The political “establishment” has become a kind of four-letter word, a catchall derogation of those who maintain the status quo in Washington. Alas, this phrase has come to confuse more than clarify.
A political establishment has always existed. That’s because it is quite necessary to have one. Even in the earliest years of our history, most political leaders were either military commanders (Washington, Jackson) or full-time politicians (Jefferson, Adams). Indeed, it is probably better now that politics is a profession. A common yet often forgotten problem in the earliest days of the republic was officials rampantly speculating on insider information, in part because the salary they drew from the government was so minuscule.
Still, a durable political class is a problematic institution in a republic, where the power of government is supposed to be exercised on behalf of the people. Such an elite class could very easily use its insider connections, knowledge, and other advantages to bend policies to its own purposes, while the great mass of people are left unaware of what is really happening.
This is actually one reason we have popular political parties—to check the excesses of the elites. A British version of political parties predates our own by many years, and there had been proto-parties during the pre-constitutional period. However, the Jeffersonian-Republican party was a self-conscious effort to draw the public closer to the government, as a way to check a political establishment they thought had begun to run amok. Of course, as the centuries unfolded, the parties themselves became captured at various points by the establishment.
So, this really is an endemic problem for the republican form of government: How do you keep the political establishment from becoming, in Madison’s phrase, “an interest adverse to that of the whole Society?” Our system has a whole host of mechanisms designed to mitigate the danger—the extended republic, the separation of powers, the political parties—but it is still an ever-present treat.
What else can we do about it?
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple years thinking about this problem (see, for instance, here, here, here, here, here, and here). I think our political class is not responsive to the interests of their constituents, nor do I think that the rules of the political game make them responsible to the general welfare as a whole. Rather, I agree with Ted Cruz when he talks about a bipartisan cartel, which, in my estimation, is committed to the propagation of interest-group liberalism; the misuse of the state to funnel public resources to the interest groups that supply the most campaign cash, lobby the hardest, and are generally most adroit at the Beltway game. This is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned, and the fact that it persists, election after election, has in my estimation only emboldened these anti-republican practitioners.
But this does not mean we need to abolish the establishment. It means we need instead a better establishment. And that begins with properly identifying which members of the establishment are actually working on behalf of the public good, and which are not. Take Tom Coburn, for instance. He had served in Congress for seventeen years. Does anybody doubt that, by the end of his service, he was just as much an enemy of interest-group liberalism as he was when he entered? By the same token, can anybody equate Paul Ryan to Denny Hastert with a straight face? How about Marco Rubio to Thad Cochran?
Conservatives are not wrong to be angry at the status quo, or to be frustrated with the members of the Republican establishment who have protected it. But painting with too broad a brush does more harm than good. If we cannot properly distinguish our friends from our enemies, then what incentive will any politician have to try to make friends with us?
Beyond that, conservatives need to look beyond the personalities of politics and instead focus on the rules. Too often, politics is taken as some kind of black-and-white drama that pits the forces of good against the forces of evil. This is just not the way things work. Most politicians are just like anybody else. They have some selfless impulses in them, and some selfish impulses, too. If we want to make lasting change in government, we need to adjust the rules of politics so that the average member of the establishment—the one who is neither particularly angelic nor all that malevolent—connects his own personal interests to the public good.
Why is it that so many Republican members of Congress talk a good conservative game in their home district, but then govern as interest-group liberals in Washington? It is not because they are bad people. It is because the rules that govern politics reward them for behaving selfishly. The rules that motivate him thusly are what we need to change.
Football is as a good analogy. The NFL has grown worried about the number of concussions, so it has taken to imposing penalties on players for hitting defenseless players in the head. Is that going to stop the worst players from taking the cheap shots? Of course not. But over time, the average player will adjust his tackling strategy, and hopefully the number of concussions will decline. By the same measure, if conservatives are frustrated about how Mitch McConnell runs the Senate, it makes sense to think about what incentives he has for running it the way he does, and promote rule changes to alter those incentives. This is a much more constructive use of our time and effort than hurling invective.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a strong motivation to let anger overwhelm—to condemn all professional politicians as part of “the establishment,” and to focus relentlessly, almost obsessively, on the personalities within politics. These are not constructive tendencies. Instead, we have to keep our tempers cool. We must recognize that we have a lot of friends in government, and find ways to work constructively with them. And instead of personalizing political conflict, we should do the opposite: We have to understand that most of our adversaries are merely following the path of least resistance, and that our goal must be to create a new path of least resistance, which leads not to interest-group liberalism but constitutional conservatism.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
