November 5, 2012 5:39 pm
US must wait for the Great Realignment
Many pundits are telling Americans that they face a historic choice on election day, between an America that will increasingly resemble a European social democracy, or one that will return to its limited government, individualistic roots. This is nonsense. Since the House will probably remain Republican and the Senate Democrat, the system of checks and balances will ensure that the paralysis that has gripped the country over the past four years will continue for the next four, regardless of whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney wins. It would be nice if the US actually made up its mind as to what kind of government it wanted, but it is very unlikely that Tuesday’s election will resolve this issue.
Both parties have been yearning for a “realigning” election, such as those of 1896, which brought William McKinley and the Republicans into control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, or the 1932 election that did the same for the Democrats. Mr Obama believed his election in 2008 gave him that sort of mandate, an understandable mistake given the financial crisis unfolding at that time. But he won only because swing voters were fed up with George W. Bush. While he succeeded in pushing through a large stimulus and the Affordable Care Act, he discovered that he could not command durable support for a progressive agenda, and was repudiated in the 2010 midterms.
The Republicans are hoping for a realignment in the other direction – hence the view in conservative circles that the polls are biased against them, and that there will be a blowout in their favour when the American people finally speak. During the mid-2000s, Karl Rove dreamt of a “permanent Republican majority”. What is remarkable, however, is how evenly matched the candidates are. The winner will be decided by a coin toss, or some fluke of electoral college arithmetic. A decisive swing to either Left or Right is virtually certain not to happen.
A key question is whether the 50-50 divide represents a deep polarisation in American society, or whether it is a byproduct of a dysfunctional political system that amplifies rather than moderates ruptures. It is clear that the extremes have pulled further apart. This is largely due to the rightward shift of the Republican party, parts of which now want to turn the clock back not just to before the New Deal, but to the period before the progressive era. In response, the Democrats have dug in their heels to defend existing welfare state entitlements such as Medicare.
There still remains a group of centrist voters who want leaders actually to govern the country rather than disparage one another. During the debates, Mr Romney turned into a moderate Republican vowing to defend Medicare and not lower taxes on the rich because he was forced to appeal to swing state voters, rather than to party ideologues as in the primaries. The political scientist Morris Fiorina has argued for some time that survey data indicate the American people are much less polarised than the broader political class that purports to represent them.
Our political institutions clearly make a bad situation much worse. Congress is far more polarised than the public at large, with the most liberal Republican standing to the right of the most conservative Democrat. Our system of checks and balances offers many opportunities for strongly partisan minorities to block outcomes they don’t like, without having to come up with realistic alternatives. The result last year was the stalemate over raising the debt ceiling; it will soon be a crisis over avoiding the “fiscal cliff”.
A well-functioning political system should seek to mitigate polarisation rather than to exacerbate it. So beyond the immediate policy agendas, there is a range of institutional reforms the country needs to consider that would reduce the veto power of groups at the extremes and force more consensual decision-making. Ending the parties’ political control of district boundaries is one obvious measure.
Creating a streamlined budget process with a single up-or-down vote, giving less scope for lobbyists, would be another. Forcing Congress to be more deliberative by shielding it from continuous public scrutiny might also help. The public sector would become more efficient if it were protected from Congressional micromanagement that turns every decision into a political football.
Like the Messiah, the Great Realignment is not likely to arrive soon. In the meantime, we need to work with what we’ve got, and try to turn a 50-50 split into something more like a 25-50-25 distribution.
The writer is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute
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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012
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