The Economist
Vicious or virtuous?
America’s political system may have become too polarised to produce compromise
JUST how dysfunctional is politics in America? After last week’s near-shutdown of the federal government, and with another scare to come when Congress votes on whether to raise the federal debt ceiling, this feels like a good time to ask. Unfortunately, it is absurdly easy to count the ways. Here is one fairly typical list, offered up at a recent event at the Brookings Institution by Dan Glickman, a former (Democratic) member of the House of Representatives and agriculture secretary under Bill Clinton.
First, money. Congressmen spend every waking minute raising the stuff. Their indebtedness to donors leads to paralysis, because most donors want either to retain the benefits they receive from Uncle Sam or press for more. Second, the self-reinforcing partisanship of the new media. Third, politicians are spending less time on Capitol Hill and more shoring up support back home. Reduced social contact makes it harder to build trust and strike compromises across party lines. This leads, fourth, to a reluctance to show leadership, if leading requires quarrelling with your own. Just look, says Mr Glickman, at how both parties treated the deficit-reduction proposals last year of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission as a potato too hot to handle. Fifth, an atmosphere of total war encourages the parties to treat every battle, no matter how trivial, as Armageddon.
Mr Glickman’s list is far from exhaustive. At the same meeting of the same think-tank, Bob Bennett, who served three terms as a (Republican) senator for Utah, offered a no less scathing critique. The flaws he enumerated ranged from television having killed debate (by making senators talk to the camera and not to each other) to the scandal of gerrymandering. Only a few dozen of the 435 House seats are genuinely in play between the parties. The real fight takes place inside the parties, in primaries where victory depends on moving to the extreme to woo the activists. Mr Bennett knows whereof he speaks about those: despite a strong conservative record, he was dumped by Utah’s Republicans last year for having voted for the banking bail-out.
Naturally, even these grizzled veterans allow that some things have changed for the better. For all the money, corruption is less naked than it once was: Mr Bennett is proud that Senate offices are no longer designed with safes into which venal politicians used casually to stuff their visitors’ personal cash contributions. Mr Glickman argues that although the media are more partisan they are also livelier—and that new social networks have enabled far more ordinary people to have a direct impact on politics. As for the comic opera that brought the government to the edge of a shutdown last week, there is always the reassuring thought that America’s governing arrangements are dysfunctional by design. Arguably, the Founding Fathers favoured a system in which one foot stayed permanently on the accelerator and the other on the brake. Hasn’t America got what they wanted?
Not quite. One big thing that has changed politics fundamentally is the extreme polarisation of the parties. The Brookings event was held in honour of Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democratic senator who died in 1983. In nearly half a century on the Hill he became famous for building cross-party coalitions and championing bipartisan legislation. But his is a dying breed. In 2010 Congress was more deeply split on partisan lines than at any time since the second world war, according to Congressional Quarterly, a sister publication of The Economist, which has measured voting patterns on the Hill since 1945. And it is getting worse. So far this year, a record 80% of roll-call votes in the House have pitted a majority of Republicans against a majority of Democrats. On average, House Republicans have voted with their party’s majority 91% of the time and Democrats 90% of the time. The picture is very similar in the Senate.
How can a government divided between two parties at loggerheads possibly take the painful decisions needed to tame America’s deficit? At first glance, the events of the past fortnight look mildly encouraging. In spite of the brinkmanship, the parties endorsed a budget for 2011 without falling off the edge. Moreover, both sides now claim in their different ways to be serious about tackling the deficit and the entitlement spending that drives it. This is the topic that seemed too dangerous for either to address until the Republicans’ Paul Ryan put his radical blueprint for 2012 and beyond on the table, thus forcing Barack Obama to counter this week with a plan of his own.
Here’s hoping Winston was right
An optimist might infer that each party is at last shaming the other into taking the hard decisions they had previously ducked. The most striking aspect of this spectacle has been the behaviour of the president. After failing to prevent the Republicans lopping $38 billion off his own party’s budget, Mr Obama promptly performed a jaw-dropping U-turn, heaping praise on, and taking credit for, the “largest annual spending cut in our history”. You would think it was some other president who four months ago touted as a famous victory the spending increase he pushed through the lame-duck session of the previous Congress.
Mr Obama’s inconsistency is no mystery. Posing as a conciliator seeking a sensible middle between the warring tribes on the Hill may help him win re-election in 2012. But for the present a posture is all it can be. Mr Ryan’s plan would raise no taxes and, in effect, privatise Medicare. In other words, he has planted his party’s flag so far to the right that it is hard to see how an agreement on the deficit could emerge from any Congress, let alone the most polarised one since the second world war. In the end, American politics may well rise to the needs of the moment, proving the truth of Winston Churchill’s famous adage. But until then more comic opera, with even less amusing results, lies ahead.
http://www.economist.com/node/18560747
No comments:
Post a Comment