As I continue to reflect on the mood of the country and our recent wave election, I came across this excellent New York Times OpEd, Divided We Thrive, by author and journalist Jonathan Rauch. His article puts forth the simplest and clearest explanation for the wild swings we have seen in recent elections:
“In all three of the most recent earthshaking midterm elections - 1994, 2006 and now 2010 - the same candidate won: divided government. That is not a coincidence. In the last two decades, a strong and persistent pattern has emerged, one that will dominate our politics for some time to come, because it is rooted in two important political realities. First, the public strongly prefers divided government. Second, it has every reason to.”
Rauch writes that in 21 of the past 30 years we have had divided government, where one party controls the White House and the other controls the House, Senate or both. The middle four years of George Bush’s presidency were the longest stint during that period when we did not have divided government, most likely because following the 9/11 terrorist attacks the country was unusually unified. He points out: “Consistently, when either party, never mind which, obtains total control, its popularity collapses and the voters take the first available opportunity to bring in the other side.”
The Senate passed the original 1965 Medicare act by a vote of 70 to 24. It was supported by 13 Republicans, while 7 Democrats voted against it. Contrast that vote with the passage (60 - 39) of the 2010 Health Care Reform Act where all Democrats voted for, and all Republicans against the bill.
The parties are now pretty much split along ideological lines, which makes it much more difficult to find common ground. “The result,” observes Rauch, “is that the system behaves very differently when one party is in control than when they share.” He identifies two distinct modes of government operation.
“In Mode 1 - unified government - the minority party in Washington, shut out of power, has every incentive to make the majority’s life difficult, and does so. Its partisans, with no stake in whether anything gets done in Washington, treat the government as if it were under control of an invading army. The majority, lacking support from the out-of-power party, must govern on its own, which requires holding on to every element of its coalition, which means governing from the center of its party instead of the center of the country.”
“In Mode 2 - divided government - the dynamic is reversed. Both parties, responsible for governing, have a stake in success. Forced to negotiate and compromise, they drag policy toward the center, allowing moderates to feel represented instead of ignored. Most important, the country itself becomes more governable and meaningful laws stand a likelier chance of passage, because neither side can easily blame the other for whatever is wrong and because any major legislation needs support from both parties to pass.”
These two modes of operation provide an elegant systems explanation for the workings of America’s federal government over the past few years. When in total control, Mode 1, each party needs to keep its own constituency unified to get anything done, since there is little hope of reaching across party lines. “In other words, Democrats, when in total control, have little choice but to govern from the left. Republicans, who are even more conservative than Democrats are liberal, govern from the right. Policy is driven toward the edges, instead of the middle.”
The built-in feedback mechanism that then comes into play is the growing number of independent voters, who, as exit polls indicate, have accounted for the wide swings we have seen in recent wave elections. If the independents don’t like what unified government is doing, they will rally against the incumbents and get the country back to divided government.
In the 2006 House elections, independents voted 57% for Democrats and 39% for Republicans, helping the Democrats win control of the House as well as the Senate. In 2010, independents reversed course and voted 56% for Republican candidates and 38% for Democrats, which accounts for the Republicans re-gaining control of the House by a wide margin and coming close to doing so in the Senate.
What is the prognosis for the next several years? Our very large government is essentially a highly complex organizational system, and thus intrinsically unpredictable. Anything could happen. But given the ideological polarization of the parties and the country as a whole, the political volatility and electoral fluctuations of the past decade are likely to continue, barring black swan events like a severe economic depression or 9/11-like terrorist attack.
What are the implications of long periods of political volatility? Has the country ever gone through such politically volatile times in the past? The answers to these question can be found in another excellent OpEd in the same issue of the NY Times - Throwing the Bums Out for 140 Years - by Stanford University historian David Kennedy. He writes:
“ . . . the political instability of our own time pales when compared with the late 19th century. In the Gilded Age the American ship of state pitched and yawed on a howling sea of electoral turbulence. For decades on end, “divided government” was the norm. In only 12 of the 30 years after 1870 did the same party control the House, the Senate and the White House.”
“The majority party in the House - intended to be the branch of government most responsive to swings in popular sentiment - shifted six times in the era’s 15 Congressional elections. Three of those shifts in power entailed losses of more than 70 seats by the majority party (at a time when there were roughly 100 fewer seats than today’s 435). In 1894, Democrats shed more than 100. Today’s electoral oscillations, for all their drama, seem modest by comparison.”
The Gilded Age is the name given to the era of rapid economic and population growth following the Civil War. It was a time of major industrial and technological advances, including railroads, steel and factories of all sorts. The telephone and electricity were both invented and initially deployed during this period.
In his article, Professor Kennedy discusses the challenges the country faced during these times. Foremost among them was navigating the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and from a rural to an increasingly urban society; managing the labor unrest in this new industrialized, urban economy, as workers worried about their jobs, pay and working conditions; absorbing millions of immigrants; and recovering from the wounds of the Civil War.
How do these challenges compare to those we now face? Some are similar, some are new. Among our most critical challenges are once more navigating an economic transition, this time to a post-industrial information and service economy; dealing with the high unemployment resulting from the structural changes the economy is going through; and coming up with a reasonable immigration policy. Other challenges are more unique to our times, such as increased global competition; high healthcare costs; environment issues; and the search for sustainable, low-cost energy.
“What’s instructive to us now is the similarity between the Gilded Age’s combination of extraordinary social and economic dynamism and abject political paralysis,” writes Kennedy. “In the face of all those challenges, like our Gilded Age forebears, we have a political system that manages to be both volatile and gridlocked - indeed, it may be gridlocked not least because it is so volatile. And, like their 19th-century forebears, today’s politicians have great difficulty gaining traction on any of those challenges. Now as then, it’s hard to lead citizens who are so eager to ‘throw the bums out’ at every opportunity.”
He reminds us that history now views the Gilded Age as a relatively inconsequential chapter in our country’s history, with a string of presidents that few now remember. “Generations of American scholars have struggled to find a coherent narrative or to identify heroic leaders in that era’s messy and inconclusive political scene.”
Yet, the country kept moving on and making progress, including major advances in what is often referred to as the Second Industrial Revolution, as well in developing the world’s most comprehensive public education system. By the beginning of the 20th century, the US emerged as one of the world’s industrial and economic powers, as well as an increasingly prosperous and powerful country.
“So perhaps the stasis of the Gilded Age and the stalemate of our recent years reflect not so much the defects of our political structures as the monumental scale of the issues at hand. From that perspective, ‘wave’ elections mark a necessary stage of indecision, shuffling, avoidance and confusion before a fractious democratic people can at last summon the courage to make tough choices, the creativity to find innovative solutions, the will to take consequential action and the old-fashioned moxie to put the ship of state again on an even keel.”
Perhaps, adds Professor Kennedy: “ . . . we are permitted to hope that the sorry spectacle of our own time may well come to a similar conclusion.”