I EXPECT THE size and scope of American social policy will expand significantly in coming decades. My reasoning can be stated simply:
• The United States has deficiencies in economic security, opportunity, and shared prosperity.
• The economic and social trends at fault will continue and perhaps get worse.
• Experience here and abroad suggests that government social programs can help.
• Policy makers try to solve problems. Reason and evidence will lead some of them to propose new government programs and the expansion of existing ones.
• On occasion, they will succeed. (The hypothesis doesn’t specify when or why. It’s probabilistic.)
• Those successes will tend to stick.
This is how social policy in the United States has evolved over the past century. It has expanded in fits and starts, bursts and lulls. Movement has been largely forward; backsliding has been rare. Simple extrapolation suggests that this is what we should expect for the future. Further advance won’t necessarily happen soon, and progress almost certainly won’t be steady or regular. But if we think in terms of decades or, better yet, a half century, the most reasonable projection is for a significant expansion of public social programs along the lines of those suggested in chapter 3.
Is it sensible to extrapolate? In this chapter, I consider five reasons for skepticism. First, Americans don’t want big government. Second, opponents of big government have become very effective at deploying the rhetoric of reaction. Third, the left will increasingly struggle to get elected. Fourth, the balance of organized power in the United States has shifted to the right. Fifth, the structure of our political system impedes progressive policy change.
Each of these is a potentially powerful obstacle to progress. Yet none is likely to derail America’s slow but steady movement toward an expanded government role in improving economic security, enhancing opportunity, and ensuring rising living standards for all.
Compared to other rich nations, the United States has a relatively small government—particularly with respect to programs that provide economic security, enhance opportunity, and facilitate rising living standards. Many say this is because it’s what Americans want. More than our counterparts in other rich nations, we tend to believe that individual effort, rather than luck, determines success in life. We therefore see a need for only minimal government assistance.
This view has a long history. One of its best expositions is by Seymour Martin Lipset, who helped to popularize the notion of American exceptionalism. Lipset argues that Americans’ belief in individualism and liberty and their hostility to government are the source of many differences between the United States and other rich countries.1
In the early 2000s, John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, a British editor and writer for the Economist magazine, took a close look at the peculiarities of American politics and political culture. In their book The Right Nation, they conclude that “the United States has always been a conservative country, marinated in religion, in love with business, and hostile to the state.… Americans are exceptionally keen on limiting the size of the state and the scope of what it does.”2
A more recent statement of this view comes from Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, who argue that differences in the generosity of government social programs across the world’s rich nations stem from differing popular views of the causes of poverty. Alesina and Glaeser find that in countries in which a larger share of the population believes people’s effort is the key determinant of their income, government spending on social programs tends to be lower. In nations where people deem luck more important, social program expenditures tend to be higher.3 The United States is among the former. Only about 35 percent of Americans in the survey feel luck is more important than effort, compared to 60 percent of Danes.
Public opinion data support the notion that Americans don’t like big government. Surveys conducted since the mid-1970s have asked representative samples of American adults, “If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services or a bigger government providing more services?” In only a few years did the the share choosing “bigger government providing more services” reach 50 percent; in most years, it has hovered between 30 percent and 45 percent.4 Gallup periodically asks, “In your opinion, which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future—big business, big labor, or big government?” Since the early 1980s, 50–70 percent of Americans have said “big government” is the largest threat.5 For more than twenty years, the Pew Research Center has asked Americans whether they agree or disagree that “when something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful.” In each year 55–75 percent have said they completely agree or mostly agree.6 The National Election Study (NES) regularly asks, “Do you think that people in government waste a lot of the money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don’t waste very much of it?” In most years 60–75 percent have said “a lot.”7 Finally, since the early 1970s, the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked Americans if they have “a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all” in various organizations and institutions. For Congress and the president, the share responding “a great deal of confidence” has been below 30 percent in every year.8
Public opinion data like these buttress the impression that Americans are averse to activist government. But they hide a deeper truth: although Americans are ideologically conservative when it comes to the size and scope of government, we’re programmatically progressive. We’re averse to big government in the abstract, but we like a lot of the things government actually does.
The GSS regularly asks a set of questions prefaced by the following statement: “We are faced with many problems in this country, none of which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I’m going to name some of these problems, and for each one I’d like you to tell me whether you think we’re spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount.” Since the late 1970s, a large majority, always over 80 percent and often more than 90 percent, has said current spending is too little or about right on “assistance to the poor,” on “improving the nation’s education system,” on “improving and protecting the nation’s health,” and on “Social Security.”9 An irregular series of polls between 1980 and 2007 asked, “Do you favor or oppose national health insurance, which would be financed by tax money, paying for most forms of healthcare?” In almost every instance 50–65 percent have said they are in favor, while 25–40 percent are opposed.10 In 2011, the Pew Research Center found 61 percent of Americans saying “people on Medicare already pay enough of the cost of their health care” versus 31 percent saying “people on Medicare need to be more responsible for the cost of their healthcare in order to keep the program financially secure.”11 In 2007, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs asked a representative sample of Americans, “Would you be willing to pay more taxes in order to provide health coverage for everyone?” Nearly 60 percent were willing versus just 40 percent who were unwilling.12 They asked the same question about paying more in taxes for “early childhood education in kindergarten and nursery school.” Here, 64 percent were willing versus 33 percent unwilling.13 Finally, Page and Jacobs asked whether the EITC should be increased, decreased, or kept about the same. More than 90 percent wanted it increased or kept the same.14
There is only one significant exception to the popularity of existing social programs in America: welfare. In the GSS surveys, between 40 percent and 60 percent of Americans say we spend too much on welfare.15 Though the question doesn’t specify the particular program, it’s likely that most respondents have in mind AFDC, which was replaced in the mid-1990s by TANF. As Martin Gilens has documented, AFDC was uniquely unpopular with the American public.16 This owes to a variety of factors, according to Gilens, prominent among them race and media portrayals of the recipients. The perception is deeply ingrained. Despite the pronounced changes introduced by the 1996 welfare reform—strict time limits on benefit receipt, reduced benefit levels, stronger employment requirements—the GSS responses suggest little, if any, shift in public opinion about “welfare” since then.
Conventional wisdom holds that Americans have become more conservative in recent decades—the so-called age of Reagan.17 Have our views about government’s role or specific programs shifted? For the most part, no. The share of Americans identifying as conservative and/or Republican increased a bit in the 1970s and 1980s. But views about government effectiveness and how much we should be spending on particular policies have remained fairly constant.18
Many Americans dislike the idea of big government. But when we think about it in terms of specific programs, we’re not at all averse to a government that is medium-sized or even large.
When the American public favors a proposed policy change, it is more likely to be adopted. When the public opposes a change, it is less likely to be adopted. That’s the finding of a study titled “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy” by Benjamin Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, published in 1983.19 Page and Shapiro find considerable congruence in public opinion and policy changes in the United States from 1935 to 1979. They also find that public opinion influences policy changes rather than the other way around.
In a book published thirty years later, Martin Gilens looks at patterns between the mid-1960s and the mid-2000s.20 His findings echo those of Page and Shapiro. When only 5 percent of Americans favored a proposed policy change, as gauged by public opinion surveys, the change was adopted just 10 percent of the time. When 45–55 percent favored the change, it was adopted 25–30 percent of the time. When 95 percent were in favor, the proposed change was adopted 60 percent of the time.
Robert Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James Stimson conducted a similar test but in a slightly different way.21 Rather than examine the relationship between public opinion and policy change for each specific issue, they constructed an index of public opinion liberalism and an index of policy liberalism and looked at how these indexes correlate over time. They too find strong indication of an association between public opinion and policy, and they too conclude that the relationship is causal.
What these types of studies can tell us is constrained by the limits of available survey data. Public opinion data don’t exist for some issues, and for others the questions don’t effectively tap the issue at stake. Still, these findings suggest a basic harmony between what Americans want and what their policy makers give them.
From the perspective of democracy, that’s a reassuring conclusion. But it raises a question about my expectation that government social policy will expand in coming decades: do we need strong public support beforehand in order to get new programs adopted or existing ones expanded?
No, we don’t. Consider Martin Gilens’s recent findings. In his data, if public support for a proposed policy change is in the neighborhood of 45–55 percent, the likelihood that the change will be adopted is 25–30 percent. In other words, even if public opinion is split, the change has a one in four chance of getting passed. Public support helps, but it isn’t necessary.
Additional evidence comes from a study by Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs.22 Examining public opinion on the major social policy innovations of the 1930s and the 1960s, they find evidence of considerable ambivalence and/or opposition among ordinary Americans to the proposed programs. The public, according to Newman and Jacobs, had “mixed and contentious attitudes about activist government.”23 Policy advances owed mainly to the efforts of political leaders, particularly Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, presidents who “moved boldly into a policy vacuum or forged on against growing antagonism. They pushed and pulled legislators into creating and then sustaining the progressive history of the 1930s and 1960s that we now—mistakenly—see as a sea change in popular political culture.”24 Here, too, the message is that while public support increases the likelihood of policy advance, it isn’t a necessary condition. Policy makers can overcome ambivalence among the citizenry.
Often, ordinary Americans aren’t sure what they think about a social program until it has been around for a while. That’s hardly surprising; it’s difficult to know ahead of time how, and how well, a program will function. Once people see a program in action, they are better able to form an opinion. If a program works well, and there don’t appear to be any major adverse side effects, they tend to like it.
Since public views about programs tend to be stronger after they have been put in place, we might expect public opinion to have more influence on proposed changes to existing programs than on proposals for new programs. And since the public tends to like existing social programs, we might expect public opinion to act as a brake on proposals to cut back or remove them. This is exactly what Paul Pierson finds through his examination of changes in social policy in the United Kingdom during the Thatcher years and in the United States during the Reagan years.25 Both administrations were committed to reducing the size and scope of government, including social programs. Both put forward multiple proposals for cutbacks. Both were in power for a fairly lengthy period. Yet neither Thatcher nor Reagan had much success.
Popularity doesn’t make a program invulnerable to retrenchment or removal. But it reduces the likelihood of that happening. This is a key reason why the trajectory of American social policy has been forward, and why we might reasonably expect that to continue.
Proponents of small government are adept at deploying what Albert Hirschman terms the “rhetoric of reaction”—arguments suggesting that efforts to enhance justice and fairness are misguided.26 Hirschman identifies three types: futility arguments, perversity arguments, and jeopardy arguments. Futility arguments hold that government programs fail to have any impact. For instance, public schools fail to educate because they face little or no competition. Perversity arguments contend that government programs worsen the problem they aim to address. An example is the contention that generous government benefits discourage work and thereby increase poverty instead of reducing it. Jeopardy arguments claim that government programs threaten some other desirable outcome. For instance, if we increase government spending, we’ll get less economic growth.
Will these types of arguments block future progress in American social policy? I suspect not. Futility, perversity, and jeopardy arguments seem compelling. That’s why they are effective. Sometimes they are empirically true, but often they aren’t. Hirschman points out that in centuries past these types of claims were made to oppose the introduction of democracy. It was suggested, for instance, that if voting rights were extended to the “ignorant masses,” they would elect a tyrant, who would subsequently abolish democracy (futility). Or democracy would result in the expropriation and redistribution of property, thereby wrecking the economy and making everyone poorer (jeopardy).
In principle, such claims are testable. But prior to the introduction of democracy, there was no evidence.
Until recently, that’s been the case for many claims about the futility, perversity, or jeopardy of generous social programs. Social scientists have lacked sufficient data to subject those claims to empirical scrutiny. But this is changing. We’re now in a much better position to evaluate these hypotheses, and our ability to do so will continue to improve going forward. Empirical assessment won’t end the influence of such claims in policy debate, but it will reduce that influence enough to open up some political space.
Climate change may prove to be a turning point. As I write, in 2013, climate experts are in near-unanimous agreement that human-generated carbon dioxide emissions are causing the planet to warm. There is uncertainty about the impact this will have on the planet if left unchecked, and there is considerable debate about the appropriate policy response. But we are now past the point at which it is reasonable to deny that climate change is occurring and that humans are causing it. Yet a number of Republicans in Congress still espouse this view, hampering the US government’s ability to take action to reduce carbon emissions.27 Their antiscientific orientation is reminiscent of cigarette manufacturers’ denial that smoking causes lung cancer long after medical researchers had reached near-consensus on the facts.
This may usher in a shift in the standards to which the American public and media hold policy makers. Going forward, it is likely to become increasingly difficult for policy makers to rely on claims that are at odds with the preponderance of evidence.
Not every claim made in opposition to a large government role in protecting economic security, expanding opportunity, and ensuring shared prosperity can be assessed empirically. But some can, such as the notion that higher taxes will hurt the economy. As I explained in chapter 4, there is some level of taxation at which this is true, but available data suggest the United States is below that level. As evidence mounts, this claim will be heard less frequently. Hardly anyone today argues that nations should avoid democracy on the grounds that it leads to tyranny. The argument doesn’t square with the facts. For the same reason, half a century from now few will claim that government taxing and spending at 45 percent of GDP is bad for the American economy.
Relative to its counterparts in other affluent nations, the Democratic Party in the United States has always been a centrist party, rather than a left party. Even so, most of the major advances in American social policy have occurred when Democrats held the presidency and one or both bodies of Congress. That’s likely to continue.
As figure 5.1 shows, Democrats dominated the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1930 to 1980, though the presidency swung back and forth. Since 1980, control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress has been split fairly evenly between the two parties. To achieve social policy advances in coming decades, the Democrats need to avoid a lengthy period of sustained minority status of the kind suffered by the Republicans during the New Deal era.
FIGURE 5.1 Democratic control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives
Lines indicate years of Democratic president, Democratic majority in the Senate, Democratic majority in the House. The end point is 2016 for the president and 2014 for the Senate and House. Data source: Wikipedia.
Two hypotheses predict that this worst-case scenario may well come to pass. The first says Democrats will struggle because working-class whites, the party’s traditional base, are now guided in their party preference by social and cultural issues rather than economic ones, which leads them to favor the Republicans. The second says we are entering a period when enormous quantities of private money will flow into election campaigns, with Republicans the chief beneficiaries.
Working-class whites have moved away from the Democrats. In the mid-1970s, about 60 percent of white Americans who self-identified as working class said they preferred the Democratic Party. That number fell steadily from the late 1970s, bottoming out at 40 percent in the early 1990s, where it has remained since.28 The same trend is evident among whites with less than a high school degree and among whites on the lower third of the income ladder.29 In the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections, whites with less than a four-year college degree favored the Republican candidate over the Democratic one by roughly twenty percentage points.30
Why has this happened? Ronald Inglehart’s “postmaterialist” hypothesis suggests that as a society gets wealthy, issues other than those connected to material self-interest become more important to people.31 There is no clear working-class interest in being either pro-choice or pro-life on abortion or in favoring or opposing equal rights for homosexuals. Hence, as material issues lose their centrality, working-class identification with the party that better serves its material interests is likely to decline. In his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank suggests that working-class Americans’ conservative inclinations on social and cultural issues have led many of them, particularly in rural parts of the South and the Midwest, to side with the Republicans at the expense of their economic interests.
Will this consign the Democrats to regular electoral defeat? That seems unlikely. As Ruy Teixeira and John Judis pointed out a decade ago in The Emerging Democratic Majority, the Democratic Party has a new electoral base centered on urban professionals, women, African Americans, and Latinos.32 These groups are large, and most are growing. In addition, geographic trends will help the Democrats to remain competitive in national elections for the foreseeable future. The Northeast, the West Coast, and Illinois are now solidly Democratic, and most of the upper Midwest leans in that direction. None of this guarantees presidential victories or congressional majorities. But it does suggest that forecasts of impending electoral disaster for the Democrats probably are wrong.
Equally important, the health of the economy is the chief determinant of the outcome of national elections. Douglas Hibbs and Larry Bartels point out that presidential election outcomes can be predicted fairly well using just a single measure of economic performance—per capita income growth.33 This is displayed in figure 5.2. On the vertical axis is the incumbent-party candidate’s vote margin. On the horizontal axis is the growth rate of per capita real disposable personal income in the middle two quarters (April to September) of the election year, adjusted for how long the incumbent party has been in office. This simple model does a good job of predicting the vote outcome. Other models can predict even more accurately by including additional factors; but in all of them, measures of economic performance play a central role.34
What about Congress? House and Senate elections are, not surprisingly, more idiosyncratic than presidential elections. Yet the condition of the national economy has consistently been a good predictor of the outcome.35
The implication is clear: if the Democrats do reasonably well (or Republicans fare poorly) at managing the economy, they’ll remain competitive in elections.
FIGURE 5.2 Income growth and presidential election outcomes
Vertical axis is the incumbent-party candidate’s vote margin. Horizontal axis is the growth rate of per capita real disposable income in the second and third quarters of the election year, adjusted for incumbency (–1.29 for each consecutive term, beyond the first, that the incumbent party has held the White House). The correlation is .89. This replicates Larry Bartels’s chart in “Obama Toes the Line,” The Monkey Cage, January 8, 2013.
The second hypothesis predicting electoral struggles for the American left suggests that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision will allow private money to flood into Republican campaign coffers. That ruling prohibited restrictions on political campaign spending by organizations, such as firms and unions, opening the door to unlimited expenditures by outside groups on behalf of their preferred candidate or party.
It’s too soon to be able to render an informed judgment on the impact of the Citizens United decision, but the degree to which it altered the legal landscape is sometimes overstated.36 Before the super PACs (political action committees) and 501(c)(4)s that sprang up after Citizens United, individuals and corporations already could make unlimited donations to 527s. The only difference is that the new organizations are less constrained in naming the candidates they favor or oppose in advertisements running during the two months prior to the election.
Figure 5.3 shows campaign expenditures for Democrats and Republicans in presidential-year elections and off-year elections since 1998 (the earliest year for which data are available). In the 2012 election cycle, outside money favored Republican candidates, just as pessimists had predicted.37 But that isn’t surprising, given that the Republicans were the opposition party (the Democrats held the presidency and the Senate). As Matt Bai wrote during the 2012 election campaign,
FIGURE 5.3 Campaign expenditures by and for Democrats and Republicans
Billions of inflation-adjusted dollars. Includes expenditures by candidates, parties, and outside groups. Data source: Center for Responsive Politics, “Total Cost of US Elections, 1998–2012,” www.opensecrets.org, accessed January 18, 2013.
Rich conservatives weren’t inspired to invest their fortunes in 2004, when Bush ran for the second time while waging an unpopular war, or in 2008, when they were forced to endure the nomination of McCain. But now there’s a president and a legislative agenda they bitterly despise …, so it’s not surprising that outside spending by Republicans in 2010 and 2012 would dwarf everything that came before. What we are seeing—what we almost certainly would have seen even without the court’s ruling in Citizens United—is the full force of conservative wealth in America, mobilized by a common enemy for the first time since the fall of party monopolies.38
Even if money totals continue to favor Republicans, it’s unclear how much that will matter. There are diminishing returns to money in influencing election outcomes: when a lot is already being spent, additional amounts have limited impact. The Democrats had less money in 2012, yet they were competitive in the presidential, House, and Senate elections.
The history of campaign finance in national elections in the past four decades is one of each party and its backers seeking new ways to raise and spend large amounts of money in spite of existing regulations. In the 1970s, the Democrats had the advantage. By the end of the 1980s, the Republicans had the upper hand. Toward the end of the 2000s, it shifted back to the Democrats. We may now be in the midst of another Republican surge. Even if that happens, however, past experience suggests that Democrats and their supporters will figure out ways to offset the advantage Republicans gain from Citizens United, or at least to mitigate its impact.39 I’m not suggesting that money doesn’t matter in American elections. It does.40 The point is simply that future developments in campaign financing are unlikely to doom the Democrats.
A variant of this second hypothesis says that the flood of private money won’t kill Democrats’ electoral fortunes, but it will push them to the right, reducing their support for social policy advance.41 This is possible. However, we’ve already experienced a flood of private money into politics over the past three decades. According to the standard measure of policy makers’ voting, it hasn’t produced a shift to the center among Democratic legislators. Figure 5.4 shows voting trends on economic issues by House and Senate Democrats. Democrats did not move toward the center during this period. This is partly because the number of Democratic senators and representatives from the conservative South has been declining. But even among nonsouthern Democratic lawmakers, there is no sign of a move to the center.42
Focusing on voting might be misleading. After all, much of the important decision making by policy makers occurs before proposals come to a final vote. If we could measure this, we might find there has in fact been a move toward the center by Democrats in response to the growing influence of campaign contributors. But if that shift has happened, it has yet to be documented.
FIGURE 5.4 Voting by Democrats in the House and Senate
Average “dimension 1 DW-nominate” scores for Democratic legislators. The range shown here is –1 to +1 (left to right). Data source: Keith Poole and Christopher Hare, “An Update on Political Polarization through the 112th Congress,” Voteview, January 16, 2013.
Since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, a significant portion of the American left has been in a near-constant state of despair about the electoral future of the Democratic Party. The party had drifted too far to the left, according to some. It had moved too far to the right, said others. It was incapable of nominating effective candidates. It couldn’t keep up with the Republicans’ fundraising. It lost touch with ordinary Americans. It was disorganized. It was too liberal on social issues. It was too dependent on big finance for campaign funding.
Each of these concerns is understandable. But the Democratic Party and its major candidates have, at least to this point, proven more resilient than pessimists expected. The Democrats have won four of the last six presidential elections, and in the past six congresses they’ve held a majority in the House twice and in the Senate four times. The recent past isn’t necessarily a useful guide to the future. It’s possible that American politics is on the verge of a sea change, with the Democrats’ electoral fortunes dwindling. But that does not seem especially likely.
According to a distinguished line of political analysis, from E. E. Schattschneider to William Domhoff to Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the scope and generosity of government social policy in the United States is determined less by election outcomes than by the relative strength of organized interest groups.43 Since the mid-1970s, American businesses and America’s rich have mobilized, while the left has fragmented and weakened.44 Will this altered balance of power inhibit further progress in social policy?
FIGURE 5.5 “One-off shift” and “continuing trend” hypotheses about the relative strength of organized interest groups
The vertical scale indicates the relative strength of organized interest groups. Higher on the axis indicates the right is stronger; lower indicates the left is stronger.
There are two versions of this line of thinking. Figure 5.5 displays a stylized depiction of each. According to the first, the change was a one-off shift in the level of organizational strength. It happened in the late 1970s and/or the early 1980s, and there has been no change since. According to the second, the shift is a trend. It began in the late 1970s, has been ongoing since then, and will continue into the future.
If the change in the balance of interest group organization was a one-off shift, its impact on social policy advance should already be apparent, given that the shift occurred quite a while ago. Has progress in social policy stopped?
No. It has slowed, but it hasn’t ceased.45 There have been quite a few advances since the 1970s, including:
• Increases in the EITC and expansion of access (in 1986, 1990, 1993, 2009)
• Expansion of unemployment insurance (2009)
• Increases in Medicaid benefits and expansion of access (1984–88, 1998, 2010)
• Free immunization for kids in low-income families (Vaccines for Children, 1993)
• Expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs (2004)
• Subsidy to low-income families’ for childcare expenses (Child Care and Development Fund, 1990, 2009)
• Expansions of Head Start (1984, 1990, 1995, 2009)
• Expansion of public kindergarten to full days in most states and establishment of age-three and age-four prekindergarten programs in some states
• Reduction of funding inequality across elementary and secondary schools in most states
• Public funding of after-school activities in schools in low-income communities (21st Century Community Learning Centers program, 1998)
• Increases in college student loan funding (Pell Grant, Lifetime Learning Credit, Hope Credit)
• Expansions of retraining, job placement assistance, access to healthcare, and income support for people who lose a job due to international trade (1997, 2002, 2009)
• Antidiscrimination protection for people with disabilities (1990)
• Increase in disability benefits and expansion of access
• Creation and expansion of the Child Tax Credit (1997, 2003)
• Guaranteed right to unpaid family leave (1993) and introduction of paid leave in a few states (since 2004)
• Increase in housing assistance (1987)
• Establishment of and increases in energy assistance (Low-Income Energy Assistance, 1981, 2009)
The one notable move in the opposite direction took place with AFDC. From the 1970s on, benefit levels have decreased in inflation-adjusted terms, and the 1996 welfare reform put time limits on benefit receipt. But AFDC was a uniquely unpopular social program. In fact, welfare is the lone public social program consistently disliked by a majority of Americans.46 In any event, its weakening is the exception, not the rule.
Some consider the 1983 Social Security amendments another exception. To shore up the program’s funding, these reforms raised the retirement age, increased the payroll tax, and increased the taxation of Social Security benefits. The increase in the retirement age was a benefit cut, but it was merited, arguably, by rising life expectancy.
Additional evidence that social policy became more generous is found in CBO data. Figure 5.6 shows the CBO’s estimates of the amount by which transfers and taxes boosted household incomes at the twentieth percentile of income from 1979 to 2007. The amount increased steadily. A good bit of this owed to increases in the value of Medicare and Medicaid benefits, but even so, these data suggest overall improvement in the size and scope of American social policy.47
FIGURE 5.6 Difference between household market income and posttransferposttax income at the twentieth percentile of the income ladder
Incomes are adjusted for household size. The market income measure includes earnings, employer-paid health insurance premiums, the employer share of payroll taxes, business income, capital income, and capital gains. The posttransfer-posttax income measure subtracts federal tax payments and adds cash and in-kind government transfers, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, SSI, AFDC-TANF, veterans’ benefits, workers’ compensation, state and local cash assistance programs, food stamps, school lunches and breakfasts, housing assistance, energy assistance, Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP. The health benefits are measured as the fungible value to the recipient. The incomes are in 2007 dollars; inflation adjustment is via the CPI-U-RS. The line is a loess curve. Data source: Congressional Budget Office, “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” 2011, appendix tables A-1 and A-3.
If the shift in organized power was a one-off, the fact that public social policy has continued to advance despite the shift implies that we are likely to see further advance in the future.
The second version of the shift-in-the-balance-of-organized-power hypothesis, depicted in the second chart in figure 5.5, posits that the shift is a trend. It began in the late 1970s and has been ongoing since then, with the strength of the right relative to the left steadily increasing. This paints a worrisome picture, suggesting we have not yet reached the point of maximum strength in the organized power of the right.
If this hypothesis is correct, what might the impact on advances in social policy be? We can glean some information by comparing policy change in the 1980s and the 2000s. If the continuing-trend hypothesis is correct, there should have been less social policy advance in the 2000s than in the 1980s. That isn’t the case, according to the list of increases in the size and scope of social programs shown earlier and the information in figure 5.6. If we don’t include the changes in the 2009 economic stimulus or the 2010 healthcare reform, the rate of advance in the two decades is similar. If we include those 2009–10 policy advances, the 2000s come out ahead by a good bit.
Here, too, the most reasonable conclusion is that the pattern of progress in social policy over the past century will continue.
Even if the obstacles I’ve considered so far can be overcome, progress toward more expansive and generous social policy might be impeded by our political system’s abundance of “veto points”—a legislature and executive each elected directly by the people, two coequal legislative bodies, and the filibuster in the Senate.48 These offer a determined minority multiple ways to block proposed policy changes.
On the one hand, these features of America’s political system have been in place for some time, and while they surely have slowed the pace of social policy advance in the United States, they haven’t prevented it. On the other hand, recent years have seen an increase in the cohesiveness, discipline, and confrontational posture of Republicans in Congress, making it very difficult for Democrats to get legislation passed unless they hold the presidency, a majority in the House, and sixty seats in the Senate. Does this spell the end of social policy advance?
The extensiveness of veto points has taken on new importance in American politics because the Democratic and Republican parties have become much more cohesive. Until recently, both were loose collections of individuals with varying orientations and policy preferences. This was largely a legacy of the Civil War and the New Deal. In the South, many viewed the Civil War as a military invasion engineered by the Republican Party. For the better part of the following century, political competition in the South occurred entirely within the Democratic Party rather than between Democrats and Republicans. With the New Deal legislation in the 1930s, the Democrats became the party in favor of government intervention to enhance security and opportunity. Although this conflicted with the conservative orientation of many southern Democrats, they remained in the party until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 aligned the national Democratic Party with equal rights for African Americans.
While conservative southerners have been moving to the Republican Party, liberals in the rest of the country have been switching to the Democrats.49 The ideological purification of the two parties is now complete: in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the leftmost Republican is to the right of the rightmost Democrat.50
In prior eras, proponents of policy change often succeeded by fashioning a coalition across party lines. While this was seldom an easy task, it is now an extremely difficult one.51
From the perspective of democracy, there is a benefit to party cohesiveness: it provides voters with clear information about how a candidate will behave in office. But in a political system with multiple veto points, party cohesiveness increases the likelihood of gridlock. As long as the minority party controls one of the three lawmaking bodies—the presidency, the House, or the Senate—it can veto virtually any proposed policy change. Indeed, given the filibuster practice in the Senate, the minority doesn’t actually need to control any of the three; it simply needs forty-one of the hundred seats in the Senate. The majority can circumvent the filibuster via a procedure known as “reconciliation,” but this can be used only for a narrow range of bills.
The polarization of America’s two political parties has been asymmetrical: the Republicans have moved farther to the right than the Democrats have moved to the left. Figure 5.7 shows the average voting position on economic issues (broadly defined) among members of each party in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both parties have shifted away from the center as they’ve become more cohesive. But Republicans in the House, and recently those in the Senate too, have moved farther from the center than have Democrats in either chamber.
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein point to another indicator of the rightward shift among Republican legislators:
the size of the House GOP’s right-wing caucus, the Republican Study Committee, or RSC. Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists created the committee in 1973 as an informal group to pull the center-right party much further to the right. It had only 10 to 20 percent of Republican representatives as members as recently as the 1980s, a small fringe group. In the 112th Congress [2011–12], the RSC had 166 members, or nearly seven-tenths of the caucus.52
FIGURE 5.7 Voting by Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate
Average “dimension 1 DW-nominate” scores for Republican legislators and Democratic legislators in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The range shown here is 0 (center) to –1 or +1 (extreme left or right). Data source: Keith Poole and Christopher Hare, “An Update on Political Polarization through the 112th Congress,” Voteview, January 16, 2013.
Republicans have become more unified in voting as well. Keith Poole has measured the share of party members who follow their party on votes in which a majority in one party votes opposite to a majority in the other party (in other words, leaving out votes on which there is significant bipartisan support). The share has risen from 75 percent in 1970 to 90–95 percent in recent years.53 The Republicans’ unity and their oppositional temperament were on display during the debate on President Obama’s proposed economic stimulus package in early 2009. Not a single Republican in the House voted in favor of the package, even though many had voted for a stimulus measure a year earlier when the economy was in far less dire shape.54
In the Senate, both parties have made more frequent use of the filibuster to block legislative proposals when they’ve been in the minority. The best indicator of filibuster use is the number of cloture motions—motions to cut off filibuster attempts—that are filed. As figure 5.8 shows, the rise in filibustering began in the 1970s. Large jumps occurred in 1971, 1991, and 2007, with the latter being especially pronounced. In each case, Republicans initiated the rise.
FIGURE 5.8 Use of the filibuster in the Senate
Number of cloture filings. The line is a loess curve. Data source: www.senate.gov, “Senate Action on Cloture Motions.”
Have these developments made it more difficult to pass legislation? Figure 5.9 shows the number of laws passed by Congress in each term since the early 1930s. Although there has been a decline, it began before the 1970s. And there was no acceleration in the 1970s when the polarization of the parties and increased use of the filibuster began, or in the 1990s when Republicans in the House began their sharp turn to the right and filibuster use jumped, or in the past few years as Republicans became especially obstructionist.
Even if we don’t see a clear impact of the new Republican obstructionism, it could have an effect in the future. Will it? I suspect the Republican leadership in Congress will sooner or later turn away from the staunch antigovernment orientation that has dominated its approach of late. I see three potential triggers. One is a bad loss in an otherwise winnable election. This nearly happened in 2012, as Republican voters in the presidential primaries flirted with a series of unelectable conservative candidates—Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum—before settling on Mitt Romney as the party’s nominee. If it eventually does happen, it will prompt a move back toward the center, some key defections from the party, or a more frequent occurrence of Democrats holding the presidency, the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
FIGURE 5.9 Number of laws passed by Congress
The line is a loess curve. Data source: Tobin Grant, personal communication.
Another push toward Republican moderation could come from the growing importance of working-class whites as a constituency for the party. Some thoughtful and prominent voices on America’s right—David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David Frum, Charles Murray, Ramesh Ponnuru, Reihan Salam—have noted that this group is struggling economically and could benefit from government help.55
Finally, clear thinkers on the right will eventually realize that the key question isn’t how much government should intervene but how it should do so. As I pointed out in chapter 4, an expansion of public social programs doesn’t necessarily mean more government interference in markets and weaker competition. If Americans want protection and support and the choice is between social insurance and regulation, the former usually is preferable.
The Tea Party could forestall the Republican leadership’s shift back to the center. It is an important force in elections to the House of Representatives in several dozen districts. If the Tea Party remains vibrant, it will continue to push Republicans toward the extreme.56 The same is true of Grover Norquist and his “taxpayer protection” pledge, which most congressional Republicans have felt obliged to sign. But if history is any guide, these barriers to moderation eventually will be eclipsed or disappear. In the long run, the center of gravity in the Republican Party probably will be similar to that of center-right parties in Western Europe, most of which accept a generous welfare state and relatively high taxes.
In the race to the good society, America is a tortoise.57 We advance slowly, but we do advance. While our veto-point-heavy political system impedes progressive change, it also makes it difficult for opponents of government social programs to dilute or do away with them once they are in place. Consequently, social policy advances tend to endure. The long-run trend in American social policy has been one of slow but steady ratcheting upward, and the most likely scenario going forward is a continuation of this trend.
The notion of a social democratic America will strike some observers of US politics as a pipe dream. But consider this: in the realm of public social policy, the distance between the United States today and Denmark or Sweden today is smaller than the distance between the United States a century ago and the United States today. In the past one hundred years we’ve put in place a host of public programs that contribute to economic security, opportunity, and shared prosperity. Getting closer to the good society doesn’t require a radical break from our historical path. It simply requires continuing along that path. In all likelihood, that is exactly what we will do.
This doesn’t mean the future is predetermined. The trajectory I’ve laid out here is the most likely one, in my view, but it is by no means the only possibility. Moreover, even if we do move toward expanded government social programs, there will be plenty of space for actors to shape the timing, scope, and nature of future policy. My aim in writing this book is, above all else, to help inform those who seek to do so.
