What the Hell Is Going On?

Like the queen in the song, the Beltway class is watching the voters back home with self-righteous bemusement, wondering: Why are all these once-quiescent voters suddenly having such a fit? They used to be so well behaved, and we took good care of them to boot. 

Those hoping for the storm to blow over must be disappointed by now. Our system of government was deliberately designed to make it difficult to effect change. Fads in public opinion usually peter out before our system ever acts on them. So when discontent is wide and deep enough to cashier a speaker of the House, it is past time to pay serious attention to the public mood. 

According to the polls, people have been unhappy with the course of government policy for over a decade. In just one federal election of the last five (2012) have they voted for the president’s party. Instead, voters regularly direct their fury at whichever party has the misfortune of being in charge. We have not seen such sustained dissatisfaction since public opinion polling began. In fact, we’d have to travel back to the 1890s to discover so prolonged a bout of electoral distemper. 

Such deep and abiding frustration must be distinguished from the nastiness and hyperbole typical of politics. The quest for office is intense, so politicians often have an incentive to inflame the passions of constituencies that oppose each other for economic, cultural, or social reasons. But there is often a broad, underlying consensus that delimits the options policymakers may pursue. 

For instance, it is hard to find a nastier campaign than Harry Truman’s in 1948. He went so far as to compare his opponent, the mild-mannered Thomas Dewey, to Adolf Hitler. But was the distance between Truman and Dewey really that great? The Republican party had, by then, abandoned most of its opposition to the New Deal (at least those parts not overturned by the courts) and disavowed isolationism and protectionism. The Democrats, meanwhile, had cast out the Communists and were in the process of doing likewise to the segregationists. There were genuine disagreements, like the intense fight over national labor policy. Still, a robust political-economic consensus underlay broad areas of policy over which the two parties were not fighting. 

Contrast that with 1860. The only issue of importance was slavery, and party positions ran the gamut. The Republicans called for confining slavery to its existing domain, while the Southern Democrats endorsed the nationwide slavocracy envisioned by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott. This substantial divergence was a signal that the consensus that had more or less governed the national attitude toward slavery since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had broken down.

In our time, the political-economic consensus has been fixed roughly since the end of World War II, with important modifications during the Johnson and Reagan administrations. Both sides basically aver that the government should take a role in promoting economic growth to benefit most Americans. This implies broad agreement on the need for federal management of the economy, its regulation for noneconomic purposes (such as the environment or consumer health), and the distribution of social welfare to those who get left behind. Methodologically, this consensus presumes an abiding faith in the capacity of experts to calibrate policies to meet the demands of the day, an experienced cadre of officeholders to implement such policies over the long haul, and political professionals to communicate the agenda to the public. 

This mixture of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan has been the dominant view of governance since before most of us were born. Of course, heated partisan battles over how all this should be done have continued. But vicious rhetoric and hurt feelings are constants of American politics. What is telling is that the fight has generally been over strategies and emphases, rather than core functions. The scope of conflict over the last 70 years has been impressively constrained, even if it is intense within those limits. 

These days, however, our political-economic consensus is looking wobbly. Of course, matters are not nearly as bad as they were in 1860, when the country was being rent in two. But it is not 1948, either. The common ground that has undergirded American politics since the end of the war seems to be crumbling.

Beltway grandees are perpetually shocked and dismayed by the Tea Party “radicals” who are upsetting age-old governing norms. They are right about one thing: The Tea Party is an existential challenge to the established order. Whereas conservative think tanks have long been the lonely, ignored voices in Washington railing against measures like the farm bill or the Export-Import Bank, they now have a sizable cadre of conservative allies in government, especially in the House, demanding change. 

But that is hardly the end of the story. Conservatives are increasingly skeptical of all politicians. Taken together, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina have zero years of service in public office, yet together draw nearly 52 percent in the Real Clear Politics average of Republican primary polls. This is also a challenge to the established order, for we normally leave public questions of politics and economics—the very sort that presidents decide on a daily basis—to the politicians and their expert advisers.

This skepticism is not only a conservative phenomenon. Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist who plans to put taxpayers’ money where his mouth is. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sanders “backs at least $18 trillion in new spending over a decade.” Sanders’s plan amounts to a threat to the established order at least as grave as anything the Tea Party has on offer. And yet Sanders currently enjoys the support of a third of Democrats in Iowa and two-fifths in flinty New Hampshire, where he is leading in the polls. 

Meanwhile, heaven help those pols who are identified with the status quo, on either side of the aisle. Clinton has been a fixture of national political life for a quarter-century, and her numbers are terrible. Jeb Bush’s family has been preeminent in the nation’s governing councils since the War Industries Board, established in 1917, yet he is at 9 percent in the primary polls. A generation ago, John Boehner was an ally of the insurgent Newt Gingrich. Last month he was pushed out of the speakership by House conservatives for what the latter believed was intractable devotion to the status quo. Tea Partiers are now eyeing Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell—hardly a Lowell Weicker-style squish—for the same reason.

Our political-economic consensus is under sustained pressure from multiple angles for good reason: It is falling far short of just about everybody’s expectations. At its core, the postwar settlement has been premised on the ability of the government to grow the economy responsibly and fairly. That is not happening anymore. From 1948 through 2000, the average annual growth in real gross domestic product was a robust 3.6 percent. From 2001 through 2014, the growth rate in GDP has been more than halved, to 1.7 percent. This amounts to trillions of dollars in expected wealth that never materialized over the last decade and a half. 

And as the pace of economic growth has slowed, the pace of deficit spending has accelerated. At the beginning of 2001, the federal debt stood at $5.8 trillion. Today, it is a staggering $18.2 trillion. It is worth pointing out that the increase in nominal GDP was $8 trillion during the same period. In other words, the government borrowed about $4 trillion more than the economy grew during the last 14 years.

Moreover, the distribution of economic benefits has shifted in the last decade. Measured as shares of the national income, private sector wages and corporate profits were more or less stable until the recession of 2001. Since then, however, wages have decreased as a share of the national income, while corporate profits have risen. The shift is not enormous, but considering the size of the national income, it still amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And the trend shows no signs of reversing. The Census Bureau just reported that median incomes for female workers have been flat for 15 years and for male workers have been flat for an astonishing 40 years.

This is far less than Americans were promised back in 2000, and both sides must shoulder the blame. In our two-party system, there are three possible ways to organize government: Republican control, Democratic control, and split control. Over the last 14 years, the GOP had complete control of government for 4 years, Democrats for 2, and the other 8 years were split. 

Is it any wonder, then, that we are seeing the rise of such sharp dissent? If the status quo is not working anymore, it is only sensible for voters to cast about for a change. Maybe Beltway types who are inclined to hold their noses as a Tea Partier walks past, or scoff at how out-of-touch Sanders seems, should recognize that the audiences for such contrarians were not so large a generation ago. They have grown only because people have lost faith in the established approach to politics and economics. 

Rather than glare contemptuously at the dissidents, the leaders of our ill-functioning institutions should instead figure out how to solve the problems that, for generations, they have claimed they could handle. They would do well to remember that everybody who draws a living from government serves at the pleasure of the people. And if the current officers of government cannot do what they promise, the people will eventually replace them. The dispersal of power under our system is intended to slow down change, but not to stop

it altogether. 

So, as tumultuous as the last month has been in American politics, it might be only the beginning of a substantial evolution in the way our government works. 

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.