Sometimes, I read or listen to something and think, “that is a much better version of something I was trying to say way back when.” The kind of thing that makes me want to go back and revise a part of a blog post a little bit.
That happened yesterday when I was listening to Ezra Klein, Sarah Kliff, and Matt Yglesias talking on their podcast about Joe Biden, and his recent implication that if making friends with people from the opposing party can help them pass bipartisan legislation. Here’s the key passage from Yglesias:
"In the 60s and 70s, when ideological and single issue groups were coming onto the horizon, those were considered to be anti-partisan forces, because the political parties were these kind of oddball patronage personal networks, that had their own electoral priorities…and being a “good guy” who wasn’t an asshole, and was willing to work with people and have lunch with them, and talk about what they thought, was actually how you could discover who your fellow travelers were, and what you wanted to do with them."
“Oddball personal patronage networks” is such a great way to describe the ideologically diverse parties of the 20th century that people hearken back to when they bemoan how little effort Obama has made to make friends with Mitch McConnell.
If I’d thought of it, “oddball personal patronage networks” is how I would have described the parties of the 20th century to demonstrate how "the political forces that encouraged consensus in government for most of our history have faded away in the last few decades: every issue stance taken by a politician places her on one side of the national Red/Blue culture war” in my piece about proportional representation.
Today, no Republican is going to vote to raise taxes or increase regulation, and if they even think about it, they’ll have Heritage Action, Americans for Tax Reform, the Club for Growth, or any number of other well-funded, uncompromising groups of activists to answer to. The liberal base is less demanding of purity than the conservative one, but it would still be very hard for a Democrat to vote to cut entitlements or to approve a trade agreement without facing organized backlash. Today’s parties are rigidly ideological, and the government can barely fund itself.
For a barely more than our first two centuries, our amorphous community of political decision-makers made policy effectively enough with the constitutional system the framers designed. But our political community has changed, and our government system needs to change with it. Five years of gridlock and a slowly mounting fiscal crisis are fair warning that we can’t hold course.
In his recently-completed magnum opus, scholar Francis Fukuyama describes a process called “political decay,” where older institutions fail to evolve with the world around them. “The fact that a system was once a successful and stable liberal democracy,” he writes ominously, "does not mean it will remain so in perpetuity.”
Our government was designed for Joe Biden’s time, but that time isn’t today. James Madison and company didn’t anticipate that base-driven party movements would one day hold virtually every office. If we are going to be sure to deal effectively with major challenges, we should give ourselves a political system less prone to stalemate.