Yet there is a more fundamental mistake behind all of these ideas for reform. They presume that the way to get more moderate legislators — and hence more moderate governance — is to change the rules of the game. To be sure, there is clearly something to the idea that the design of American institutions may be exacerbating political polarization and that changing them would make it easier for moderates to compete.
Even under optimal institutional rules, political outcomes are not determined by the mystical, disembodied median voter so much as they are by the blood, sweat, and tears of committed partisan actors. In the American political system, there are no shortcuts around the hard work of organization, mobilization, and engagement in the sometimes unseemly business of party politics.
Moderates, by contrast, have largely abandoned the field. Moderates, perhaps because they believe that the broad public is already with them, tend to believe that the control of politics by those mobilized at the ideological poles is illegitimate, and they look for ways to design rules to allow the sensible but unmobilized middle to have its preferences govern without having to do the hard work of organizing for action within the two major parties. This is backwards. There is simply no way to get around the fact that democratic politics rewards participation and preference intensity, both at the mass and elite levels.
Moderates have to wake up and realize that they need to do the same. Unless moderates increase their own commitment to durable, organized political activity, there is no institutional tweak that will keep them from losing out to those on the extremes.
In the past, moderates have relied on three alternatives to durable partisan organization. First, they have relied on the financial resources of moderate donors to pull the parties to the center, a strategy that has long since been ineffective with Republicans and which is increasingly running out of steam with Democrats as we can see by the stigma on high-dollar fundraisers in the presidential primary and the increasing reliance on — and pious rhetoric attached to — small donations.
Second, they have counted on their control of relatively insulated parts of government, such as the Federal Reserve and the foreign policy establishment. But with each election cycle, these moderate incumbents are gradually replaced by new, more extreme members. As a result, they have to either quit — as most moderates have — or join the herd. Their declining influence has led moderates to search for institutional reforms to amplify the voice of moderate voters.
The most desperate indulge the Hail Mary scheme of forming a new, moderate third party. The cruel truth is that there is no politically viable future for moderates outside the Democratic and Republican parties.
And within those parties, moderates will only get the power that they desire by organizing as a coherent bloc, recruiting attractive candidates, mobilizing moderate voters in each party to participate in partisan politics, and developing ideas to inspire their base and provide opportunities for policy change. Without strong, durable, organizationally-dense factions, individual moderates or even entire state parties will not be able to distinguish themselves from their national brand or fight for leverage in national politics.
But how can they do that when the two parties have been captured so thoroughly by their activist poles? Could moderate factions in the Democratic and Republican parties actually have any significant influence?
The opening will come from deep forces at work in American society and politics that are going to cause the two parties to become less and less cohesive in the coming years. Among Democrats, the temptation for overreach that accompanies the increasing power of the left in a number of coastal states will open up opportunities for Republicans who can split off suburban, relatively moderate Democrats with the promise of political adult supervision for left-wing legislative majorities.
These forces have already created significant fissures within both parties that show no signs of abating. As these fissures widen, they will create an opportunity for organized and mobilized factions with different social and geographic bases to reemerge as a major force in American politics. Under a scenario in which factions return, the control of Congress by party leadership will break down, as members will no longer consent to restrictive rules.
When this occurs, the legislative agenda will become more chaotic and the opportunity for legislative entrepreneurship will expand. Habits of cross-party coalition-building that have faded in recent years will be rediscovered and the utility of constructing coalitions of strange bedfellows will increase. Indeed, a relatively small — but pivotal — amount of disciplined moderate dissent in each party would be enough to provide the political leverage to demand rules changes conducive to greater cross-party agenda-setting.
If that happened — and if supportive institutions, like think tanks, started supplying policy ideas with appeal across party lines — it would produce a Congress that has more in common with the early s than the last quarter century. If we are right, moderates — especially those with resources to devote to politics — should redirect their efforts. While the stage is set for factionalization in both parties, exploiting that opportunity will require the creation of durable institutions within each party designed to fight the battle for intraparty supremacy.
Especially in the GOP, that is a battle that moderates cannot win in the sense of attaining dominance at least in the foreseeable future. But, again, they do not need to attain primacy in the party in order to achieve many of their goals — they just need to pick, and win, the right battles. The opportunity to gain sufficient power to change the operation of legislative institutions is emerging. This opportunity can be missed if moderate reformers devote their time to pointless democracy-reform do-goodism or quixotic third-partyism that does not build up a base of power in the two parties.
Ultimately, there is no nonpartisan route to the kind of looser, more deliberative democracy that many moderate reformers want. In the American political system, the only pathway is through the political parties. But ultimately, the path to improved democratic governance requires seizing power. If moderate votes, organizational activism, money, and ideas are not mobilized in the right places and over the long term, we will likely remain mired in hyperpolarized gridlock.
More typically, the two major parties have each been deeply divided. This is an outgrowth of how our party system is structured.
More specifically, two key ground rules in our electoral system overwhelmingly tilt the playing field toward a two-party system rather than a multiparty system. First, we have single-member districts in which each congressional and legislative district elects its own representative.
Second, we have a winner-take-all system. For third parties to gain any power, they have to actually win elections. This high standard for entry means that the two parties have an effective duopoly. Because our institutions push strongly in the direction of two parties, it is no surprise that there has been no durable third party in the United States since the Republicans dislodged the Whigs in the s.
However, our enormous population, vast geography and demographic heterogeneity make it hard for those parties — especially in Congress — to be internally coherent. The consequence is that the ideological and coalitional diversity that other systems process through multiple parties has typically been institutionalized in the United States through durable factions within the two dominant political parties. Despite that, for the last couple decades both parties have been remarkably lacking in factional divisions.
The Republicans in particular have not had organized groups with significantly different ideas, institutions, funders, and geographic bases. There has been, of course, the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, but even there it disagreed with the leadership not on first principles but primarily on tactics. This era of internal coherence may be coming to an end.
The Democrats are already seeing the first signs of durable factional divisions emerging in their ranks, with some members openly calling themselves socialists and rallying behind a presidential candidate — Bernie Sanders — who has always resisted membership in the party itself.
This leftist wing of the party now has an increasingly large membership organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, that funnels party participation through a factional structure. They also have their own ways to raise money, focused on large groups of small-dollar donors. By contrast, the moderate wing of the party is somewhat less developed, although it has a significant base of large donors, a group of loosely affiliated members of Congress the New Democrat Coalition and a few think tanks like Third Way and the Progressive Policy Institute.
But both of these factions are likely to only grow and deepen in the future, potentially squeezing politicians, activists, donors, campaign professionals, and intellectuals to join one faction or the other. It remains to be seen which faction will be dominant. The energy is certainly with the Democratic left for now, but it could be countered by growth in the moderate faction driven by refugees from an increasingly populist Republican Party.
Whichever faction gains the upper hand, the Democrats in the future will almost certainly be a more deeply divided party than they have been since the fall of the conservative Southern Democrats. The Republicans are likely to also become more factionally divided. Going forward, the dominant faction of the GOP will almost certainly be populist and nationalist, yet they will not have the party all to themselves.
The populists are going to be forced to share the GOP with what we will call a liberal-conservative faction in recognition of their grounding in classical liberal principles of free trade, pluralism, and constitutionalism. But that dominant faction will be all but uncompetitive in the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, New England, and the Acela Corridor, even as far down as Virginia.
Notably, these are the same parts of the country where the left wing of the Democrats will be the strongest, possibly even dominant. That leftist tilt will make the Democrats potentially beatable, especially in nonfederal races, by a Republican Party that embraces an individualist vision of racial and ethnic diversity; stands for economic competition and entrepreneurship; offers market mechanisms to protect the environment; promotes internationalism in foreign policy; and proposes aggressive measures to fight poverty and enhance economic mobility without growing the public payroll or handing over power to public-sector unions.
The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exist in a free society. AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a wellconstructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice.
He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.
The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected.
Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.
It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other.
These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations. By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects. There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease.
Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.
As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.
From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.
So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.
But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.
The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens?
And what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail.
Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice.
Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets. It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good.
Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.
If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.
To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.
By what means is this object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.
They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful. From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.
A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.
0コメント