THIS COUNTRY IS TIED. Over the past decade, we’ve had an information revolution, a huge wave of immigration, large demographic shifts. We’ve impeached a president, seen the emergence of Third Way Democrats, and watched the rise and quiescence of the Gingrich revolutionaries. And after all this change and turmoil, the country is more evenly divided than ever in its history.
We’ve had close presidential elections before. But now there is parity up and down the political system. The Republican majority in the Senate is razor thin, and it could disappear with a couple of untimely deaths. The House, too, is split down the middle. If you take the congressional election tallies over the past six years and add up all the results, you find just about the same number of votes cast for Republican candidates as for Democratic candidates. Meanwhile each party apparently controls the same number of state legislatures — 16. In another 15 bicameral states, the legislature is split, with each party controlling one chamber. This is truly an age of parity.
How did we get here? Is there some Mystical Mom up there who took all the political goodies in the country and divided them evenly among her squabbling kids? Maybe. But my explanation starts not with a look to the heavens, but with a look to a book that was written a few years ago by Jonathan Rauch called Demosclerosis. Rauch drew upon some work that free-market economist Mancur Olson had done on the rise and decline of nations. Olson noticed that far from being hurt in the long run by the destruction of much of their political and economic infrastructure during World War II, Germany and Japan actually seemed to benefit from it. He theorized that in times of stability, barnacles grow on a nation, gradually weighing it down. World War II destroyed those barnacles in the defeated nations. And after the war, those countries were streamlined, and could rise with incredible speed.
Rauch applied the same idea to Washington, pointing out that, during our postwar period of political stability, barnacles have grown so thick on the structures of American politics that you can barely see the basic institutions underneath. There are all the special interest groups, the lobbying groups, the donor organizations, the unions, the trade groups, the activist organizations, and on and on. Together they weigh things down and frustrate change. Rauch chose a medical metaphor rather than a seafaring metaphor and said all these groups clog the arteries of politics, leading to demosclerosis.
Now we see that the result is not just stagnation; it’s stagnation in the form of equilibrium.
Look at how tightly the special interest networks dominated this election. In each party, the established network of interest and activist groups settled on a nominee early. In the Democratic party, the unions, the trial lawyers, the feminist groups, and the liberal interest groups settled on Al Gore and scared off all primary challengers except the quixotic Bill Bradley. In the Republican party, the establishment drafted George W. Bush, who was not exactly thrusting himself forward to be president. And the establishment — the Christian coalition, the big donors, various conservative organs such as the Washington Times — worked together to fend off the insurgent challenge from John McCain. Then the two parties poured in unprecedented amounts of money and manpower to support their candidates. Indeed, the loosely organized networks of activist and interest organizations sometimes seemed to over-shadow the candidates themselves. This was the first time in American history that more soft money was spent in political ads than hard money was spent by the candidates themselves.
The first effect of this change was that the issues that matter most to the best-funded special interest groups, money and materialist issues, tended to dominate the campaign. When Ronald Reagan ran, his speeches were filled with soaring ideas about America’s destiny and human freedom. Hubert Humphrey represented a lofty liberal vision of a just society built on the basis of equality. Bread and butter issues were important to both men, but these were supplemented and ennobled by larger beliefs. But the 2000 election was consumerist. Watching the two candidates speak about their rival plans was like watching an ad war between cellular phone rate plans: My plan gives you more choices! My plan gives you more minutes! My plan gives you free prescription drugs on weekends and holidays! Missing were any idealistic calls to arms of the sort that periodically surge through American politics and sweep away materialist interests and established coalitions — abolition, civil rights, Reagan’s reassertion of middle class values. This year there could have been a crusade for integrity, a combination of anti-Clinton revulsion and a desire to clean up Washington, but it was not to be.
The second effect of the dominance of the entrenched network of interest and activist groups is that we get campaign overkill. The two party establishments can pour so much money into their campaigns that they create a climate in which the airwaves in key states are inundated with ads and pleas. It’s like World War I — after a while, all the heavy artillery does is make the rubble bounce. The candidates are forced to stick to their trenches because they know if they do anything unusual or untested they will get blown away by a barrage. Their massive firepower only creates stagnation.
So the great army loosely affiliated with the Democratic party and the great army loosely affiliated with the Republican party have fought each other to a standstill. In 1993 the Clintonite health care warriors led a Democratic offensive, which failed. In 1995 the Gingrich budget warriors led a Republican offensive, which failed. The defensive trenches held, and we’ve been sitting here ever since, tied.
Some people hope that this age of parity will force the parties to rush to the center and give us a great age of vibrant centrism and coalition building. Don’t bet on it. There is a difference between stalemate and centrism. Neither of the two great networks that surround the parties is inclined toward that vital center (which in itself is a mythical creature like the unicorn). Indeed, the two great armies have now developed a symbiotic mutual-bogeyman relationship.
Liberal activist groups like People for the American Way raise money off the supposedly menacing power of the religious conservatives, and vice versa. The unions and the business organizations have a similar interdependence. It suits them fine.
Instead of some dynamic centrism, we’re far more likely to remain in a period of cranky stagnation. Already in Palm Beach we have seen how nasty things can get very quickly. This always happens when entrenched forces are locked in stalemate. It’s like the joke that is told about Serbian Alzheimer’s, or Northern Irish Alzheimer’s, or Palestinian Alzheimer’s: Sufferers forget everything but their grievances.
Whether the president is George Bush or Al Gore, he is going to have difficulty governing in this climate. Both men are beholden to their party establishments, but neither will be able to put together a governing majority. They will be hit not only by the opposing army, but also by true believers in their own ranks. Liberals will savage Al Gore, and we conservatives will hit George W. Bush, just as we did his father during the Clean Air Act and Americans with Disabilities Act campaigns. Negativity on stilts. The narcissism of small differences. The battles will be nasty because the stakes are low.
Is there a way out? If the leaders stay beholden to the interest and activist networks that elected them, probably not. But it is possible to imagine cures for demosclerosis. First, the president could select a few issues that cut across the current correlation of forces. For example, George W. Bush could name John Kasich his budget director and declare war on corporate pork. This would appeal to wonks on both right and left, but not to the party establishments, which benefit from all the spending programs that lard the federal budget (their lobbyists, after all, are the ones who created them). A few successful efforts like this would loosen some blockages. Who knows, a President Bush, elected by the establishment, might make a bid for greatness and govern as a renegade. FDR’s campaign didn’t foreshadow his presidency. Neither did JFK’s.
The second thing that might help is some form of soft money ban. If special interests want to give money to politicians, that’s fine. Let them give hard money to the candidates. That reform might take some power away from the establishments and give a little more flexibility to the candidates themselves.
But the stagnant equilibrium we see around us ultimately can’t be changed by any clever rewriting of the rules. It will take a change in the voters’ thinking. More voters will have to develop an insurgent mentality — a hostility toward candidates who emerge from the party establishments and come armed with the money and power of the entrenched networks.
It’s hard for insurgent sympathies to develop in a time of peace and prosperity. But insurgencies are frequent in American politics — some of them long-lived, like Andrew Jackson’s, some of them short-lived, like Newt Gingrich’s. If times turn tough, an insurgent will emerge from somewhere, and the age of parity will be blown away — to be replaced, we will hope, by something better.
David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.
