Is American politics suffering from too much accountability?
It's a thesis with growing appeal to the class of centrist political commentators, exemplified by a recent cover story by Jonathan Rauch for The Atlantic. Rauch's thesis is that successive waves of political reform have reduced or eliminated the role of mediating institutions and practices that made government work in spite of profound divisions.
The degeneration, as Rauch tells it, has progressed slowly, beginning with the early 20th century reformers who amended the Constitution to require direct election of senators (thus weakening the influence of state-level political leaders), continuing through the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s that increased the role of primaries in selecting presidential candidates and imposed novel limits on campaign contributions, through to the 1990s-era reforms by the Gingrich Republicans that dismantled the traditional committee system and reined in pork-barrel spending and earmarks. Intended to fight corruption and promote good government, this host of reforms has, in practice, made it impossible for the parties to discipline their members, and hence impossible to compromise with the opposition, while empowering outside groups with no interest in or incentive to pursue such compromise.
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It's a persuasive story to anyone who remembers how things worked back in the good old days. But is it true? Color me skeptical.
For one thing, American government genuinely improved after many of the reforms Rauch cites. No Ted Cruz emerged as the result of the direct election of senators. The increased importance of presidential primaries did not neuter party leaders — indeed, earlier this season most political commentators dismissed Donald Trump's chances by citing The Party Decides. Congress operated with no more than typical inefficiency after the post-Watergate reforms. As for the rise of the congressional free agent, the Gingrich reforms were specifically intended to increase party discipline — and to concentrate that disciplinary power in the hands of the speaker and whip, as opposed to the previously-powerful committee chairs. And, indeed, congressional Republicans have proven far more disciplined than, say, the Democrats were in the 1980s, when the Republicans regularly peeled off conservative Southern Democrats to pass the Reagan administration program.
Outside groups like super PACs are troublesome for politicians because they are formally forbidden from coordinating with campaigns. They are even more troublesome for the parties with whom they compete. But is there any structural reason why they should be especially ideologically extreme or resistant to compromise? If there is, Rauch doesn't articulate one. The parties themselves were a response to the need for a new organizational scheme that reflected the divergent interests within the new nation; the rise of political patronage machines, similarly, were a way of reflecting the interests of voters who saw themselves inadequately represented. Why couldn't extra-party pressure groups work similarly, and compromise just as well as parties themselves did?
Meanwhile, if one wants to assess whether government has become too transparent and accountable, it's worth noting that, at least at the federal level, two of the most powerful organs of government are completely unaccountable to the electorate. And yet, neither the Supreme Court nor the Federal Reserve is especially popular. On the contrary, opposition to the former has been a staple of right-wing rhetoric for a generation, and in recent years the Fed has joined the Court in the annals of infamy.
This is probably the right point to note that nearly all of Rauch's examples relate only to one side of the political divide: the Republicans. Democratic super PACs and pressure groups have been around for many years now, and Democratic candidate Howard Dean pioneered the process of raising money directly on the internet rather than going through traditional fundraising channels. But there is no sign of anything resembling the Tea Party or the Freedom Caucus on the Democratic side. Plus, plenty of evidence provided by Rauch himself suggests Democrats are highly amenable to compromise. Even Bernie Sanders is far more of a traditional insurgent than a figure comparable to either Trump or Cruz. And Sanders lost. Trump and Cruz, between them, won nearly every contest on the Republican side.
Finally, Rauch's analysis pertains exclusively to the way American institutions have evolved. But he has probably noticed the disturbing ructions on the other side of the Atlantic — particularly the rise of right-wing populist parties running on platforms deemed unmentionable by the traditional ruling parties. Centralized parliamentary systems are by design more efficient at passing legislation than the American system of checks and balances, but accounting for that fact European politics are in as much turmoil as America's. The stable alternation of center-right and center-left coalitions seems a thing of the past.
With that comparative perspective in mind, it becomes clear that, whether well-intentioned government reforms have unintentionally made governance harder, they are not the cause of the insanity that has gripped American politics. Rather, that insanity is driven by a crisis of legitimacy in one of our major political parties. For a variety of reasons, the Republican Party has completely lost the confidence of the Republican electorate. In response to that loss, the GOP has tried to maintain loyalty on the basis of appeals to identity and ideology, appeals whose effectiveness have steadily declined, until we have now reached the point of open revolt.
Rauch calls for a restoration of mediating norms and institutions as a solution to a surfeit of transparency and accountability. Give party leaders the tools to make deals, and deals will be made once more. Call it the good government case for the dirty business of sausage making. The problem, ironically, is that the prescription suffers from the same defects of good government reforms generally, of elevating process over the conflicts of interests that the process must manage to achieve any kind of result.
Authority, in any political system, rests on the consent of the governed; democracy just provides the most effective means for the political class to determine whether the governed continue to consent. So long as the GOP's voters lack confidence that the party is responsive to their interests, attempts to insulate the political class from direct accountability will only inspire greater ructions and revolts. Inasmuch as its donor class is indifferent or actively hostile to any such effort — and plenty of evidence points to the fact that this is the case — we should expect those disturbances, and their chaotic impact on America's political system, to continue for some time to come.
