Another Rebuttal to Jonathan Rauch's "How American Politics Became Insane"

On July 1, 2016, Jonathan Rauch told us what he thought the problem with American politics is:

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

While I will counter some of Rauch's complaints, I will begin by attacking his central thesis that good government reforms are responsible for the "chaos" reflected in the Republican and Democratic primaries and for an ineffective Congress. My first point though must be that he must not have read or internalized the conclusions of Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann. As anyone here on Daily Kos can attest to, it is almost always:

Jonathan Rauch lays out a list of good government reforms that he says have weakened political actors' allegiance to parties and thus the effectiveness of elected officials. These reforms include: 1. We reformed the nominating process, 2. We reformed political money, 3. We reformed Congress, 4. We reformed closed-door negotiations, 5. We reformed pork. It is undeniable that these reforms have changed American politics and some have weakened political parties, but to claim that these reforms are responsible for the ineffectiveness of government is patently ridiculous. 

I. Rauch's Central Thesis is Wrong.

Rauch says that, "Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around." Throughout his essay, Rauch claims that the good government reforms mentioned above are responsible for the polarization in our politics. He blames the "neurotic hatred of the political class" for causing ineffectiveness in government.

If Mr. Rauch's conclusions were true we would see those problems solely reflected in American politics, but we don't. Political polarization is a world-wide phenomenon and many institutions are in decline as is Americans' trust in them.

A. Why is political polarization a world-wide issue, if the reforms that are cited by Rauch are responsible for American political polarization?

The world is facing increasing polarization of politics. This is not just happening in the US, but around the world. No clearer example of that was the Brexit vote. While the pro-Brexit returns included votes from the extreme right and left, the reaction to the Brexit results has left little doubt of the polarization in the UK:

All hell has broken out in the U.K. Over here, on one side we have the political elites who are demanding a “do-over” as if the vote was just a practice run. Their position is that the “remain” voters were the young, university grads, mostly from urban areas – the so-called “dynamic” people. The “leaves” are the older, uneducated, working class white racists or xenophobes.

Whereas, we have heard those in the "Leave" campaign echo the Republican nominee when they said, they would "take their country back." 

We have further seen this polarization in the rise of right-wing parties throughout Europe, such as Marine La Pen's National Front and Nigel Farage's UKIP. This problem is not just a problem in the US or Europe, but throughout all representative governments in the world: in Europe, in India, in South Africa, in Israel and in some parts of Latin America, including Mexico and Colombia.

If US good government reforms were to blame for the rise of political polarization in the US, then we would not see the rise of political polarization throughout the world since most of those reforms were unique to this country. Except for governmental transparency, most of the democractic countries throughout the world could not make reforms that the US did because they are unique to our system. 

Much of the world instituted governmental transparency laws at the same time or after the US did. Yet, the other reforms in our system could either only happen in the US or differ from practices in other countries. Three of Rauch's complaints revolve around increasing power of legislative leaders at the expense of the chairs of committees, eliminating pork and reforming the nominating process. 

All three of those reforms only exist in the US system. As Rauch says of the UK:

Unlike the British parliamentary system, the Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. A rogue member of Congress can’t be “fired” by his party leaders, as a member of Parliament can; a renegade president cannot be evicted in a vote of no confidence, as a British prime minister can.

And those provisions which strengthen political parties are common in all parliamentary systems. Yet, as shown above, we see increased political polarization in those countries. 

The last reform that Mr. Rauch laments are reforms to money in politics. He rightly states that the reforms that the Supreme Court has allowed to survive constitutional inquiry have weakened political parties. Yet throughout his article, he fails to note that the Congress in 1974 and 2002 created comprehensive systems that would have curtailed the influence of outside forces, such as, the "deep-pocketed donors, super pacs, 501(c)(4)s, and so-called 527 groups" of which he complains. Those campaign finance reforms would have strengthened political parties, but were rejected due to the Supreme Court's constitutional theory that "money is speech."

Yet, the rest of the world has a very different campaign financing system. In many of the world's democracies there is a public financing system for campaigns. These countries give public funds directly to the political parties. In addition, some countries allow contributions from individuals and outside groups. Yet these donations, as we see in Germany, are cotributions to the party, not to individual candidates. Therefore, the campaign finance system cannot explain the political polarization in those countries either. 

So, if the good government reforms made by the US that exist only here, except for governmental transparency, are responsible for American political polarization, then why are we seeing political polarization throughout the world just as we see in the US? The fact is that polarization is a world-wide phenomenon. So is the growing dissatisfaction by populations in the US and around the world with all societal institutions. 

B. American political parties are not the only institutions to have been weakened in the recent past, so it is myopic to ignore that as a factor in weakening political institutions.

There is a glaring hole in Jonathan Rauch's analysis of the political system: he fails to acknowledge that the decline in the influence of political institutions is not unique to those institutions, but instead a societal problem. He states that "the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees" has led to many of the failures of American politics today. He blames the reforms mentioned above as being responsible for "the weakening of the institutions".

Yet, Mr. Rauch fails to mention that the decline of institutions in American society is not limited to political or governmental institutions. Americans' faith in the institutions that have historically held society together is in dramatic decline. Whether you are talking about Congress, the judiciary, the executive branch, religion, education, the economic system, corporations, the media, Hollywood or sports, the American public's trust in them is in severe decline. And those institutions have given great reason to distrust them. Therefore, the weakening of institutions must be a societal issue and not just a political one. 

Rauch may claim that Congress and other political institutions have become more weak because of good government reforms. He cannot and fails to try to show that the reforms he cites are responsible for weakening of other societal institutions. Rauch may claim that good government reforms, like electing judges, have weakened the judiciary and people's faith in it to further illustrate his point (although he doesn't). Yet none of those reforms can explain the decline in other public and private institutions. The explanation instead may be that the various scandals of elites in those institutions demonstrate corruption throughout society and is leading to public distrust of them.  

For example, the US has seen a drop in Americans' confidence in their educational institutions. This may be because for the past several decades we have seen a decline in education throughout the US. The failure of schools to teach our children has led the Council on Foreign Relations to say in 2012 that US educational failures are threatening national security. (Please don't interpret this argument as an attack on teachers, but rather a systemic complaint). The problems in the American education system are not the only signs of weakening institutions in this country. 

We have seen scandals in a number of institutions that have shaken Americans' faith in them and greatly weakened those institutions. Societal institutions are getting weaker: whether you want to look at religion, where a number of scandals, especially the Catholic Church's treatment of pedophile priests, has led to declining religious faith and growing secularism. Or if you want to look how doping has affected sports. Or if you want to see how the capitalist system in the western world has led to a decline in wages and concentration of wealth. Which is why a majority of millenials have no faith in capitalism. I don't think I have to show this community how the corporate media is making people less informed today than in the past. 

I could go on to lay out several other issues with US institutions, but I think you get the point. Like political polarization, weakening political institutions are a societal problem that is far more universal than Rauch acknowledges. And since those problems are more universal, it is bad political science to ignore that as a factor in the weakening of political institutions. Moreover, Rauch's culprits, the good government reforms described above, are not as responsible for the chaos that he decries. 

II. The Reforms Rauch Criticizes Are Not To Blame for the Conditions He Attributes to Them. 

Rauch decries five political reforms: 1. We reformed the nominating process, 2. We reformed political money, 3. We reformed Congress, 4. We reformed closed-door negotiations, 5. We reformed pork. He says that these reforms are responsible for Americans increasingly turning to extreme candidates and making legislative compromise impossible. He also says that the reforms have made it impossible for party leaders to compel loyalty by elected officials in Congress and elsewhere. Let's examine those claims. 

A. Reforms to the Nominating Process.

Rauch says that reforms to how we nominate political candidates have lead to increased political polarization and to weaker or more extremist candidates. As Rauch states:

Primary races now tend to be dominated by highly motivated extremists and interest groups, with the perverse result of leaving moderates and broader, less well-organized constituencies underrepresented.

I don't understand how he can make that claim after the Democratic party just nominated Hillary Clinton and 8 years earlier nominated Barack Obama who came onto the national stage with an appeal to the humanity of people of all political stripes. Yet, even if you ignore those facts, we still have historical examples that disprove his assertion.

If you want to look at extremist candidates that were nominated in the smoke-filled rooms that Rauch praises, you need look no further than Barry Goldwater, who Rauch mentions and dismisses. Rauch says that sure you had a Goldwater, but at the time you also had party insiders who would harness an insurgency like that and "govern through them" (emphasis in original).

That is a really shoddy job of analysis, because on the other side of the aisle at the same time, in an era of smoke-filled rooms, you have a movement that will dramatically change political parties that was trying to be suppressed by Democratic party insiders: the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was not a party movement. It was non-partisan. Yet, many Democratic party insiders had spent decades violently opposing it. Despite this, the movement grew and its success in Congress led to a split in the Democratic party and the loss of the "Solid South".

Thus, we can see that despite Rauch's statements, insurgencies, even in the time of smoke-filled rooms, were not incorporated into parties as Rauch stated, but sometimes lead to the break-up of political coalitions. We also see this phenomenon in the example of Zachary Taylor. 

Taylor was nominated by the Whig party as part of a populist fervor supporting him due to his success as a general in the Mexican-American War. His nomination was the death of the Whig party, which ceased to exist a few years after Taylor's election. 

Rauch's claim that insurgencies that happened pre-1972 were effectively incorporated into parties better than today is just not true, as the civil rights movement and Whig Party examples show. Rauch also argues that the current nominating process leads to more extreme and weaker candidates. He cites Trump, Christine O'Donnell and the Tea Party as examples of his position. While he does show how Democratic voters in primaries are more partisan than the general electorate, he fails to note that ALL HIS EXAMPLES ARE REPUBLICANS! 

Throughout this whole article, the only Democrat that Rauch says is emblematic of the trends he criticizes is Bernie Sanders (and I would dispute that characterization). On the other side of the aisle, Rauch mentions Trump, Christine O'Donnell, Jerry Moran, Eric Cantor's challenger, John Boehner's inefficiency and the Tea Party. Does anyone else see a pattern? This is why I think that Rauch would benefit from reading Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, because as we at DKOS know it's the Republicans' fault. 

Therefore, Jonathan Rauch's conclusion regarding the effect of nominating contests is flawed, because he engages in false equivalency.

B. Reforms to Political Money.

As I mentioned above, Rauch's claims that reforms to the campaign finance system have made political parties weaker are true. Yet his solutions will exacerbate the problem because he fails to examine how the system came into being. In stark contrast to the impression given by Rauch, the campaign finance reforms of 1974 and 2002 were designed to create systems that would control all money in politics, both contributions and expenditures. 

The problems that Rauch cites came about when the Supreme Court decimated the campaign finance system first in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) ("money is speech") and then in Citizens United (2010)("independent expenditures are constitutional" and "give no appearance of corruption"). Had the Court not intervened, there would be in place today regulations that would restrict the use of super pacs, 501(c)(4)s, and so-called 527 groups by private individuals and groups that have no accountability to the political system. 

The Supreme Court's decisions in Buckley and Citizens United defies common sense and is in contravention of the Constitution. As former Justice John Paul Stevens said before Congress in 2014, "[s]peech is only one activities financed by campaign contributions and expenditures. Those financial activities should not receive precisely the same constitutional protections as speech itself. After all, campaign funds were used to finance the Watergate burglary-actions that clearly were not protected by the First Amendment." 

We can see Rauch's bias regarding campaign finance regulation in this statement:

Campaign-finance rules did stop some egregious transactions, but at a cost: Instead of eliminating money from politics (which is impossible), the rules diverted much of it to private channels. 

Thus, we can see why Rauch's proposal to solve what's ailing American politics is to raise the "limits on donations to the parties." He thinks that giving more money to parties will increase its power. If this were the case, then we would have seen the parties get stronger with the rise of "soft money" and even weaker when it was banned. But history shows that is not true. The ban on "soft money" did not weaken political parties, which were able to quickly make up for the loss of "soft money" with smaller "hard money" donations in the next cycle. Instead, Rauch's solution of "[u]nrestricted money would strengthen the parties’ bottom line, but it may arguably weaken them institutionally in the long run," as Roll Call said in 2014.

The biggest problem in American politics today is its saturation of money. Any "solution" that calls for an increase in money into the system is delusional.

C. Reforms to transparency, Congress and pork.

Lastly, if Rauch's conclusion that the various other reforms to government were to blame for our ineffective Congress than we would have seen similar ineffectiveness from the Democratic Congress of 2007-2011 and in state governments that have similar laws. But we don't. The record of those legislatures demonstrates that Rauch's position is wrong. 

Rauch says that various reforms in Congress, such as weakening committee chairs, eliminating pork and creating government transparency, have eliminated the power of legislative leaders to compel votes for bills that need to be passed. He cites the Boehner's failure to compel his party to support the "Grand Bargain" of 2011 (which included trillions in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Defense and other discretionary spending) as an example. Rauch also includes this interesting quote:

The House Republican Conference, an unnamed Republican told Politico, is “unwhippable and unleadable. Ryan is as talented as you can be: There’s nobody better. But even he can’t do anything. Who could?”

So, if we follow Rauch's logic we should see the same inefficiency in how the Democrats ran Congress from 2007-2011. The Democrats were operating under the same transparency rules that currently exist for the Republican-led Congress today. In fact, the Democratic Congress in 2007 instituted several new reforms on transparency and pork. Also, Democrats were operating under the same decades-long decline in the influence of committee chairs that Rauch mentions in his piece. Yet, the Democratic Congress from 2007-2011 was not dysfunctional.

Instead, we saw major legislation getting through the Congress: ACA, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", Lily Ledbetter Act, and Dodd-Frank. And that was just in the two years that Democrats controlled Congress under President Barack Obama. In the 110th Congress, Democrats passed a new GI bill, FISA amendments, a Farm Bill (that had been languishing for years), and TARP after Bush destroyed the economy. And Speaker Pelosi would have been able to do more if the Senate hadn't hamstrung her. 

At a time when according to Jonathan Rauch she should have been completely ineffective, Speaker Nancy Pelosi proved to be the most effective Speaker of the House of Representatives since Sam Rayburn 50 years ago. In addition to the legislation above, she passed major legislation on Climate Change and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, but the Senate either gutted or failed to pass them. Nancy Pelosi is still remarkably effective and powerful today, despite the fact that she lost the Speakership 6 years ago, which almost always before marked the end of a political career. 

So, the Democrats were effective in Congress, but were state governments as useless as Republicans have been these past five years? The Federal Open Meetings Act of which Rauch complains is very similar to state laws, like California's, yet we do not see the dysfunction in California's government that exists on the federal level. The same is true of gift laws and other state campaign finance laws. There is no evidence of greater weakness of political institutions in states that have more stringent laws than exists in states with weaker laws. 

The only conclusion from the above evidence is that good government reforms mentioned in this section have not led to the weakening of legislative leaders, but instead that Republican Congressional leaders are incompetent. The problem with Rauch's analysis is that he does not weigh his hypothesis against the vast evidence that shows that the weakness of political institutions of which he complains is located almost entirely in the Republican Party alone.

CONCLUSION

The problem with Jonathan Rauch's article is that he falls into the same false equivalency trap in which much of today's media wallow. His hypothesis is not entirely incorrect: good government reforms can lead to a weakening of institutions. No clearer example is needed than the effect that the election of judges has had on the judicial system. It has led to a system where judges have to determine between what the law says and what will best help their re-election. In addition, it has increased a loss of faith in the system. Thus, Rauch's hypothesis was not poorly-formulated, but his conclusions are suspect because his analysis is weak. 

Rauch, in his essay, concludes that political institutions are failing because he sees dysfunction in American politics. And when he goes to see what changes happened in the last 40 years, he saw the good government reforms described above. So far, his analysis is fine, although it may have been helpful to look at how some technological advances have affected political polarization. Yet when he examines the problem and sees much of the dysfunction is in the Republican party, one would think he may try to see if the dysfunction he sees is really a sign of the weakness of the Republican party alone. This may have been clarified if Rauch had only saw fit to look at the last time the Democrats controlled Congress. But he didn't. Therefore, we see that poor analysis leads to Rauch's conclusions regarding political parties.

A full analysis of the issue will show that the problems of political polarization is a world-wide phenomenon. Further, said analysis will demonstrate that various American institutions, not just political ones, are weakening and distrusted by the American public. So Rauch's conclusion that good government reforms are responsible ignores a massive societal problem. Finally, Rauch fails to examine if his complaints about various good government reforms are reflective of issues across the political spectrum or is confined to the Republican party.

Tl;dr Jonathan Rauch's essay is shoddy political science, because he fails to analyze his hypothesis in light of all relevant facts and ignores the evidence that IT'S ALL THE REPUBLICANS' FAULT.