Planning to Stay in Power: part 1

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 3.3

Once an agenda for the current time frame is established, it is vital that an impartial and fact-based means of evaluating policy options exists. Sadly, the interests of society and the interests of politicians are in conflict. In a competitive electoral environment, politicians regularly have an incentive to spread falsehoods or misrepresent facts and policy repercussions. Since the top priorities are re-election and partisan advantage, when the facts are inconvenient or problematic, politicians have a powerful motivation to ignore, distort or lie about them. Elections also have a detrimental effect on a government’s crucially important long-term planning. Politicians rarely look beyond the next election. They are like investment bankers motivated by short-term bonuses that can maximize personal gain while sacrificing long-term global economic stability. US Senator Tom Coburn (R – Oklahoma) in his book The Debt Bomb, observed that:

“Careerism — the philosophy of governing to win the next election above all else — is the root of almost all that ails Washington. Careerism is the dark matter of the political universe. It is the unseen force that bends decisions, and character, in ways that defy common sense and obvious explanations.”

He has argued that Congress, including staff and lobbyists, constitute a “permanent feudal class.” Campaign expediency regularly trumps long-term needs. In a paper titled “The role of elections as drivers of tropical deforestation” researchers analyzed elections and deforestation in 55 countries in the tropics, from 2001 to 2018, and found that more deforestation occurred in competitive election years. Lead researcher Joeri Morpurgo suggested that this is because some politicians use land and resources to win over voters. There are a lot of laws and regulations against monetary or real estate bribery, but not against exploitation of nature. Therefore, this is a way to win votes from the agricultural sector, among others. Morpurgo isn’t asserting that competitive elections are completely responsible for deforestation, but the study’s results do suggest that they are indirectly one driving factor.

Elections are thought to be the appropriate tool for the populace to punish or reward rulers, in order to “hold them accountable.” The issue of “accountability” exists when there is a separation between the rulers and the ruled. But accountability is a double-edged sword. The fear of losing the next election (or more plausibly, of facing a serious primary opponent, given the nature of gerrymandered safe-seat districts in the US) may restrain an office holder from taking bad actions, if the bad actions would also risk being widely known and perceived as harmful by a politically significant subset of their possible supporters. But elections also restrain the office holder from taking good actions that would be extremely beneficial for society. Such actions might be unpopular simply because of inadequate understanding among the populace, but might be extremely popular if all the voters had the information, time and inclination to seriously think it through. But such popular detailed examination never happens in an electoral environment. To make matters worse, the politician isn’t facing a neutral, un-informed electorate.  The candidate knows that opponents will try to frame the incumbent’s actions as foolish or cruel by cherry-picking facts and prompting voters to take a short-term view. 

The example of Ronald Reagan’s campaign against President Jimmy Carter is instructive. Andrew Bacevich, in his book The Limits of Power contrasts Carter’s 1979 so-called “malaise” speech about the energy crisis, the danger of rampant consumerism, and the need for sacrifice and belt-tightening to achieve foreign oil independence, with Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” campaign theme that Bacevich suggests amounted to telling voters what they wanted to hear – there are simple, painless fixes to long-term systemic problems. 

Reagan’s theme was the winning one. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson noted that:

“while they’re running for office, politicians of both parties encourage this kind of magical thinking.”

This keeps citizens in a constant state of political immaturity. Political activism and participation is reduced to aggrandizing one or another political celebrity while parroting the talking point of the month, as defined by an elite, rather than dealing with the reality of the governance decisions that need to be made. When looking at long-term issues such as climate change, one could argue this candidate-driven incentive is the Achilles’ heel of our electoral democracy.

Recognizing that a poor economy tends to weaken the election prospects of the party in control of the White House, elected officials of the party “out of power” have an incentive to sabotage the economy through congressional action or inaction. Faced with a he-said-she-said blame game, voters may not be able to assign blame accurately, but they know when the economy turns sour. As discussed in the previous section on “throwing the bums out,” the usual response is to punish the party that controls the White House.  Some observers blamed Republicans for such economic sabotage leading up to the 2012 elections. It is beyond the scope of this book to evaluate this particular claim, though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell provided some credence to this assessment with his statement in a National Journal interview in 2010 that

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Whether Democrats intentionally aided the economic meltdown that occurred near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, or the Republicans intentionally sabotaged economic recovery during Obama’s presidency, the incentive is real. The quote from Paul Krugman at the beginning of Chapter 1 of this book is to the point.

When legislators seek solutions to problems, they naturally seek “politically viable” solutions, remembering the catchphrase that “politics is the art of the possible.” Of course, this generates a feedback loop among fellow legislators and becomes a self-fulfilling limitation – making policy with tunnel vision. Often this means pushing bills that only pretend to address a problem, because a real solution can’t garner the needed votes in the chamber. 

When I was a member of the Vermont House of Representatives in the 1990’s there was a statewide grassroots movement advocating single-payer health care reform. Instead of embracing genuine reform, the Speaker of the House helped hammer out a political solution – meaning one that could get a majority of votes. The fact that the plan could not possibly provide universal coverage, nor solve the health care problem, was deemed irrelevant by the Speaker and his lieutenants. The goal was to pass a bill that had the appearance of “moving forward,” so that the members of his party could look good in their next election. Actually tackling health care reform would involve challenging the power, and inciting the wrath of, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Better to put on a good show, with the inevitable failure of the reform plan being revealed down the road, and definitely after the next elections. A similar dynamic infected the Clinton effort at healthcare reform and Obama’s Affordable Care Act on the federal level.

There is a tension between the conception of representatives as delegates mirroring the wishes of an (ill-informed)  electorate, or as trustees, exercising independent judgment to optimally benefit their constituents. Neither of these notions are actually achieved by elected representatives. This tension and the after-the-fact, or retrospective nature, of election accountability will be addressed in later chapters.