The Changing Face of American Politics

Executive Summary and Action Plan

Our system of government remains far more open to dedicated activists than most of them believe. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how our system has fallen into an abyss of polarization, dysfunction and mistrust; how our major institutions are failing, and what can be done about it. In section one I make the case that getting involved in politics is important not just in the short run sense of changing public policy, but in the larger sense of putting our democratic system back together. The most viable pathway to change is through electoral politics, and the most accessible vehicle is the Democratic Party.

Section two — the demise of the Democrats — and Section three — on professionalization — explain how the Party, despite a strong edge in public support, has done badly in recent elections. These are somewhat statistical arguments, trying to make sense of an academic literature that provides important counters to some over-simple explanations too often believed. The Democratic Party's slow decline is rooted partially in demographic patterns beyond control; and in part by deliberate gerrymanders and discriminatory election laws, the Electoral College, and a badly skewed system of campaign finance. Many of the Party's problems, however, are of its own making. Its fundamental economic and social justice orientations have been distorted less by substantive policies than through top-down, elitist, money-driven methods of running for office. Although its campaign professionals have developed increasingly sophisticated methods of targeting and delivering voters, the bloodless, impersonal nature of these techniques has robbed the party of authenticity. Only when it puts face-to-face interactions back into the equation can it overcame the electoral disadvantages built into the system.

The first step in putting people back in politics is to revive, replace or displace the many party organizations that have become empty shells. Activists must understand the importance of capturing the nominating process, the most crucial but least understood of aspect of American electoral politics. In most parts of the country, major party nominations can be won, and party organizations taken over with tiny fractions of the popular vote. Effective activism begins here.

In the concluding sections we return to a more academic analysis of how the current system is out of whack. Particularly important for those working in congressional campaigns — potential candidates in particular — many readers may prefer to skip to chapter two.

The 2018 elections provide the opportunity to begin the process of changing the increasingly dysfunctional Congress where the ideal of responsible parties has been distorted into a system of top down leadership that has frozen out, not just Democrats, but the Republican's own rank-and-file as well. Both parties need legislators with ties to their districts strong enough to counter the centralizing forces of party discipline and big money. The failure of Congress to encourage deliberation, specialization, expertise and oversight of the administration has badly distorted the balance of powers in which our constitutional system is grounded. The open deliberation of important issues is both a hallmark of democracy and the road to the restoration of trust in government. The first steps toward reform are those actively involving citizens in politics.

1. The Importance of Participation

One of the few things on which the supporters of the Tea Party, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and countless others readily agree is that the American political system is functioning badly. As party polarization has intensified, our sense of a civic culture and its related values of comity, courtesy and compromise have evaporated into a toxic atmosphere of alienation and mistrust. As with most swings in national mood, recent manifestations of dysfunction and discord are most vividly on display in Congress which — to give it its due– has rather faithfully recorded and amplified much of what is wrong with our politics. There is a viciouscircle here: "deepening public disillusionment ... has been both cause and effect of policy paralysis."

The waves of discontent that have roiled American waters have washed over other shores as well, bringing dark undercurrents of authoritarianism and intolerance. After years of touting the spread of democracy, the respected Journal of Democracy increasingly features gloomy tales of rising authoritarianism. "Even in some of the richest and most politically stable regions of the world," as one recent essay put it, "it seems as if democracy is in a serious state of disrepair." In both the United States and Europe there is a growing tendency for younger people in particular to describe "having a democratic political system" as a "bad" or "very bad" way to "run the country." An infectious, often prejudiced form of nationalistic xenophobia has re-emerged as a significant political force even in countries long thought to have put that sad story behind them. In most of the world's putative democracies, moreover, recent decades have seen a slow but widespread and continuous decline in citizen participation and trust in political institutions.

There is vicious a circle spinning here: the less people participate in their own governance the less they believe they can. Democratic governance is strongly correlated with participatory cultures: educational systems that encourage dialogue as opposed to rote learning, neighborhood associations that actually meet, businesses in which employers and employees work together, and even social organizations where people learn the skills of working together. From Alexis de Tocqueville's 1835 Democracy in America to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, the link between a vigorous associational life and democracy has long been clear. Civic groups produce "virtuous circles" of trust and habits of accommodation, serving as what Tocqueville called "large free schools" in democracy. Bowling alone, in contrast, as opposed to bowling in a league, provides no such experience. It is through group life and working with others that people become citizens rather than subjects.

Putting people back in politics can have the salutatory effects both of making a democratic system work better and of making people feel better about the way the system works. While those in government– the "establishment" if you will– sometimes lose touch with ordinary people, being on the inside does have the virtue of making manifest the vulnerabilities of the system. I once asked my one-time boss, former Senator Birch Bayh, what made him think he could run for president. "The better I got to know the other people running," he said, "the more I felt that I could do it." The better one knows people in power– whether in business or government– and the better they know their employees and constituents, the more they become "just folks."

Clearly some people have a lot more power and influence than others. And conspiracies, cabals, networks of corruption do exist. But it is more the complexity of power than its concentration that makes a system dysfunctional and difficult to change. The greater the power distance between citizens and their government, the less likely either is to work well. The first step on the road to closing this gap is to understand the system's complexity and the points of access the system presents. The most accessible pathway to change in 2018 is through electoral politics and the vehicle of the Democratic Party. Only if and when Democrats are back on track is there any hope of reforming the Republican Party and of putting ordinary people back in politics.

2. The Demise of the Democrats

Democrats have had at least a slight advantage in the percentage of people identifying with a party almost every year since Gallup began surveying party preferences in 1991. As of 2017, however, Republicans controlled the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, 32 of 50 Governorships and 67 of 98 partisan state legislative houses. Their margin of seats in state legislatures is now 4100 to 3200, despite the edge Democrats still enjoy in party registrations. Clearly the Democrats are being outplayed.

In part, the Democrats misfortunes are rooted in demographics. Urban areas and areas of high poverty remain at the core of the party's voting constituency. These voters are concentrated to the extent that they form what amounts to a natural gerrymander in what academics call partisan clustering. Gerrymandering works by maximizing seats in the legislature by winning a lot of districts by small margins and losing a few by landslides. By concentrating all or most of the voters of one party in the same district, many of their votes are in effect "wasted." In the 2016 elections for the State Senate in New York, to use a fairly typical example, 22 of the 31 Democrats elected (20 of them in New York City) won with 90% of the vote or more. Only 6 of 30 Republicans won by similarly lopsided margins, or, to put it another way, it took the Republicans fewer votes to win more seats. Although there is a gerrymandering factor that explains the Republican's ability to maintain control of the State Senate, partisan clustering is also a strong influence. Democratic voters are clustered in urban areas less by gerrymandering than by patterns of residency founded in economics, ethnicity, race and choice. Nationally, a similar combination of gerrymandering and demographics has produced a House of Representatives in which "very few representatives (twenty-nine to be precise) now serve in districts without a clear partisan tilt."

Economic segregation has also impacted the Democratic vote by creating a "class gap" in participation. Poorer neighborhoods, with fewer competitive elections and less vibrant civic cultures, lack the political resources and skills more readily available to the affluent. This gap "helps perpetuate a virtuous cycle of engagement and responsiveness among the prosperous and a vicious cycle of isolation and disengagement among the impoverished." And this has helped create a parallel problem for the Party. "The economic segregation of wealth has made it easier and less costly to target neighborhoods with stronger civic environments– specifically, robust social networks, active voluntary associations and higher levels of education and income." Add to this increasingly expensive campaigns that rely on affluent donors, and the Democrats, as a party, find themselves increasingly distanced from their base. Republicans, meanwhile, have been increasingly aggressive in using their new majorities, particularly at the state level, to aggravate this gap by revising the rules of the game in their favor. Adding deliberate gerrymanders to demographic disparities they have virtually locked in their legislative majorities. Further tipping the balance, they have enacted state-level election rules specifically aimed at disenfranchising the poor, particularly those in urban areas.

The cumulative effects of these factors are striking. In most elections since the Supreme Court ruled that districts must be of roughly equal size, the party winning the most popular votes usually won a bonus of a few seats in the House. In 1996, however, the Democrats won a majority of the total popular vote, but only 47.6% of House seats. Only once since then (in 2008) have Democrats won a higher percentage of seats than votes, and the differential is growing. In 2014, Republicans won 56.8% of the seats with only 53% of the vote. In 2016, the Democrats total of 48.9% of the major party congressional vote gained them only 44.6% of the seats– the biggest discrepancy between seats and votes (4.3%) in modern history.

As much as these factors help explain the Democrats under-performance in recent elections, many of the larger problems are of their own making. Since the election of Donald Trump, Democrats have been arguing about the message the party should be sending to voters. To critics of the Party's "establishment," its leadership has been too close to Wall Street and too far from tapping into the aspirations of its economically deprived base voters. If the Democrats moved to the left, it is argued, if they more vigorously espoused policies that redistribute income, they could have won major victories in 2016. "If only" questions are always problematic in politics; but his one, despite its apparent simplicity, is particularly opaque.

To begin with, voters had no problem distinguishing Clinton and Trump on economic issues, and they did so by margins that make it difficult to argue that a change in either candidates' positions on economic issues could substantially have changed the outcome. Among voters with incomes of less than $50,000, Clinton trailed Obama's 2012 percentage by 7 percent, but still beat Trump 53% to 41%. Some proportion of this fall-off is explained by the lower turnouts of African Americans, but the dominant narrative of the campaign– that the Democrats lost because they failed to reach working class and lower income voters– is, at best, weakly supported. Gallup researchers found, for example, that although Trump did slightly better in areas of "diminished economic activity," his supporters were in those areas were more likely themselves to be employed, and to have a median income $15,000 above the national median.

It may well be that Bernie Sanders, absent the burdens of Benghazi, etc. could have run a stronger campaign than Hillary Clinton. But the effects of the Senator's liabilities, the skeletons in his political closet that were not raised in the primaries, are unknown, and the fact that he could win less than 43% of the total vote among Democrats in the primaries, suggest that he would have, at best, done no better than Clinton in the general. Polls taken during the campaign rather consistently showed issues of "character" and recondite but apparently significant "issues" such as Benghazi and Clinton's e-mails often exceeding economic concerns in the eyes of voters, particularly among those with lower incomes and education. And when Clinton moved left to adopt positions similar to those of Bernie Sanders on college tuition, the effects on public opinion were negligible. Congressional candidates who ran to the left of Clinton, moreover, did not run particularly well. Clinton lost Wisconsin, for example, by a margin of just 23,000 votes; but the progressive Russ Feingold lost his Senate race by 99,000. Ted Strickland, similarly lost his Ohio race by 11.4% compared with Clinton's 8.6.

If economic issues had few direct effects in 2016, perceptions did. And it could well be that it was less Clinton's actual stands than perceptions of her "real" loyalties and positions that hurt most. Robert Reich put it as follows:

The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change.... The election of 2016 has repudiated it. We need a people's party — a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump's Republican Party ... What happened in America Tuesday should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

This brings us a lot closer to understanding why Clinton, and Democrats more generally, did so badly in 2016 and how the situation can be improved. The Democrat's message can be tinkered with for sure, a task made both easier and more urgent as Tea Party/Trump policies unfold. Unfortunately, however, the Party's fundamental economic and social justice orientation has been distorted less by substantive policies than through its top-down, elitist, money-driven methods of running for office. The medium, to recycle Marshall McLuhan's aphorism, has become the message. The modern campaign, whether at the national, state or local level; whether Republican or Democratic, has become more a technology-intensive bureaucratic battle of campaign professionals than a contest between politicians, partisans and political activists.