The road to hell…

Remember the old adage that ”the road to hell is paved with good intentions”? American democracy is in terrible shape right now, riven by unremitting partisanship, and it is mostly due to things people naively thought were good ideas.

Item: In the “good old days” members of Congress lived pretty much full time in Washington, because travelling back to their home districts was expensive and time consuming for all but the few from nearby East Coast towns and cities. So they lived most of the time in Washington, often were neighbors, attended the same Washington parties, and socialized together and became friends, whatever their political party. In the 1940s and 1950s, after a vigorous debate in the Senate, many members of both parties would gather in Senate majority leader Sam Rayburn’s office to drink Bourbon together. (When my grandfather, a Republican in politics, died most of the local Democratic Party turned out for his funeral – they were all good friends of his).

With the advent of fast and cheap air travel, many – perhaps most – members of Congress no longer live and socialize in Washington. They now travel back to their home districts on Thursday, returning on Monday. That means they are more available to their constituents on the weekends, which many thought would be a good thing.  But it also means they now socialize less, if at all, with other members of Congress, and in particular, with those of the opposite party. So there are no longer those bonds of friendship to foster respect and bipartisan comity.  

Item: In the “good old days” members of Congress would retire behind closed doors (those “smoke-filled rooms” that political activists decried as so evil) and negotiate compromises to their differences. Then along came the movement for “open democracy” – let’s get those sneaky deals out of the smoke-filled rooms and into the public light. Sounds like a reasonable idea, doesn’t it?

But what is the result? Members of Congress now have to negotiate in public, and any sign of compromise on either side promptly brings a flood of emails (orchestrated by whatever pressure groups opposes it) from constituents. Result? Compromise is out the window and we get today’s partisan stalemates.  The essence of politics IS compromise – is finding a middle ground that gives all sides something. So cutting off compromise cuts off effective politics, which is where we are now.

Item: In the “good old days” candidates for office were usually selected by local party leaders, who usually, among other things, looked for suitable “electable” candidates. It was a system that was certainly open to abuses, but by and large it worked.  Then along came the movement for direct democracy and open primaries, which certainly on the face of it sounds like a good idea. But in fact far fewer people vote in primaries than vote in general elections, and those that do tend to be those that care most – the most partisan, the most extreme.  The result: we now get far more extreme right or extreme left candidates than we used to, feeding the increasing partisan divide in politics.

More than that, the extremes on both sides can now impose single-issue “purity tests” on primary candidates.  That got us the unruly Tea Party on the right, and fear of primary defeats seems to be driving many of the Democrats in Congress to equally extreme positions, like this really dumb filibuster threat against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

Item: In “the good old days” most Congressional districts contained a mix of voters – different parties, different races, different economic classes, etc, etc. That meant candidates had to have broad appeal, and pay attention to the concern of all the groups.  Then politicians began to gerrymander districts to “increase minority participation”.  The theory was that if one gerrymandered a district with, say, a majority of Hispanics or blacks, that would increase the chances a Hispanic or black would get elected and therefore increase Hispanic or black leverage in the political process. Of course gerrymandering wasn’t new; it had been around since the early 1800s. But this argument gave it a liberal moral justification.

The result? Both parties have now gerrymandered so many Congressional districts that most House seats are a safe seat for one party or the other, and the office holders don’t have to pay much attention to any but the dominate political voices in their district. As of this year, about 205 Republican and 173 Democratic seats in the House are considered “safe”.  And of course the economic and political segregation of the nation – with liberals in the costal big cities and conservatives in rural and small towns in mid-America, has exacerbated the problem. All this also feeds the growing partisan divider in the nation.

All four of these changes were made for the most part with the best of intentions (though politicians certainly saw other advantages to gerrymandering). Yet all four have contributed significantly to bringing us to today’s dismal political state. “The road to hell…..”