7
7
We’ve looked at ways to take the urgently needed (if challenging) steps to bring the American party system and its governance institutions into better alignment. We’ve noted though that changing electoral rules and institutional arrangements will be at least as difficult as governing effectively is. We conclude by exploring how Americans can improve the political system they have.
Can Americans do anything in the near term without making massive changes in electoral rules and political institutions? First, they can work to change the culture that shapes how political institutions perform. Then they can confront directly the destructive asymmetry between the parties and demonstrate that voters have the capacity and bear the ultimate responsibility for healing a broken and very dysfunctional political system.
Trashing others, undermining their very legitimacy, and lying openly and repeatedly about individuals or institutions now bring no visible penalty or public obloquy. In fact, it can mean fame and fortune. Changing the country’s poisonous culture, which has metastasized beyond the political area, requires first an effort to restore some semblance of public shame.
The country needs the remaining (if dwindling) opinion leaders from institutions like the military, churches, universities, foundations, business, the media, and public life to outspokenly denounce those who profit from bombast and lies and to denounce equally the television and radio networks and the print outlets that give them airtime and web and print space, with the legitimacy that flows from them. There’s no better place to start than with the outrageous rhetoric of Stephen Schwarzman, billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, who responded to a proposal from the Obama administration to treat the “carried interest” of private equity managers as ordinary income, taxable at a rate of 35 percent, instead of the same as capital gains and dividends, at 15 percent. Schwarzman characterized the proposal as being “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”1 Scores of such examples litter the landscape. In another particularly egregious example, the Speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives, Republican Mike O’Neal, referred to First Lady Michelle Obama as “Mrs. YoMama” and called her the Grinch, and then forwarded widely an e-mail that asked for Psalm 109 to be applied to the president—a verse which says “Let his days be few in number” and “May his children be orphaned and his wife a widow.”2 Then there was Republican Representative Allen West of Florida who told President Obama to “get the hell out of the United States of America” in a January 2012 speech captured on videotape. People like Colin Powell, Robert Gates, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Tom Brokaw, George Shultz, and Oprah Winfrey, ideally through some collective effort, should have the goal of recreating in society some sense of shame for distortions, lies, and other efforts to coarsen the culture and discourse. That means calling out miscreants like Schwarzman, O’Neal, and West.
Tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft can also help by convening experts to explore ways of rooting out insidious and false communications spread over the Internet. They should do more than a onetime debunking via factcheck.org or politifact.org, but maintain a continuous and aggressive effort to spread the word when falsehoods (like the libel about Congress in the widely circulated e-mail discussed earlier or the birther nonsense) continue to spread or fade when debunked and then reemerge for a new generation or population to be misled.
America also needs a concerted effort to ameliorate the impact of the partisan media. The country no longer has a public square where most Americans shared a common set of facts used to debate policy options with vigor, but with a basic acceptance of the legitimacy of others’ views. Little can be done to change the new business models, driven by technology and global economics, that make Fox News’s approach a clear winner over the old network news approach. But a semblance of a new public square, one that might never have the reach or audience of the old one, could be a model for civil discourse and intelligent, lively debate.
The best way to create a public square is to find a new source of funding for public media, with shows like the PBS NewsHour, Charlie Rose, and the Diane Rehm Show that fit a better model of discourse. A strong option would be to change the model of broadcasting and the public interest that has been the law since 1934, one in which broadcasters can use valuable public airwaves for free, in return only for their paying heed to the public interest through amorphous public interest obligations.
Television broadcasters, the biggest beneficiaries of the post–Citizens United campaign finance laws, have covered less and less politics and government at all levels, even as their revenues from campaign ads have skyrocketed. Broadcasters have claimed that they give back in a single year more than $10 billion in public interest obligations. We propose erasing those obligations and instead requiring broadcasters to pay annual rental fees for their use of public airwaves amounting to a quarter of the burden they themselves say they incur. This $2.5 billion each year could go to a public or private foundation that would create more opportunities for candidate-centered discourse during campaigns; for genuine, straightforward coverage of news and public affairs; and for more real debates on important issues. These efforts would not realistically compete with cable news outlets or commercial talk radio, but could attract a robust enough audience to provide a positive role model and a partial counterweight for more-corrosive media figures. The foundation could fund many more outlets than traditional public television and public radio, including new sources for information and discourse on the web and via social networking.
We do not shrink from partisanship, but from tribalism. We recognize that not all policy differences in America divide sharply along partisan lines. But two recent debates show how far the country has strayed. In the debate over health reform, some ideas that had originally come from Republicans and conservatives were trashed simply because Obama and Democrats had embraced them. In the debate over climate change, Republicans who sought bipartisan approaches, like former Representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina, were drummed out of office by their own partisans because they dared to acknowledge the problem and work with the other side.
Neither do we shrink from lively and contentious debate. But too often in the past few years, debates have moved from contentious to vicious, with challenges not so much to the workability or desirability of ideas as to the basic legitimacy of the ideas and their progenitors or supporters. The so-called “death panel” discussion and the trashing of the scientific community over climate change underscore that point.
What to do? In our conversations with former lawmakers from both parties, we are struck by their amazement, anger, and exasperation with their former colleagues; it is as if, once they left the peculiar air breathed inside the congressional chamber and inhaled a less noxious set of fumes, they were freed from a trance. We have thus thought of creating a parallel or shadow Congress of former lawmakers from across the political spectrum who would periodically gather and debate key issues facing the country.
Our goal would be to have the kind of debate and deliberation that Congress should engage in but, to be frank, rarely did even in better days. The best debate in Congress in many decades was conducted over American entry into the first Gulf War in 1991. It was stirring, emotional, consequential, and educational, but in both the House and Senate, it was more a series of sequential speeches than genuine give-and-take. There have been a few recent instances of genuine debate, in colloquies on the Senate floor over the National Defense Authorization Act, for example.3 But they are rare.
A shadow Congress could expand those colloquies to a wide number of former lawmakers and encourage real give-and-take with heated exchanges, not all along strictly partisan lines. We would expect the members selected to appreciate the viewpoints of opposing colleagues and accept their legitimacy. Given the disrepute of the current, real Congress, the parallel Congress might well receive significant public attention, with its debates triggering additional discussions on public affairs shows like Nightline, Meet the Press, and PBS NewsHour, and perhaps encouraging local versions of the debates on individual public television stations. The debates could prove enlightening to viewers and listeners and might also provide a powerful role model for the real Congress to change its own culture of argument.
In our long history of writing and commenting about American politics and Congress, we have criticized one or both political parties when it was warranted. We have noted, for example, that Democrats’ arrogance and condescension toward the minority over their forty years of majority reign contributed in no small measure to the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, and we criticized the Democrats for their departures from the regular order during their renewed majority status after 2006. We also chastised Democrats when they used over-the-top rhetoric in the battle over Robert Bork’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, and used the filibuster to block qualified nominees, including Miguel Estrada to the Court of Appeals. So we do not in this instance level our criticisms at the Republican Party lightly, or as a partisan weapon.
In every chapter of this book, we have documented the ways in which the Republican Party has become the insurgent outlier in American politics and as such contributes disproportionately to its dysfunction.4 If the case we have made about the GOP is accurate, then the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party itself, at the congressional, presidential, and, in many cases, state and local levels, must change if U.S. democracy is to regain its health. The contemporary GOP, to the horror of many of its longtime stalwarts and leaders like former senators John Danforth of Missouri and Alan Simpson of Wyoming, has veered toward tolerance of extreme ideological beliefs and policies and embrace of cynical and destructive means to advance political ends over problem solving. These tendencies have led to disdain for negotiation and compromise unless forced into them and rejection of the legitimacy of its partisan opposition (as manifested especially in the continuing drumbeat questioning the birthplace of President Obama, and the refusal of major party figures to condemn the birthers).
Some readers may be struck by a lack of balance in our treatment of the two major political parties. We hope they understand that we do not seek to advance a personal ideological or partisan agenda. Rather, we believe that imbalance or asymmetry reflects a regrettable reality that is too often obscured in the traditional media and among serious scholars of American democracy. We want two vibrant and constructive political parties that can compete vigorously for the votes of Americans and fight hard for their views in political and policy arenas. But the Republican Party of old—the party of moderates like Ray LaHood, David Durenberger, and John Danforth and of conservatives like Alan Simpson, Mickey Edwards, and Bob Bennett—is no longer present in our political debates or governing dynamic.
It is, of course, awkward and uncomfortable, even seemingly unprofessional, to attribute a disproportionate share of the blame for dysfunctional politics to one party or the other. Reporters and editors seek safe ground by giving equal time to opposing groups and arguments and crafting news stories that convey an impression that the two sides are equally implicated.5 Scholars often operate at a level of analytic generality and normative neutrality that leads most treatments of partisan polarization to avoid any discussion of party asymmetry.6 Many self-styled nonpartisan and bipartisan groups seeking to advance policy and process reforms are heavily invested in a search for common ground between the parties, a strategy made difficult if not untenable when one is a clear outlier.
We believe that our case for asymmetric partisan polarization is strong and that it has enormous consequences for the country’s ability to deal with the existential challenges that confront it. Democrats are hardly blameless and have their own extreme wing and their own predilection to hardball politics. But as we have shown, those tendencies have not generally veered outside the normal boundaries of robust politics. At the same time, Republicans in office have driven both the widening of the ideological gap between the parties and the strategic hyperpartisanship on such crucial issues as financial stabilization, economic recovery, deficits and debt, health-care reform, and climate change. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, their leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending and kowtowed to the most strident voices within their party. Where both parties in the past would try to focus debates on policy differences while using rigorous analyses from places like the old Office of Technology Assessment, the National Academy of Sciences, and the CBO, Republicans in the new era have dismissed nonpartisan analyses and conclusions about the nature of problems and impact of policies when they don’t fit their own ideology or policy prescriptions. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on a one-sided obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth while ignoring demand-side considerations. On issues from health reform to climate change to energy production, Republicans in Congress opposed, obstructed and tried to nullify policies proposed by President Obama that many of them had recently embraced, and repeatedly took hostages and made nonnegotiable demands in lieu of real give-and-take. The Republican presidential debates and the rhetoric and positions of all the GOP presidential candidates have provided no basis for people to believe they would govern differently if they were to capture the White House and both houses of Congress.
How can the thoughtful and problem-solving element of the party that we have long admired, represented by such former lawmakers as the late Barber Conable of New York, Bill Frenzel of Minnesota, John Porter of Illinois, Tom Davis of Virginia, Nancy Kassebaum of Ohio, Howard Baker of Tennessee, and many others, be restored to return the party to its pragmatic conservative roots? How does this relate specifically to the choices voters will confront in 2012 and beyond?
Refreshingly (at least modestly so), not just disillusioned former elected officials and members of the conservative movement like economist Bruce Bartlett, but also a few of its most respected inside commentators, including the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru and the American Enterprise Institute’s Steven F. Hayward, have challenged the destructive, take-no-prisoners approach of the movement within the Republican Party.
Ponnuru offered Republicans a gimlet-eyed view of their own electoral failings in 2006 and 2008 in a Bloomberg.com commentary. He notes:
The view that Republicans must avoid accommodation at all costs—that the principal obstacle to achieving conservative policy goals is a lack of spine, and not, say, a lack of popular support—made them lose at least two Senate races in 2010. In Colorado and Nevada, conservative primary voters rejected two electable, conventionally conservative candidates because they were considered part of a compromising establishment. . . . Meanwhile, the real mistakes of the Bush years keep being made. Republicans had nothing to say about wage stagnation then and are saying nothing about it now. The real cost of Republicans’ fixation on ideological purity is that it distracts them from their real problems, and the nation’s.7
In a long, provocative, and thoughtful essay in Breakthrough Journal, Hayward makes a strong pitch for modernizing conservatism without diluting its strong philosophy.8 He notes that the “no tax increase” mania of the movement, and its corollary, the theory that the way to reduce the size and scope of government is to “starve the beast,” has been proven empirically not to work. Indeed, he quotes the seminal work of libertarian William Niskanen, who found that lower taxes actually increase the size of government, and that raising taxes may be the most effective way of reducing government by making voters pay for what they receive, instead of getting things at a steep discount.
Hayward further urges conservatives to recognize the reality that “the welfare state, or entitlement state, is here to stay. It is a central feature of modernity itself.” Most importantly, Hayward takes on frontally the current destructive politics: “Achieving policy compromise and the reconstruction of a ‘vital center’ requires an end to the view of practical politics as a zero sum game, in which compromise is viewed as a defeat by both sides.”
Hayward not surprisingly says both sides are responsible for the dysfunction and calls for both liberals and conservatives to reform themselves. His points about the weaknesses and failures of the liberal movement are well taken. But his willingness to defy convention and look inwardly at the failings of the contemporary conservative movement is a small but hopeful sign that over time, some changes might come from within.
The most powerful potential leverage in any democracy is the ability of the citizenry to “throw the bums out.” Scholars have demonstrated that voters often treat elections as referendums on the performance of the party of government (which they almost always associate with the president’s party).9 But this instrument of democratic accountability is especially blunt in times of polarized politics. It gives the opposition party a powerful incentive to obstruct the president’s agenda and to discredit those elements that are adopted by turning their debate and passage into divisive and bitter wars. During periods of economic crisis, the opposition loses its incentive to alleviate Americans’ pain and instead is encouraged to err on the side of allowing harmful conditions to fester as a price worth paying for political gain. The Republicans responded to this latter incentive in a powerful and unprecedented fashion when they were in the minority during the first two years of the Obama administration. That strategy intensified in the third year, after Republicans won a majority in the House. Mitch McConnell’s infamous quote left no doubt about their priorities: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”10
Referendum voting in times of economic difficulty also tends to obscure the policy choices that the competing parties offer. One of the tenets of democratic theory is that the electorate will punish parties that become ideologically extreme—that stray from the preferences of the median voter. Yet so-called swing voters, pure independents or very weakly attached partisans, have little in the way of ideological frameworks or information on the policy positions of the candidates and parties with which to mete out that punishment. They are the classic referendum voters who simply bet that times will improve with different leaders. This phenomenon is by no means limited to the United States. Political scientist Larry Bartels has demonstrated that governing parties of all ideological stripes—right, center, left—were punished by voters during the economic crises of 2008–2011 while the ideological makeup of successful opposition parties was equally diverse.11
There is a final constraint on voters providing a way out of dysfunctional politics. Understandably, during difficult times such as the present, they tend to broadly condemn Washington or Congress, which is more likely to reinforce the structural dynamics that produce gridlock than to generate a constructive call to action. Voters simply turning out of power those now in control of the White House, Senate, and House or indiscriminately replacing incumbents with “outsiders” because of broken politics have little hope of making the parties and institutions operate more constructively and effectively. Instead, they are likely to have the opposite effect, and continue a downward spiral into deeper dysfunction.
Voters are unlikely to be more responsive to the problems they themselves identify without additional information about the policy and process choices that competing parties and candidates offer. But we have little confidence that a public consumed with pressing matters close to home will brush up on their civics and become fully informed citizens. America’s is a republican (that is, representative) form of government, not a direct democracy. Political leaders and parties have the responsibility to structure and elucidate those choices. Along with the media, they are responsible for providing regular reporting and analysis that clarifies the substance of the choices and the likely consequences. But, ultimately, the public will reap what it sows.
President Obama came to office having promised the country postpartisan politics, built on the commonalities among Americans, not the divisive differences. Then reality hit. Obama’s promise did not start with the 2008 campaign; it was the core of his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which established a political brand that facilitated his extraordinarily rapid ascent to the White House. But almost since his presidency began, allies and observers have criticized that outlook for pursuing bipartisan agreements in the absence of a sincere negotiating partner. A postpartisan approach to governing seemed simply naïve and wishful thinking, poorly suited to the sharply polarized system Obama confronted; this became crystal clear when Republicans announced their intention to operate as a parliamentary-like, unified opposition party.
Of course, some of the criticism was overdone and misplaced, at least for Obama’s first two, quite productive years in office. He began his term when Democrats were short of the sixty votes needed for cloture in the Senate, so some Republican support was essential. Getting the House and Senate Democrats to agree on anything was difficult, while getting all Senate Democrats, from socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont to conservative Ben Nelson of Nebraska, to unite was especially daunting. That took time and patience, including attempts at compromise with Republicans long after it became clear that they would not be cooperating. The modus operandi was a necessary step to assuage more conservative Democrats like Nelson, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana that he was leaving no stone unturned in his efforts to find bipartisanship. That avenue was essential to get the remarkable unity from all sixty Democrats, in the brief period when they had the sixtieth vote, to pass the health reform bill.
However necessary that approach then, conditions clearly changed with the 2010 midterm elections and the advent of divided government, with the take-no-prisoners approach of the House Republican majority. Those conditions dictated that the president adopt a more confrontational, clarifying approach to Congress and the public. The debacle of the debt limit faux negotiations may have been necessary to make Obama recognize the wisdom of such an adjustment in his leadership strategy, but he clearly did so. And paradoxically, the more aggressive “tit-for-tat” strategy on his part, raising the political heat and stakes for those pursuing obstruction, may be the only way out of this prisoner’s dilemma.12 If carried through the last year of his term and integrated fully into the campaign, his strategy increases the prospect of making the election more a choice than a referendum.
As the ideological outlier, Republicans have every incentive to blur policy differences between the candidates and parties by focusing the public’s attention on the performance of the economy under Obama’s leadership. The Republican presidential nominating process made more publicly salient the stark rightward tilt of the GOP. Their objective in the general election campaign is to downplay those positions and frame the election as a referendum on Obama.
They also appear to be taking a calculated gamble: that even if voters become more enraged by Washington’s policy failures and take some of their anger out on Republicans, they will still, thanks to the firewalls they have erected through redistricting to shore up vulnerable freshmen, be able to maintain a narrow majority in the House. At the same time, with only ten Republican seats at risk in the Senate compared to twenty-three Democratic seats, they can count on voter anger toward incumbents to give them the net gain of three seats to recapture the Senate. Unfortunately, that calculated gamble means a continuing willingness to block significant policy action if it might accrue to the benefit of Obama, even if the blockage results in more pain and dislocation for Americans.
Here, President Obama’s belated willingness to call out Republicans specifically for obstruction has changed the dynamic somewhat, creating at least some political pain and potential political downside to Republican obstinacy. That in turn has meant some modest willingness on the part of Mitch McConnell to craft compromises with Harry Reid and President Obama when he believed that the downside risk of refusal to do so was too great.
We have discussed the profound impact of the new media on American politics and governance and suggested how to contain its destructive effects and encourage the positive contributions that new technologies offer. Here we tender some unsolicited advice to friends and colleagues in traditional news organizations, where enormously talented individuals report, write, and broadcast under strong codes of professional conduct. Discerning consumers of their output—and we include ourselves—profit every day from their enterprise and insights.
That said, there is more they could do to help citizens navigate the current political system. Here are a few suggestions:
•Help your readers, listeners, and viewers recognize and understand asymmetric polarization. The parties are different in many important respects (which we have tried to identify in these pages). Document those differences, report on them, and consider the implications of those differences for ordinary citizens.
•A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is a distortion of reality and a disservice to your consumers. A prominent Washington Post reporter sanctimoniously told us that the Post is dedicated to presenting both sides of the story. In our view, the Post and other important media should report the truth. Both sides in politics are no more necessarily equally responsible than a hit-and-run driver and a victim; reporters don’t treat them as equivalent, and neither should they reflexively treat the parties that way. Our advice: don’t seek professional safety through the unfiltered presentation of opposing views. What’s the real story? Who’s telling the truth? Who is taking hostages at what risks and to what ends?
•Fact checks are important contributions to contemporary journalism. Why treat them all as equally important and bury them in the back pages? Move them into the body of news stories and onto the lead, and repeat them when politicians continue to repeat falsities despite the fact check.
•Stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a sixty-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend that. Your consumers should be better informed of the costs associated with it. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and clearly identify every time a minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support. Do not say or write that Congress or the Senate killed a bill or stopped a nomination if a majority in both houses voted for the bill or the individual—say or write the truth, that the bill or person was blocked despite majority support, by the use of a filibuster. This is especially true, as with the example of the DISCLOSE Act on campaign finance, when all the members of one party (in that case, fifty-nine) support a bill and all the members of the minority vote against. It was not Congress that blocked disclosure—it was one political party via the filibuster.
•Your highest priority should be to clarify the choices voters face and the likely consequences of those choices after the election. How would they govern? What could they accomplish? What differences can people expect from a unified Republican or Democratic government or one divided between the parties? The “how would they govern?” story is always important, but more so now than ever.
Political elites can clarify choices, and the media can help make those choices understandable, but in the end, voters decide elections. Visceral disgust and blanket condemnation of Washington or Congress or government are often ill-informed and unproductive reactions; for politicians and their consultants, that can easily serve their self-interest and the status quo. Understanding the forces driving dysfunctional politics is essential to changing it, over the long haul, through reforms of the electoral and governing institutions, and sooner, through voters’ strategic choices. We end with some suggestions for voters:
•Punish a party for ideological extremism by voting against it. (Today, that means the GOP.) It is a surefire way to bring the party back into the political mainstream.
•Promote the essential norms of the republican form of government (respect for opposing views, acceptance of the opposition party’s legitimacy, bargaining, and compromise) by demanding that elected representatives and their parties adhere to the norms and punishing those who don’t. When candidates pop up and proudly proclaim that they have nothing to do with politics or Washington, and won’t behave like the politicians, ask them their views on those essential norms—and keep in mind that many, perhaps most, of the ardent and vocal outsider candidates reject them at their core.
•Consider carefully which presidential ticket (the candidates, party, and platform) you prefer to lead the country. Then entrust that party with the majority in the House and Senate. It makes more sense than divided government in these times of partisan polarization. But remember that actions have consequences, and votes based on either reflexively throwing the bums out, or spurning one’s own party or president for insufficient zealousness, could bring in something far worse.
•Challenge the legitimacy of Senate filibusters and holds. The framers of the Constitution had no such devices in mind. A vocal backlash against obstructionism by the minority will do much to overcome gridlock and permit those in government to work more effectively and responsively. Filibusters and holds are not just arcane rules; they undermine the legislative process and make government less effective.
•Finally, beware of nonprofit political groups bearing independent presidential candidates and balanced, centrist tickets. Americans hate political parties in general but the parties are essential vehicles to represent their values and views and to give direction and purpose to government. A democracy cannot float above politics; politics—and parties—are critical components of our democratic DNA. Political groups promoting the siren song of transcending politics instead of working to change the dysfunctional behavior of those in politics and government suffer from their own democratic deficit and are more likely to play spoiler or produce an ungovernable administration than to remedy dysfunctional politics.
A Westminster-style parliamentary system provides a much cleaner form of democratic accountability than the American system. A party or coalition of parties forms a government after an election and is in a position in parliament to put most of its program in place. The minority party will be aggressively adversarial, but it is unable to indefinitely delay or defeat the government’s program. When the next election arrives (not quickly, as in the U.S., before that program has made itself felt, but in four or five years), there is no confusion in the public over which party is to be held accountable. If the government is thrown out of office, the minority party can govern on its own terms, within an institutional setting and political culture that accepts the legitimacy of the new government and the policy changes that will follow.
As we write this book, the United States is approaching a pivotal election without that clarity. Voters, as disgruntled with the performance of Congress and the policy dynamic in Washington as at any point in our lifetimes, are expecting and hoping that their collective voice will be heard and accountability achieved.
But how? We fear that expectations in 2012 will not be reached, and that the range of potential outcomes do not easily allow for one that will either affirm the existing order or accomplish sweeping change, at least in a way that will recreate a functional and legitimate political process. If President Obama gets reelected but faces either a continuing divided Congress or a Congress with Republicans in charge of both houses, there is little reason to expect a new modus vivendi in which the president and GOP leaders are able to find reasonable compromises in areas like budget policy, health reform and financial regulation.
If President Obama is reelected and sees his party recapture the House and hold its majority in the Senate, there is some reason to believe that the dynamic will change. Republicans will have suffered an unexpected and devastating defeat, and some Republican Senators may decide the time has come to put the all-out opposition strategy aside and re-engage in the lawmaking process. Less ideological and more pragmatic leaders may begin to emerge in the GOP. Obama might be able to use the expiring Bush tax cuts as a basis to entice a number of Senate Republicans into a revenue-producing tax reform process and efforts to strengthen cost-savings initiatives in Medicare and Medicaid.
It is also possible that Senate Republicans will return to the use of filibusters and holds to slow down the process, obstruct the president’s appointments, and make every policy victory a protracted and ugly battle to delegitimize the outcome, hoping for another sweeping victory in the 2014 midterms akin to what they achieved in 2010.
If President Obama loses his reelection bid and Republicans hold the House and win the Senate, with narrow majorities much like the ones George W. Bush had in his first year as president in 2001, the new Republican government will certainly use the tools Bush did, starting with budget reconciliation, to promote a sweeping agenda that will start with dismantling health reform, gutting financial regulation, cutting taxes even more, and making deep cuts in domestic spending. There are limits to what can be done with budget reconciliation (although the tool was used to achieve the huge tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that contributed mightily to our long-term debt crisis). Senate Democrats will be tempted in many or most cases to use filibusters and holds to limit the damage, and there will be a strong temptation on Mitch McConnell’s part to act unilaterally to erase the filibuster to take advantage of this rare chance to achieve revolutionary change.
Under those circumstances, we could potentially see major policy shifts, indeed revolutionary ones, akin to those that are frequent in parliamentary systems. But even more than in the first two years of the Obama administration, the changes—deeper tax cuts; steep reductions in Medicaid through block grants to the states; partial privatization of Social Security; massive deregulation in finance and environmental policy—would come to a country that is deeply divided politically, and more than half of whose citizens would likely strongly oppose these moves and be jolted by their implementation. The schisms created could be greater than any we have seen in more than a century.
We do not mean to suggest that it would mean the end of America as we know it; the country, with its deep patriotism, enormous reservoir of talent and belief in freedom, and inherent flexibility to respond and adapt to crisis, would survive and ultimately come back as it has in the past. But because we face enormous challenges—emerging from the deepest downturn since the Great Depression; solving our looming deficit and debt problems; finding ways to create jobs while competing in an increasingly challenging global economy; and ensuring that the burdens from our aging population do not overwhelm our capacity to respond—the prospect that we might have to adapt to these challenges, with an even more dysfunctional or discredited political system means that all Americans who care about solving or tackling these problems should take our proscriptions and prescriptions seriously.
To be sure there are some signs of green shoots sprouting throughout the country. One is the model set by our metropolitan areas—fifty-one of which have populations greater than one million—that are finding public-private partnerships and cross-party alliances to solve their problems in transportation, social welfare, education, and infrastructure. Another is that, even in this awful political environment, some of the best and brightest and most admirable in our society are still stepping forward to do public service and to run for political office. A third is the number of former lawmakers, especially Republicans, who are mad as hell and determined to change things in the system and in their own party. They are joined by a handful of influential conservative public intellectuals who are questioning the take-no-prisoners, no compromise position that has taken over the GOP. A fourth is in the new social movements, including both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. If their goals are sometimes amorphous, their hangers-on sometimes unsettling, and their means sometimes questionable, they still reflect a broader, bottom public desire to get America back on track.
We end where we began: it is even worse than it looks. But we are confident that if the worst has not yet hit, better times, and a return to a better political system, do indeed lie ahead.