questions, the conclusion is obvious—activists of both parties are ideologues, regular party members are not.
The Gift That Keeps on Giving
By centralizing campaign resources in Washington the polarizers are better able to control elected officials, party operatives, campaign consultants, and especially campaign contributions—providing crucial leverage as the mother’s milk of politics. Campaigns have become outrageously expensive.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 85 percent of the 2000 Senate candidates who spent the most money succeeded at the polls. The success ratio for big spenders was even higher in that year’s House races. Twenty-five financial underdogs were successful, but many of them had spent almost as much as their opponents.
In the 2006 elections, there was not as much disparity between incumbents and challengers. Incumbents still outspent challengers, but in competitive races the differences by historical standards were very small. In 2006 the party campaign committees raised more money than at any time in history. The result was that Democratic challengers, who were thought to have a serious chance at beating an incumbent, were helped with huge amounts of money. Conversely, incumbent Republicans received millions from party committees to retain their seats.
The cost of getting to Congress and staying there requires more money than a candidate could ever hope to raise from family and friends. Campaining for the House routinely costs $1 million or more. Senate races can easily exceed $10 million. All that money for a job that pays $158,103 per year. Those who do not depend on large amounts of money from party campaign committees or Washington special interests are usually multimillionaires who finance their own race. Most candidates for Congress are not millionaires and so are “forced” to turn to lobbyists for campaign contribution. The lobbyists, of course, assume that in return for helping the candidate, they will have access to her after the election. It is a sickening revolving door and the taxpayers are the losers.
Most campaign money, especially for incumbents, is found among the various special-interest groups that swarm over Washington like the occasional locust infestation. Special-interest lobbies grow by the hundreds each year, adding to the thousands already in Washington. The lobby business also provides a source of job security for members of Congress once they retire or lose reelection. Most former members don’t go home; instead they become lobbyists. While they once represented their state or district, they now represent themselves, and cash in on the access to former colleagues. (Not to mention lifetime access to the House or Senate floor.)
Campaign Central
In this era of polarization, special-interest groups are encouraged (about as nice a word as we could use) to contribute to the national party committees, and to the House and Senate campaign committees. This gives party committees the ability to control the flow of campaign contributions to candidates, and with it an enormous amount of leverage. With centralized campaign funds has come the nationalization of campaign messages. The parties create their respective messages and expect the candidates to use them. It doesn’t matter how different one media market is from another, the campaign ads have the same message. The background may be different and the accents appropriate for the region where the ads appear, but they all seem to say the same thing.
This is due, in part, to the influence over political consultants by the same national committees that control campaign money. Political consultants have multiplied exponentially in recent years. Most of their campaign experience has been limited to the highly charged partisan climate of the past three decades. The results have been negative campaigns, which are now the rule rather then the exception. Consultants, like candidates, rely on the goodwill of the party committees for candidate referrals. The committees become, in effect, job banks for consultants. Consultants, wanting to maintain good relationships, agree to promote the party’s agenda with their clients.
“The result is that the conventional debate about whether congressional elections are primarily local or national in character is both irrelevant and misleading. Even apparently local developments are often orchestrated from afar, and even personal attacks on individual candidates are largely the work of a cadre of Washington-based researchers.”
—E. J. Dionne, Washington Post, October 2006
Candidates’ dependency on partisan sources for money and their addiction to consultants inevitably lead to negative campaigns. Much has been made of the nastiness of modern political campaigns. But it would be a mistake to assume, as some commentators have suggested, that negative campaigns are the primary cause of political polarization. In fact, the opposite is true. The control exerted by proponents of polarization leads to negative campaigns. Polarizers depend on messages that undermine their opponents and cast their differences in the starkest of terms. To accomplish this, polarizing messages by definition need to be negative.