19. American Democracy Diagnosed

CHAPTER 19

American Democracy Diagnosed*

Alan Ehrenhalt earned a master’s degree in journalism, has worked as a political reporter, editor, and columnist, has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a visiting scholar in political science at Berkeley, and is now executive editor of Governing magazine in Washington. His new book, The United States of Ambition, shapes his keen observations into an intelligible pattern.

The U.S. political system has changed vastly from what it was several decades ago. Old-style machines like the one bossed in Utica, New York, by Rufus Elefante (never elected to anything) are gone. Political parties have lost their organized character. Experienced politicians and party leaders no longer have much chance to screen potential candidates. Success no longer belongs to team players. The political process has become much more open to leaderless individuals seeking office on their own. “The skills that work in American politics at this point in history are those of entrepreneurship. At all levels of the political system ... it is unusual for parties to nominate people. People nominate themselves” (p. 17).

Those who gain and keep office tend to be people who like politics, see it as a full-time career, and either enjoy campaigning or dislike its rigors less than most people would. They bask in publicity and put a relatively low value on privacy. As careerist professionals, they develop expertise in fundraising and in exploiting technology and the media. Furthermore, people who have these tastes tend to be people who believe in activist government. Even out of genuine public spirit, they work to expand their scope for doing good in their favorite way, through exercising governmental power.

People with a negative image of government, seeing it as overly meddlesome, or whatever, tend to shun politics. Exceptions do exist, but they are just that, exceptions; and they tend not to persevere in politics as tenaciously as career-oriented devotees of activist government. Under our current system, furthermore, a party’s success depends on steadily recruiting full-time talent. Government-bashing does not build majorities. Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment rhetoric reinforced a distaste for political careers among young Republicans.

When conservatives occasionally come to power, they do not do much to roll back activist programs already in place. “Government programs acquire an inertia and a set of constituencies that make repeal look like onerous and politically costly work, even for a newly installed conservative regime that finds them unattractive” (p. 64).

[T]hrough the 1970s and 1980s, the Democratic party strengthened itself as the vehicle for people who grew up interested in government and politics and wanted to make a career of them. And the Republican party was forced to compete as the vehicle of those who felt that government was a dirty business and that they were demeaning themselves to take part in it. (p. 222)

Ehrenhalt illustrates his points with case studies of local government (Concord, CA.; Utica, N.Y.; Greenville county, S.C.), state government (South Carolina, Alabama, Connecticut, Colorado, Wisconsin), and members of Congress.

In Wisconsin, for example, the people

have never chosen the Democratic party en bloc to be the legislative majority. The question is not put to the electorate that way.... Wisconsin’s voters have elected individual Democrats who outperformed their opposition at the tasks a modern political career requires. The electorate has not sent them to govern; it has merely maintained the conditions under which they could send themselves, (p. 142)

In Wisconsin, “the GOP has become the party of Cincinnatus—the party of those who, in the final analysis, would rather be doing something else for a living. The Democrats are the party of those who believe, with [Assemblyman] David Clarenbach, that ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather devote my life to’” (p. 126).

As Ehrenhalt recognizes, his observations do not fully apply to the general election for President. For a brief period every four years, after the self-nomination process is over, the opinions and values of the electorate are decisive. However little the voters know about the vast majority of political choices confronting them, “they do have enduring images of what the two major parties are about in presidential politics” (p. 270). They apply these images and they pay attention to the campaign as they choose between the two major candidates—or many of the voters do, so the qualification should run. Another qualification should be that the voters are choosing only between two candidates that they have not themselves deliberately nominated.

Ehrenhalt identifies a “central contradiction” of the U.S. political system that cries out for explanation: although voters have shown a clear preference for Republican presidential candidates over the last twenty years, this has done nothing to give the GOP a majority in the country as a whole (p. 208). Yet his own method of analysis suggests how to explain this “contradiction,” as well as the common observation (if it is correct) that voters tend to disdain Congress in general while admiring their own particular representative.

Presidential elections deal with the big picture. Voters are interested and informed—relatively. They have a chance to express conservatism more effectively than in local and Congressional elections.

Voters may dislike the performance of Congress as a whole. Taking the system as given, though, they can sensibly elect a representative who knows how to manipulate it in defense of their interests. Forbearance from grabbing their own supposed share of federal largesse would not appreciably turn the system around. Responsible government—government responsible to the general public interest rather than overresponsive, piecemeal, to numerous local and special interests—is a public good; pursuing it has prisoners’-dilemma aspects. Why should one’s own representative behave responsibly when few others would follow the example and when the payoff to himself and his or her constituents would be so slight and conjectural? Furthermore—as is one of the book’s main themes—their representative tends to be a specialist in providing services to constituents and in projecting an attractive personal image.

Ehrenhalt mentions the chronic U.S. government budget deficit as an example of irresponsibility or dissipation of responsibility in the political and legislative processes (although he does not phrase the matter just that way; see pp. 245...250). More generally, the political system has developed a critical flaw: “It has allowed power and leadership, at many levels, simply to evaporate” (p. 38).

What accounts for changes in the political system over the past few decades? Ehrenhalt makes or hints at several suggestions. Skill in communicating—in town meetings, in door-to-door canvassing, on television, in direct-mail literature—has gained in importance (p. 19). “The more campaigning becomes a science unto itself, the more public offices and rewards flow to people who have mastered its details” (p. 206).

Air conditioning and jet planes helped change the character of Congress. More so than before, serving in it can and must be a year-round, full-time occupation; yet members can keep in touch with their constituents. But long weekends back in the district, together with heavier work loads, have further eroded camaraderie among the members (p. 234 in particular). On local as well as congressional levels, an explosion in staffing has changed the legislative process, making legislatures both more competent and more active (p. 138).

Redisricting under the 1962 Supreme Court decision and the civil-rights movement contributed to opening up the political system. Changed convention rules and the increased importance of primaries have altered the presidential race. Vietnam and Watergate created opportunities for antiestablishment, antiorganization types (pp. 152, 209...210).

Some of these points, obviously, are just as much features as explanations of the new system and require explanation themselves. Ehrenhalt does not, and does not claim to, provide anything approaching a full, well-articulated, persuasive explanation.

Still, he has made a praiseworthy contribution to political science. It meshes nicely with the work of public-choice economists. Perhaps more academically oriented researchers will build on his work, figuring out, for example, how to obtain statistics on the personal characteristics of politicians and how to test his insights in ingenious ways.

The book’s two final paragraphs state a brief conclusion. Our political system is deficient in leadership, discipline, and the willingness to seek accommodation of divergent personal preferences. It generates a politics of posturing and stalemate. Yet it will not do simply to blame ambitious professional politicians for “this mess”:

We understand more than we might like to admit about city councils that can’t defer to leadership; about state legislatures where every individual is a faction unto himself; about a Congress that lacks any sort of meaningful community among its members. We understand these problems, or should, because they are all around us in American life. For all our ignorance as voters and inattentiveness as citizens, we have a politics that is, in the end, appropriate to its time and place.

This rather lame conclusion overlooks the insights of Anthony Downs in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957): It is perfectly rational for the individual citizen ordinarily to remain ignorant of political issues and give them only superficial attention. Any reform effort that hopes to succeed must take this circumstance to heart.

Ehrenhalt neither fully explains our political malady nor gives advice on how to cure it. Yet even unaccompanied by an etiology and a prescription, his diagnosis is well worth having. Although Ehrenhalt is not pushing any particular ideological line, his analysis tempts me to offer some libertarian embroidery.

Sheer eloquence, I conjecture, including a knack for devising memorable slogans, succeeds better in the political arena than competent concern for the sizes or importance of various supposed problems and of the benefits and costs of remedies offered. Knowing economics can hobble the honest politician, while the pangs of conscience spare the economic ignoramus as he prevails with promises and eloquence. Concern for the long run is a similar handicap, since looking good at election time is what counts.

These are among the reasons why the qualities and skills of a successful political campaigner do not coincide with those of a good government executive or legislator (as Ehrenhalt noted in Concord, CA., p. 55). “The ability to canvass for votes in Iowa or New Hampshire does not have much to do with the qualities that make a successful president. But it has come to be a virtual prerequisite for anyone who wants the job” (p. 206).

Ehrenhalt further helps us understand why the outcome of the political process does not necessarily represent the will of the people. It is a fallacy to say (as George Will and Herbert Stein did) that people must be pretty well satisfied with government as a whole; otherwise they would vote to change it. The voters do not have an opportunity to express themselves, and express themselves knowledgeabfy, on the character of government and its overall scale of activity. The political process operates with a bias toward bigness. Furthermore, voters are probably trapped in a kind of prisoners’ dilemma (as suggested in remarks about Congress above).

Ehrenhalt’s readers will see further reasons for skepticism about democracy as a good in its own right. Democracy is a particular political method, a method of choosing, replacing, and influencing our rulers. Ideally it offers us a way of avoiding or dismissing rulers who would destroy our individual rights. It is a radically inaccurate method of implementing the desires of the people, but the alternative political methods are even worse. It is a gross fallacy to slide from the case for democracy as the least bad political method into admiring political methods as such and into a supposed case for throwing more and more aspects of life into the political—meaning governmental—arena. Ehrenhalt’s observations bolster the case for strictly limiting the scope of government.

Although reforms in the democratic process will not dispel the dangers of big government, Ehrenhalt’s book should arouse interest in exploring them. The case for limiting the terms of governmental office looks better. So does the case for choosing legislators, or some of them, by lot rather than by election. So, perhaps, do the radical reforms suggested by F. A. Hayek in The Political Order of a Free People (1979).

Prospects for reforming politics and restraining government may look bleakjust now. In the long run, though, experience, reason, and the growth of organized knowledge can change what is politically feasible. (The historical and intellectual demise of socialism is a case in point.) Ehrenhalt has made a solid contribution to this growth of knowledge. So doing, he provides grounds for optimism.

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*From Liberty 5 (January 1992): 69-71. Review of Alan Ehrenhalt, The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office (New York: Times Books, 1991).