(Late) Monday Smackdown: Jonathan Chait Takes Care of Jonathan Rauch
Over the past two decades, my opinion of the intelligence, sophistication, and desire to be a trustworthy information intermediary of Jonathan Chait has gone up. Jonathan Rauch--not so much. The vibe I get is one of a profound unwillingness to tell too much truth to the right-wing half of his desired audience, and thus the constant provision of false-equivalence cover to bad actors. This pattern continues today:
: Why American Politics Really Went Insane -- NYMag: "Jonathan Rauch.... Rather than the presidential system, or the Republicans, Rauch instead blames the demise of what he calls the ‘informal constitution’...
...Political machines, pork-barrel spending, powerful committees in Congress, and centralized fundraising... drained the confrontation from the system and... made things work. Reforming those practices has led to a more open form of politics that people hate, resulting in ‘reflexive, unreasoning hostility to politicians and the process of politics.’ Rauch cites not only Trump but also... Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders.... Rauch has some things right. Large numbers of Americans fail to understand the source of partisan conflict, find gridlock inexplicable, and retreat to a simplistic populism to make sense of the mess.
But... the trouble with his theory becomes clear if you run through his examples of government dysfunction. ‘House Republicans barely managed to elect a speaker last year,’ and then hard-liners revolted against the Speaker’s budget deal; members of Congress are worried about ‘being the next Eric Cantor,’ the House leader who lost his primary to an upstart tea-partier; it’s ‘hard to raise the debt limit or pass a budget’; the Senate has refused to consider any nominee at all for the Supreme Court vacancy; annual appropriations bills often fail to pass; the government has shut down, and Congress has threatened not to lift the debt ceiling; a grand bargain on the long-term deficit failed in 2011; plus, of course, Trump, whose nomination is the most important factual premise of Rauch’s essay.
The links between these failures and the causes that Rauch identifies for them are tenuous at best.... The angry activists who drove Congress to shut down the government and oppose various deals... pork-barrel spending... enraged the activists. Nor is it easy to see how giving committees more power, or reverting to older forms of fundraising, would tamp down the populist uprisings that have scared members of Congress away from deal-making.... The link between the design failures of the presidential system itself and these failures is clear enough. The worse things go for the president, the better the chances for the opposition party to regain power. Cooperating would merely give the president bipartisan cover, making him more popular and benefiting his party as well. Republican leaders have openly acknowledged these incentives....
The more serious problem with Rauch’s argument is this: Virtually every breakdown in governing he identifies is occurring primarily or exclusively within the Republican Party. Democrats have not been shutting down the government, holding the debt ceiling hostage, overthrowing their leaders in Congress, revolting against normal deal-making, or (for the most part) living in terror of primary challenges. Rauch is right that Sanders has encouraged unrealistic ideas about a revolution that would make compromise unnecessary, but... Sanders lost. And Sanders’s notion... has no influence over Democrats in Congress--arguably not even with Sanders himself, who votes more pragmatically than his stump rhetoric would indicate.
The disconnect implies a fatal flaw in Rauch’s analysis. Since he identifies causes of illness that afflict both parties equally, while the symptoms have manifested in only one of them, what reason is there to trust his diagnosis?... Only one of them truly exhibits the tendencies he describes.... The GOP, but not the Democratic Party, is fully identified with an ideological movement... ethnically monolithic... ideologically monolithic, too.... Democratic voters rely on news sources that, whatever their unconscious bias, strive to follow principles of objectivity and nonpartisanship. Republican voters mostly trust Fox News....
Democrats tend to conceive of their policies in concrete terms, while Republicans present theirs in ideologically abstract terms. The pragmatic deal-making Rauch venerates is simply far more compatible with the style of the modern Democrats than the Republicans.... Democratic-leaning voters want their leaders to compromise, while Republican-leaning voters do not. Many Democrats feel frustrated with the system, but they want to make it work. Republicans do not feel this way at all...
