“The Republican Party stands on an ever-narrowing base of older, whiter, more rural voters, whom it regards as ‘the real America’”
Read Jacob Kirkegaard on how gerrymandering has destroyed the house
In the first week of October, America’s national parks, museums, and war cemeteries closed. The military reserve cancelled training drills, 90 per cent of Internal Revenue Service workers were sent home, Wall Street regulation was put on hold, the National Institute of Health stopped giving grants and locked out new patients from clinical trials, trade talks in Europe were suspended and negotiations with Iran no longer had the necessary personnel. The markets dropped, anxious about the threat that the United States Treasury might default on its obligations, for the first time in American history.
The percentage of Americans who are either working or looking for work is at its lowest level since 1978; among men, it’s the lowest since 1948. As of 1st October, concealed weapons are allowed in North Carolina bars and playgrounds, and earlier this year a town in Georgia passed a law requiring every household to have a firearm. The current Congress is the least productive in over half a century. Republican members of the House of Representatives say they have enough votes to impeach President Barack Obama. Eleven rural counties in northeastern Colorado are trying to secede from the state.
From a distance, this breakdown of American institutions must seem like a fit of mutinous irrationality. And, to some extent, it is exactly that. Year after year, the US is becoming more secular, more urban, more polyglot, darker-skinned, and, politically, more blue. A Democrat has won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and last year Democratic congressional candidates won more total votes across the country than Republicans (though Republicans continued to hold onto the House by a narrow majority because of gerrymandering). Younger voters identify overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party; in a recent poll, a majority of people under 30 even said they preferred socialism to capitalism. Large majorities of Americans favour new laws that would limit gun ownership and put illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, but the bills can’t move through a Congress where minorities have the ability to block.
The collapse of governance in Washington has to be seen as a revolt by conservative politicians and the people they represent against their own waning power. Modern conservative politics rose up in the 1970s as a confident, forward-thinking movement out of the Sunbelt, bursting with new ideas. One of its creators, a young congressman from suburban Georgia named Newt Gingrich, described his constituency as “a sort of Norman Rockwell world with fiber-optic computers and jet airplanes.” In 1978, the rubric of an anti-abortion Republican candidate for the Senate in Iowa, Roger Jepsen, who defeated a longtime liberal Democrat, was “conservatives for change.” This spirit attracted younger people who felt little connection to the New Deal programmes or to the sclerotic labour unions that held together what was left of the old Democratic coalition. Conservatives welcomed elections because Republicans won them—five out of six presidential elections between the late 1960s and the early 1990s—while liberals, cloistered in dying northern cities and university towns, lost touch with the pulse of average Americans and had to resort to undemocratic means, such as court-ordered desegregation busing, to achieve their agenda.
A generation later, everything has been turned on its head. Conservatism has no new ideas and argues the same old ones in the face of majority opinion, electoral defeat, scientific facts, and the lessons of history. The Republican Party stands on an ever-narrowing base of older, whiter, more rural voters, whom it insists on regarding, in the divisive and misleading words of Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign, as “the real America…Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.” And the party reacts to its diminishment like a furious old man who can’t bear the fading of his faculties, shouting its message louder and louder, waving off any thought of compromise or change, certain against all evidence that the world will eventually yield as it used to. A few years ago, Senator Tom Harkin, the veteran Iowa Democrat, told me that the Republican strategy is to create political chaos and destroy liberal government in the manner of the authoritarian parties of early 20th-century Europe. At the time I thought this was hyperbolic. Today, it’s the stuff of routine speechmaking by Democrats in Congress.
The conservative movement always had the character of an ideological insurgency, a counter-establishment, with the far-reaching strategy of a long march through the institutions—Congress, federal agencies, the courts, the media, schools and colleges, the culture. Today, like an insurgent army facing defeat, the movement is undertaking a radical self-purification that looks nihilistic, holed up in districts where everyone thinks alike, purging leaders deemed traitorous in primary challenges, while exhorting its rank and file in the delusional faith that ultimate victory is near. The Facebook page of Republican Senator Ted Cruz—the greatest demagogue Washington has seen since Joseph McCarthy—proclaims, “We can defeat Obamacare, and here’s how we do it. Please SHARE!” while readers reply “God Bless U! Praying for you and will support your efforts!” and “I think it would work, put THEM on the defensive for once. Forget about elections, this is a principle you CAN stand on.” It all carries a whiff of Tamil Tigers cornered in the jungle.
The more clear-eyed Republicans know that time is running out on them. They still have the power of organised money and media behind them, and where Republicans enjoy local majorities, they are passing increasingly extreme laws on the issues that motivate their base. But nationally, where they are no longer able to persuade majorities, they are resorting to every available tactic to circumvent or overturn election results: partisan redrawing of congressional boundaries to ensure safe seats, routine abuse of the Senate filibuster, legislative hostage-taking to extort what can’t be won by normal up-and-down votes, reliance on the unelected lifers on the Supreme Court to overturn laws passed by elected legislatures, restrictions on voter registration, a sustained propaganda campaign of distortions and falsehoods in right-wing media and on the floor of Congress, oceans of political spending by billionaire donors. Above all, the Republicans champion a spirit of destroying the opposition and winning at all costs, even at the price of the national economy and democratic institutions. To an ideology that’s implacably hostile to the functions of government, the wreckage in Washington must already look like success.
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There is another story behind the current breakdown. Over the past four decades—the same period that’s seen the rise to power and subsequent decay of the conservative movement—the US economy has stopped working on behalf of ordinary Americans. The average household has seen its inflation-adjusted income go up just five per cent—around 50 dollars a year—since 1973, while those in the top five per cent have enjoyed an increase of 43 per cent (these trends have only intensified in the years since the 2008 financial crisis). This is barely treading water, and in many cases, going under—four lost decades for US workers, four decades of wealth concentrated at the top, seriously eroding the old American faith in equal opportunity, upward mobility, hard work rewarded, and the chance for each generation to do better than the last. When you get away from the two coasts and the prosperous “creative cities,” the physical landscape of American towns is blighted, the roads and bridges decrepit, the main streets lonely.
There’s no simple connection between economic stagnation and political dysfunction, but the past century has seen numerous examples, in Europe and elsewhere, of hard times leading to extreme ideas. This makes it all the more striking how contained American extremism has been during these years of decline, with widespread disenchantment but little mass unrest. Radicalism has been mainly confined to the political right, while liberals have become the party of conservatism, struggling to preserve the social fabric that had been in place during the decades of the Roosevelt Republic.
In certain circumstances (including America in the 1930s), hard times can produce social solidarity, collective hope, and lasting institutional reform. This has not been the case in the US over the past generation. With the hollowing out of the heartland, the populism of American life since the 1970s has bent toward harshness, fragmentation, and resentment. Map the parts of America with the greatest dependence on government benefits and those with the most reliably Republican voting patterns: they are very nearly the same.
A few years ago, I was driving on an ugly stretch of US Highway 41, south of Tampa, Florida, where the housing boom had turned into a catastrophic bust. A sign over a metal shed scattered with car and engine parts said “American Dream Welding & Fabrication.” The owner was Mark Frisbie, a middle-aged man with a big, limping body that was in constant pain. His American dream had been to have his own welding shop. “I did it for my father,” Frisbie said. “He always wanted me to own my own small business. Then the bastard died on me.” At one point he’d had six employees but now he was the only one, along with his son. Frisbie had $60,000 in hospital bills. A doctor from Iraq or India or somewhere (Frisbie could hardly understand what she was saying) had accused him of shopping for pain medicine. His wife wanted to move away from all the Mexicans who were coming to the area. Frisbie needed health insurance but he had no idea whether Obama’s plan could help him or not. All politicians were corrupt, they all stole, they were just in it for themselves, killing him with taxes and regulations. Same with the banks—they had come in and taken his wife’s day care centre when she couldn’t make the payments. “She’ll never be the same.”
Among his ailments, Mark Frisbie suffered from what the great historian Richard Hofstadter called “status anxiety.” He had grown up believing in independence and self-reliance; he had taken pride and a sense of worth in running his own business, his own life, only to find himself sinking in debt, unable to make his enterprise work, physically a wreck, and overtaken by foreign people, while distant institutions like government and banking appeared not just indifferent to his situation but actively hostile. It was difficult to say where this left Frisbie politically, but I didn’t have the sense that he would be sympathetic to the cautious progressivism of President Obama.
In an unguarded moment during the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama infamously said of hard-pressed Americans like Mark Frisbie: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” He had it half-right: the list was accurate, as subsequent years have borne out, but the suggestion of false consciousness was condescending. People in small towns and rural areas really do care about guns and religion—it’s just that these things might not be so dramatically magnified or so easily politicised if either of the two parties in Washington were able to do more to reverse a declining way of life.
Obama has had a few notable successes, but his presidency has been a disappointment to his supporters, and to the hopes he raised in that 2008 campaign. He was never able to make the levers of power work to the public’s benefit—he would reach for one, only to find that it wasn’t connected to anything on the other end. The institutional rot was too deep, the opposition too ruthless, the public too sceptical, the media too distracted, his inexperience too obvious. The great achievement of his first term, America’s first universal healthcare law, never caught on with most Americans and helped cost his party the midterm elections of 2010. That election proved hugely important. It brought in the class of radical Republican House members who are busy destroying the government and economy. And—because a peculiarity of the American constitutional system requires a census at the start of each decade, whose results are used by state legislatures to redraw national congressional districts—the 2010 elections put Republicans in charge of numerous state Houses where they drew the new lines in such creatively partisan ways that dozens of House districts will remain Republican for a long time to come.
It is unlikely that Obama will have any significant domestic achievements in his second term on the level of universal healthcare or averting a new depression (which was always a negative achievement). Presidential second terms have less than two years to get anything serious done before terminal weakness sets in, and Obama might not even have that. Immigration reform, gun control, limiting greenhouse gases, job creation, improvements in education, infrastructure, and scientific research—none of these seems possible now, with a determined and unscrupulous opposition in charge of one legislative house and eager to use the undemocratic filibuster to block progress in the other. For the past couple of years the only legislative movement in Washington has been on deficit reduction, which is both economically harmful in the short term and inadequate to solving the country’s other problems.
In the long term, the US, like other advanced democracies, faces the structural problem of slow economic growth, an ageing population, and unsustainable levels of debt. Both political parties claim to want a “grand bargain”—a far-reaching solution to the impending debt crisis—that could provide a way out of the current impasse in Washington. But neither side is seriously willing to sacrifice its own policy shibboleths (government benefits among Democrats, opposition to taxes among Republicans). Like previous weakened presidents, Obama might need to turn to foreign policy for any breakthroughs in his remaining years—and even a nuclear deal with Iran would need the approval of Congress.
All of this is remarkable. Obama won two elections with comfortable majorities in the popular vote and wide margins in the Electoral College. For many years he’s been personally popular, as have most of his positions. Currently, he’s down in the polls, but congressional Republicans are close to single digits. And yet some commentators are talking about the end of the Obama presidency.
The US constitution was written by ex-colonials whose greatest fear was concentrated power, who made sure that the government they set out to create would be divided, unwieldy, and exceedingly difficult to harness and drive in any one direction. They were brilliant men of the Enlightenment, and they didn’t anticipate that tyranny would be a much lesser threat to the republic than nihilism, unreason, ignorance, and incompetence. With the violent exception of the Civil War, America’s constitutional system has kept the country stable and limited its more extreme tendencies. But today, with one of the two major parties taking such a destructive course, while huge problems are left to fester, the weakness inherent in a democracy of checks and balances is glaring, and thoughtful Americans are pointing to the virtues of a parliamentary system. Yet, for better and worse, we are stuck with the constitution we have, which hasn’t been changed in four decades.
As in the Progressive era, the early years of the last century which Hofstadter anatomised in The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR, the sense of inequities and wrongs, of something fundamentally rotten in American society and institutions, is widespread and profound in the early 21st century. America might very well be at the start of a new Progressive era: the robber barons have consolidated into trusts, political corruption is endemic, reform legislation is blocked at the national level, but reform impulses are breaking out all around the country. The elements of democratic renewal are not mysteries. Their spirit goes back a century to that other time. We need limits on the role of organised money in politics, through constitutional amendment, disclosure laws, and state-by-state spending caps; replacement of partisan gerrymandering with redistricting by independent commissions; laws that level the playing field between management and labour; a return to the progressive tax code of the postwar years; and, perhaps more controversially, national service for all young Americans, to tap their idealism and forge civic bonds among citizens of different backgrounds. Such reforms would at least begin to remedy many of the largest problems in American life, from immigration to inequality, that fester unresolved year after year.
In 1981, in his first inaugural, Ronald Reagan declared, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He was issuing a prophecy that was doomed to fulfil itself. Three decades later, the radical spirit unleashed by Reagan’s words has rendered government incapable of governing. Most Americans no longer look to Washington for answers. The change, if it comes, will begin with places and people we haven’t heard of. Though Americans have lost much of their faith in institutions and the elites who lead them, they remain resilient, self-reliant, and capable of fixing things in their own backyards.
How gerrymandering has destroyed the House
Under the current two-party political system, America is essentially ungovernable. This is the product of a number of recent events and several long-term trends. The long-term trends, described by George Packer (above), include the poor performance of the US labour market over the past two decades, the increase in inequality and demographic shifts from the large white majority towards a “majority-minority country.” All this has contributed to the radicalisation of right-wing Republicans, who feel that they are fighting a rearguard battle to defend their “version of America.”
More recent shifts are equally important to understanding America’s political dysfunctionality. The first is “computerised gerrymandering.” Gerrymandering is the political practice in the US of having sitting state legislatures draw new electoral districts for state public office and the House of Representatives every 10 years after each US Census is taken. This is an old tradition, which has always given US politicians some opportunity to “select their own voters” by drawing safe electoral districts for both Democrats and Republicans.
What has changed is that since the 2000 census this process is now done with the help of computerised GPS maps, which essentially shows each district down to the individual household’s political preference. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of electoral districts for the House of Representatives have become essentially “100 per cent safe districts” for each party.
This means that the “political contest” for the House of Representatives shifts from the actual election in November every two years to the party primaries much earlier in the election year. As Democrat districts will reliably vote Democrat and Republican districts Republican, what matters to the candidate is that he wins the party primary. As a result, the voters candidates need to attract are “party primary voters,” rather than the median voter in his district, and such primary voters are generally much more politically polarised than the population as a whole. Sadly, it is entirely rational for especially Republican House members to appeal to a radical fringe of the US population: it is this group that determines GOP primaries.
This destructive process is, particularly in the GOP, much aggravated by the 2010 “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision, which permits unlimited anonymous political contributions. Since then, a very small group of extremely wealthy, extremely conservative Republicans have built alternative “political organisations” that stand ready at all times to finance an ultra-conservative primary challenger to any moderate House GOP member. Every Republican in the House knows that if he votes for tax increases, Obamacare, raising the debt ceiling and so on, then they will likely have to face such a primary challenger. Moderates feel they must take obstructive political positions to “save their own political lives.”
It is the combination of unlimited outside money from rich arch-conservatives and gerrymandered electoral districts that have rendered the House of Representatives an impossible “branch of government.” Of course, the Senate is not much better—with its 60 per cent majority requirement—but it can nonetheless generally be trusted to avoid the destructive silliness of government shutdowns.
Without reform of the “electoral redistricting process” to create genuinely competitive electoral districts and a dramatic curb on anonymous political contributions via non-profit organisations, the United States will not again become governable in the sense that it each year passes a government budget that reflects the redistributive priorities of a majority of elected representatives, takes care of long-term economic challenges and generally provides for the welfare of the population.
