American Politics: “Insane”? Or Just Inflexible?

The title is provacative enough to get attention (How American Politics Went Insane), but Jonathan Rauch’s analysis of the American scene suffers from two flaws that are so common as to seem invisible to most Americans: presentism and reverse-provincialism. Because of these flaws, Rauch sees an unprecedented failure in American politics, where history and comparative politics point to a more common frailty – the rigid inflexibility of our current yet weakening two-party system.

Rauch’s description begins to run into trouble when he describes the history of the early Republic from its founders thorugh the Second Party System.

They were visionaries, those men in Philadelphia, but they could not foresee everything, and they made a serious omission. Unlike the British parliamentary system, the Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. A rogue member of Congress can’t be “fired” by his party leaders, as a member of Parliament can; a renegade president cannot be evicted in a vote of no confidence, as a British prime minister can.

…

By itself, the Constitution is a recipe for chaos.

So Americans developed a second, unwritten constitution. Beginning in the 1790s, politicians sorted themselves into parties. In the 1830s, under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the parties established patronage machines and grass-roots bases. The machines and parties used rewards and the occasional punishment to encourage politicians to work together. Meanwhile, Congress developed its seniority and committee systems, rewarding reliability and establishing cooperative routines. Parties, leaders, machines, and congressional hierarchies built densely woven incentive structures that bound politicians into coherent teams. Personal alliances, financial contributions, promotions and prestige, political perks, pork-barrel spending, endorsements, and sometimes a trip to the woodshed or the wilderness: All of those incentives and others, including some of dubious respectability, came into play. If the Constitution was the system’s DNA, the parties and machines and political brokers were its RNA, translating the Founders’ bare-bones framework into dynamic organizations and thus converting conflict into action.

The first problem with this assessment is the underlying assumption that the British system was more stable than our own. In fact, one could argue that the United States of America may never have come into existence but for the seven-year Parliamentary chaos that followed the French and Indian War. King George III had to appoint four new Prime Ministers between 1763 and 1770, when he finally had enough of the politically dominant yet factionally paralized Whig Party and chose an outsider (Lord Frederick North, who promptly stunned everyone by staying in office twelve years). During the time when the American colonists were demanding Parliament address their concerns (and the time when “those men in Philadelphia” paid the most attention to London), Parliament was barely able to manage itself. So perhaps the “omission” was done with a keen eye to what factionalism could do to an elected legislature.

That said, the greater error is the rather blase acceptance of the Second Party model as the basis for functioning democracy. Lest we forget, the Second Party system failed – and failed spectacularly – to address the key issues of the 1850s (the triumph of the Industrial Revolution in North America, the contential expansion, and of course, the matter of slavery). None other than Martin Van Buren himself took aim at the party he helped create in 1848. History was far messier (and in the 1860s, bloodier) than Rauch presents…

…and not just in the US, either. While the “RNA” of our system was mutating and sending off toxic proteins in the 1850s, the British were suffering their own problems. Indeed, one could say the entire political history of the Victorian-Era UK could be titled How Ireland Made A Mess of Westminster and Prevented Stable Government – All. The. Time.

This ties into Rauch’s second flaw: presuming the rest of the world is looking aghast at us while silently governing itself without incident. This sort of America Last thinking (I call it reverse provincialism) just blithely assumes that the rest of the world (or, given the white privilege pulsating through these critics, Europe) has things in order while we don’t.

To which I can only ask: Have you seen the rest of the world lately?

I’ve been posting for weeks about how the British referendum is figuratively tearing the governing Conservative Party apart. Australia has seen five changes at the top in less than a decade: three of them as a result of the intra-party coups that Rauch sees as a form of stability. France’s President is about to run for re-election…and either lose his party’s nomination or miss the second round of voting (either would be an ignominious first for a leader of the Fifth Republic). The two previously dominant parties in Spain will be lucky to win half the vote between them on Sunday (in Greece, that ship sailed four years ago). Even in Germany, the supposed pinnacle of stability in Europe, Chancellor Angela Merkel has had to build three distinct coalitions to stay in power – and voters seem less inclined to give her a fourth try next year. Of course, then there is Belgium, which in 2010 elected a Parliament that couldn’t install a government for over a year and a half.

You say, “Trump”; I say, “Google ‘Cybernat’, and wince.”

Even presidential systems have seen turmoil. Argentina’s dominant political parties (Peronist and Radical) fell into factionalism in this century, leading to last year’s election when the latter had to endorse a conservative (Mauricio Macri) to stop the former. Peru just shifted from Chavezista to “neoliberal”.

All over the world, (including Europe now), factions are atomizing and reforming under different party names and agendas, all in an attempt to keep up with rapidly changing electorates.

Indeed, that may be the one place where America is *different*, and much to its undoing: our factions and coalitions are stuck with the ossified “major parties” (Democrats and Republicans) that have been in place for 160 years. No other nation on earth has such historical rigidity. The left and center in the UK have gone back and forth among the Whigs, Liberals, Labour, Social Democrats, and Liberal Democrats in that time frame. Canada’s right has gone from Conservative to Progressive Conservative to Reform and back to Conservative again (the latter shift just in the last twenty years). France’s center-right has renamed itself three times in the last 20 years. Colombia’s Conservative and Liberal Parties, who fought elections and wars disguised as elections in the last century, barely register in this one.

Even Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the paragon of amber-encased “stability,” chose to establish a coalition with the local Green Party during its 21st Century recovery.

In short, when the old parties don’t match the new voters in the rest of the world, they go away and get replaced. Only here, in the United States, do so many, like Rauch, think about dramatically overhauling our political infrastructure instead of simply getting rid of one party and replacing it with another – which, by the way, is how the Second Party system died, and the now past-its-sell-date Republican Party was formed in the first place.

I sympathize with Rauch’s concerns, but we’ve been here before. Anyone who thinks the Ted Cruz of the 2010s is a new model needs to brush up on William Henry Seward in the 1850s. More to the point, if the political parties of today can’t adapt to modern politics, I humbly submit that what needs replacement are the parties themselves.

Sure, as a newly-minted capital-L Libertarian, I would say that, but any political reform that leaves the “major parties” in place is bound to fail.

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