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Published on Leave a comment on Looking Ahead to 2024

David Brooks pins our current social and political problems on Collapsing Levels of Trust in his recent column in The Atlantic. I think he gets most of his arguments right. Without evidence that people are in general trustworthy, individuals will tend to congregate with others in their tribes. The way this is playing out today is polarization toward the far left and the far right.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it in his recent book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times:

The far right dreams of a Golden Age that never was, and the far left dreams of a utopia that will never be.

It is not an unreasonable reading of 20th century history to say that when the extremes are emboldened in pursuit of these dreams, the result is violent and horrific. What are reasonable people supposed to do?

In brief, form a new tribe in the center. I am politically to the right of the center, but probably no more so than most of the people whom I call friends are to the left of center. If we chose to, we could waste a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, or other anti-social media arguing about whether the lunatics well to their left are worse than the lunatics well to my right. We would be making the problem worse, by acting like partisans and letting the extremists set the agenda for public discussion and civic life. And yet this is the pattern into which we have fallen. Instead, we could disavow them both. 

 

I would wager that a coalition that included them on its left flank and me on the right flank would constitute a majority and would enact sensible policies. Centrist parties are thought not to be possible in our Presidential system in part because the parties that start on the far left or far right will find it easy to encroach on the center without losing the support of their flanks. I understand this as an equilibrium result. Are we in or moving toward such an equilibrium? I see no evidence that the two major political parties are courting the political center by moving toward the center. So perhaps there is a window of opportunity during which this coalition could govern. In other countries, they would call this a unity government, and such governments typically get formed when the alternatives are pretty awful. I am surprised that 2019 was not awful enough to spark such an insurgency of the rational. I suspect 2020 is that awful but the timing relative the Presidential election is unfavorable.

 
The last link and the phrase it highlights are to a TEDx talk by my colleague Charlie Wheelan, who put forth a sensible platform in the Centrist Manifesto in 2013 and founded Unite America to try to get a pivotal centrist bloc in the Senate. The Achilles heel in that strategy turned out to be that it presumes a Congress that seeks to perform even its most basic Constitutional responsibilities. So, looking ahead to 2024, we should be thinking about a centrist ticket for the Presidency, composed initially of a bipartisan duo with a prudent and responsible platform that begins to address the many crises we have built for ourselves. If the ticket wins, then the party can immediately recruit Senators and Representatives from the political center for a majority in each House, leaving the two existing parties in the extremes. Addressing those crises, even if incrementally, is what will help rebuild trust in our public life.

Published on Leave a comment on DC Statehood

Last week, the House passed a bill to allow for statehood for Washington, DC. I am in favor of representation in national legislature for the residents of the District, but I am not in favor of statehood. The Founders intended for the District to not be a part of any state. Here is a proposal formed from ideas I've picked up over the years from various sources, so I don't claim originality here.

We could think of the District as part of Maryland, which gave the land for it. Allow the District to be its own Congressional district. This is only fair, as the House allocates representation based on population. The District gets a minimum of 1 Representative (and is protected from gerrymandering that might occur if it were formally part of Maryland). For the Senate, allow residents of the District to vote for the Senators that represent Maryland. Then its residents have two Senators to represent them. 

This solves the problem that there are no voting members of the national legislature who are responsive to the residents of the District. It does so with minimal disruption. I acknowledge that Maryland has to take one for the team and needs to consent. But this is where I would start the conversation.

Published on Leave a comment on Ratf**ked, Now From the Left

About a year ago, I read the book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count, by David Daley. It is an eye-opening account of how some Republican strategists figured out that by flipping a few state legislatures from blue to red, the Republicans would get to control the redistricting process after the 2010 Census and draw the maps for those states to favor their party. The book has chapters on Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Arizona -- the states where we have seen increased attention since. The strategy was quite successful. The books is worth your time, as a means of better understanding what happened in 2010 and sorting through the challenging issues associated with the Constitutionality of gerrymandering.

In today's Washington Post, James Hohmann describes (without reference to Daley's book, strangely) what some left-leaning groups are doing between now and the midterm elections to try to run that strategy on behalf of Democratic candidates. Midterm elections tend to favor the party that does not hold the Presidency, and the Tea Party was ascendant while the Democrats were snoozing in 2010. But in 2018, the midterm effect favors the Democrats, and in 2020, they will be driving high turnout due to their dissatisfaction with President Trump. So they are poised to make gains. What they won't have is an opposing party that is not paying attention. There is nothing magical in the way Democrats would figure out which races to target, so I expect the Republicans to contest them vigorously. If you are in one of those districts, I don't envy the political ads and robocalls you will be experiencing over the next two months.

Published on Leave a comment on Charlottesville: The Criminal, the Moral, and the Constitutional

A lot of ink has been spilled over the tragic events in Charlottesville last weekend. I spent the early part of the week trying to find good summaries and timelines of the events. I found two that were particularly helpful. The first was in the Chronicle of Higher Education, from University of Virginia President Terry Sullivan's perspective. She continues to be on the front lines of many challenges confronting higher education, and I think she's holding up pretty well. The second was in Buzzfeed, in which reporter Blake Montgomery gave his first-person account.

I spent the last few days thinking about my own response and the various responses of others to the events. I think that one problem in the way the nation is articulating its response is that there are (at least) three elements of the events in Charlottesville that need to be distinguished.

The easiest element to identify is the Criminal. The horrific incident, in which a car being driven by James Alex Fields Jr. plowed through a crowd and crashed into other cars, left 1 person dead and 19 others wounded. This incident happened after the rally was declared an unlawful assembly. Fields will be prosecuted as a criminal, for offenses including second-degree murder.

The Moral element is also pretty easy to identify. Many, probably almost all, of the participants in the "Unite the Right" rally draped themselves in the imagery of the Confederacy or the Nazis. I can only imagine how pathetic life would have to be to hide behind symbols of genocide and the regimes that inflicted them. (Kevin Williamson has some ideas at NRO.) To do so in proximity to those who have suffered or lost loved ones to those regimes is a heinous act, for which there is no moral justification.

But here the Constitutional element is relevant. That heinous act of spewing white nationalism, whether through conventional media for speech or in an otherwise peaceful assembly, is protected by the First Amendment. Those who organized the "Unite the Right" rally had the right to do so, and they should not be threatened with or subjected to violence for doing so. This is true despite the fact that their ideology, if they could implement it, would impose violence on others. And those on the Left who seek to deny that right to speak and assemble -- an extreme form of the heckler's veto that is so evident on college campuses today -- should be criticized severely. The same is true of those who, during last year's Presidential campaign, are reported to have perpetrated violence against people attending a political event for the then-candidate Trump. The ACLU was right to file the lawsuit on behalf of the "Unite the Right" organizers who wanted the event at the site of the Robert E. Lee statue. They are also on solid ground to, going forward, refuse to represent such groups if they insist on carrying firearms to such events.

Prosecute the Criminal, Condemn the (IM)Moral, and Uphold the Constitutional.

Published on Leave a comment on How Successful Was the Tea Party Movement?

Over Dartmouth's recent spring break, I made some lunchtime remarks at a meeting of the Dartmouth Club of Dallas. The theme of my remarks was that we have recently seen, or will soon see, the poor outcomes of trends that have been a long time in the making. I used some examples that have been the subject of blog posts -- the depopulation of urban areas in the Midwest that put Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and even Ohio in play for the Republicans in 2016; the chronic underfunding of state and local pension plans; and the impending financial consequences of the Baby Boom generation shifting from being a large, productive cohort of contributors to old-age entitlement programs to being a large cohort of program beneficiaries.

On this occasion, I added a new outcome that we should have expected based on recent events. The election of Donald Trump represents the culmination of the Tea Party movement. Here's what I said:

As much as the media fomented stories about discord between the Trump campaign and the Republican establishment, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus – reflecting the insurgent and the traditional elements of the Republican Party – were working together on Trump’s campaign since at least August 15th.
In light of this, I think we have to acknowledge that the Tea Party is one of the most electorallysuccessful political movements in our lifetimes. I say electoral success – this does not necessarily imply ideological or policy success. And it has achieved its success without much formal, top-down mobilization. Recall that this movement began in February 2009 in opposition to Obama’s early policies, particularly his announced plans to give financial aid to bankrupt homeowners but also including the stimulus bill and eventually Obamacare. Some elements appear to be for a smaller public sector and lowering the public debt, but others have shown up to town hall meetings with, shall we say puzzling, slogans like, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” (In fairness, though, we do refer to Medicare as an “entitlement program,” so eventually people might start believing that.)
As an aside, lest you think it matters as much to Trump supporters as it does to his critics, you may have been reading in newspapers this week articles with sensational headlines that contend that Trumpcare or Trump’s budget will disadvantage areas that voted for him. This is more misunderstanding of the phenomenon. Recall the origin of the movement – in opposition to a government handout that would have sent money to some of these same areas. I would argue that “nothing is the matter with Kansas” – it just doesn’t always vote its pocketbook. (We might even note that there are some positive social aspects of that approach.)
The Tea Party’s first victory was to strongly influence the outcomes in the 2010 midterm elections, flipping the House back to Republicans, which the Republicans have held since. The House turns over every two years, the Senate every six. In the first three Senate elections following the Tea Party’s formation, the Republicans picked up 13 seats: +6 in 2010, -2 in 2012, and +9 in 2014 to regain control before giving 2 back while retaining the Senate in 2016.  Given how many seats the Democrats will have to defend in 2018, the Democrats are unlikely to retake the Senate, despite what we are observing in Washington these days. 
And in 2016, the Tea Party elected a president. Much of what Trump considers to be his agenda – national security and sovereignty, economic nationalism, and (using Steve Bannon’s language) the deconstruction of the administrative state – appeals to the Tea Party movement. I don’t see how the other elements of the Reagan coalition – pro-business, libertarian, evangelical – can find their way back to power until, first, the Trump coalition organized around these nationalist themes surrenders its narrow Electoral College majority to a Democratic administration and, second, the population is ready to move on from that administration.

I made these remarks on March 17, before the debacle of the failure to move the AHCA the following week. What I take from that episode is that 2016 is this culmination of the Tea Party movement is also the peak of its electoral success. The rhetoric of criticism of the Obama administration was ill preparation for the realities of governing. Conor Friedersdorf describes the unraveling in riveting detail in the Atlantic yesterday. Save for appointments to the Supreme Court, President Trump is unlikely to accomplish anything fundamental that requires the Congress to participate. That includes the budget, walls on the border, and many other planks in his campaign platform. And the reason isn't that the Democrats refuse to cooperate -- it is that the Republicans will be unwilling or unable to move these initiatives along.
 

Published on Leave a comment on What Makes a Swing State Swing?

An article by my friend and former Bush Administration colleague Chuck Blahous provides a defense of the electoral college based on the claim that it focuses the presidential candidates on swing states. Here's the essence of the argument:

In an electoral college system, however, the campaigns are induced to focus less on the sheer size of a state and more on its political moderation.  The so-called swing or battleground states are those states with roughly equal numbers of voters potentially willing to back different candidates, such that an extra successful effort by one candidate could tip the balance.  This is not a theoretical concept, but rather an observable phenomenon. For example, this year the candidates repeatedly visited swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio and New Hampshire.  Tiny New Hampshire, with its mere four electoral votes, received more candidate attention than California with its 55.  Why?  It is because New Hampshire was open to being persuaded by either candidate, whereas California was not.

As I noted to Chuck in some Facebook comments, I don't think this is true.  A state can be a "swing state" because it contains a lot of voters who are political moderates and thus swing voters. But a state can also be a "swing state" because it contains a roughly equal number of Democratic voters and Republican voters, who are no more persuadable than their counterparts in other states that have less equal numbers. In the latter case, the "political moderation" benefits of the electoral college don't materialize. From my experience, the Democrats in New Hampshire (where I work) are just as partisan and no more open to persuasion to vote for a Republican than the Democrats in Vermont (where I live). Chuck is correct that candidates respond to incentives and deluge the New Hampshire media market with advertising, but these advertisements may simply be efforts to turn out their base of partisans in larger numbers than their opponent's base of partisans.

To add some further support to my hypothesis, I would note that the political advertising done in New Hampshire during the general election was not particularly targeted to swing voters. All the negativity seemed like an effort to drive turnout by the candidate's base or to depress turnout by the opponent's base. I cannot recall an advertisement that tried to appeal to moderates who might be undecided (e.g. here's a problem we need to solve in a way that respects the valid points on both sides of the political spectrum.)

Much of Chuck's article is about what would happen in the counterfactual case where the national popular vote determined the winner. He is right that candidates would likely gravitate to their strongholds to try to drive turnout by their base. (President Bush remarked, when queried about his failure to capture the popular vote majority in 2000, that if that was the objective, he would have campaigned in Texas and "run up the score.") My simple model of what candidates are doing, now and in the counterfactual, is to devote their resources where the "price per vote" is the lowest. The price they pay is with their own time and with advertising. Population density matters for economizing on their time, but I presume that media buys are more expensive when they reach more people, so that it is not clear that media dollars would flow to the largest markets. Further, the media buys presumably depend on total population, not "total population likely to be sympathetic to your message." In this case, more politically diverse areas -- swing states -- would be further disadvantaged.

Addendum: How sad, I have finally repeated a post title without realizing it. Fortunately, the message is consistent.

Published on Leave a comment on Five Suggestions for the President-Elect

By now, if you are reading this blog, you know that Donald Trump is the President-Elect. This is not an "I told you so" post, for two reasons. First, of all the subjects for a blog, the horse race aspect of politics is among the least interesting to me, and there were plenty of more qualified experts to get things wildly wrong. Second, I haven't been blogging much over the last few years. Unlike when I started blogging 12 years ago, the blogosphere is now quite crowded. Just as importantly, around the start of 2015, in response to some life events and in anticipation of how unpleasant I thought this campaign would be, I just decided to focus on some other things and give myself the gift of not paying much attention in real time.

It didn't get nearly as unpleasant as I thought it would. We should actually consider ourselves a bit lucky.

For the record, I am a Republican, but I did not vote for Trump. I voted for John Kasich in the Vermont primary and Gary Johnson in yesterday's election. I simply refuse to vote for any candidate who gives clear signals that he or she will abuse power. For different but self-evident reasons, that disqualifies both Trump and Clinton. I would have voted the same way if I lived across the river in New Hampshire, where my vote might actually have mattered.

But I was also not part of this #NeverTrump movement among my fellow Republicans. Now that Trump is President-Elect, he needs support to govern from everybody. That includes me. I'll try to offer my best ideas and most thoughtful reflections from the blog, with greater frequency than during the long campaign. I will start with five ideas.

First, Trump should announce that he expects the Senate to vote on Merrick Garland's nomination before the session ends. He should not tell them his preference for whether Garland is confirmed or not. He should further scold the Republicans for not having acted on it sooner. Draining the swamp requires him to shine a light on political opportunism, regardless of which party exhibits the bad behavior. He owes no particular courtesy to Republicans who shied away from endorsing him, and so he should not spare them the criticism they deserve.

Second, he should acknowledge that our federal budget is on an unsustainable path. He should be clear with the new Congress that he expects a compromise like Simpson-Bowles, or something better, to be on his desk by Day 100. The problem is the baseline. Simpson-Bowles addresses that problem. Resetting the baseline so that it is sustainable does not absolve the Congress of its other fiscal duties, to modify the baseline annually to better reflect priorities as they evolve. This is an issue where we need to act sooner rather than later, and Presidential involvement is absolutely essential. Plus, his involvement gives Congress cover to do something politically unpopular but fiscally prudent. They might actually appreciate it. I make this suggestion in full recognition of the next one.

Third, he needs to recognize that his election coincides with a peak of the labor market, and things are only going to get more challenging from here. He needs to be thinking of rebuilding our decrepit infrastructure as a jobs program for the labor market dislocation that is sure to come. I have been preaching this for nearly 9 years now, most recently here, so I won't repeat all the details. Just make the process of setting priorities as transparent as possible.

Fourth, he should announce that he plans to have national or international summits on key policy issues for each of his first twelve months, led by his newly appointed cabinet officials and senior aides. Bringing the country together, and bringing it together with our fellow nations, requires a distinct forum for putting ideas into discussion. There is no shortage of topics -- race relations, immigration, international trade, education, surveillance, cooperation in the Americas, what's left of NATO, energy security, environmental degradation, homeland security, ... you name it. He should task his Vice President with organizing all of them, with the expectation that the lessons learned from each will inform his policy agenda over the coming years. (Yes, I am envisioning him in his role on The Apprentice as I write this.)

Fifth, he should get up to speed, like yesterday, on potential terrorist threats. The upheaval of this election is just what ISIS ordered. He needs to surround himself with a diversity of experts and listen to what they have to say.

More ideas and reflections to come.

Addendum:  A colleague points me to this recent book, The Politics of Resentment, claiming "Kathy Cramer got it right all along."

Published on Leave a comment on What’s a Conservative Student to Do?

NPR interviewed three student editors of the Dartmouth Review, to get their perspective on the upcoming New Hampshire primary.  The most interesting part comes near the end:

On The Anti-Intellectualism That Some See Starting To Define The Party
Neff: "There is an intellectual atrophy. Republicans use to be the party of strong fiscal policy. Now it is the party of tax cuts. It's not an intellectual approach to just talk about cutting taxes. I feel there's a lot of populism choking off what could be cool new ideas. On education, on immigration."

Riley: "The most troubling part of the rightward shift, for someone like me who believes in evolution and the climate change issue, has been the anti-intellectualism that has infected that. I don't know if candidates actually believe what they're saying, or are just saying dumb things intentionally to appeal to the lowest common denominator."

Published on Leave a comment on If You Want To Advance the Centrist Democratic Agenda …

... then you might hope that Romney wins the election in November.  Here's my thinking on this crazy notion.

We know what Washington looks like if Obama is President but the Democrats don't have the House and don't have 60 votes in the Senate.  Republicans dig in.  The Democratic agenda doesn't move forward.  It's gridlock.  If Obama is re-elected but the Congress doesn't shift strongly Democratic, we can expect more of the same. That's just the way it is with Republicans on Capitol Hill these days.  We can speculate as to whether House Republicans would feel more or less empowered opposing a re-elected Obama.  Maybe less right after the election, but growing over time as Obama becomes more of a lame duck President.  And history doesn't favor an improvement for the Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections if they control the White House.

But now consider what happens if it is President Romney.  We can presume that if there was enough sentiment to make that happen, the Republicans will not have lost ground in Congress.  So what is Romney's record in the organizations that he has run?  It has been pointed out many times that he does not seem to be driven by ideological principles.  It is less often emphasized what he is driven by.  He is results oriented.  He tries to turn things around and add value.  It was true at Bain.  It was true in the 2002 Winter Olympics.  And, most instructively, it was true of his time as Governor of Massachusetts. 

So how would a President Romney get things done?  He wouldn't make the mistake of trying to transcend politics.  He would play politics to the hilt.  Unencumbered by restrictive ideological principles, he would work very hard to get 60 votes in the Senate while retaining a majority in the House, so that he could take credit for the results while he's in office. The need to get those 60 votes in the Senate is what allows the centrist part of the Democratic agenda to move forward.

I believe that the way to understand the Romney campaign is simply to acknowledge that his ambition is to be the guy in charge who gets things done on the grandest scale possible.  That means being President.  Nothing he has to say or do in the process of getting elected will substantially affect what he does when he gets there.  And that would be good news for centrist Democrats, even if it would be a bitter pill to swallow.

Published on Leave a comment on Quick Reactions to the Iowa Caucus

The results from Iowa with over 90 percent of precincts reporting show Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney in a dead heat with 25 percent of the vote each, with Ron Paul third with 21 percent of the vote. 

This is not a surprise.  The Republican party has three factions: religious conservatives, economic conservatives, and libertarians.  Each faction is represented by one of these three candidates (in the order listed above).  What shifted over the past few months was which candidate would represent the religious conservatives.  It turned out to be Santorum, rather than Bachmann or Perry.

The Iowa caucus is not supposed to determine the nominee.  It is primarily the media circus surrounding it that makes it appear to be more consequential than it is.  Ezra Klein had a good post on this a day ago.  Iowa matters beyond the delegates it awards because it provides information that is useful to others who are deciding which candidate to support -- and because an abysmal showing might convince a marginal candidate to drop out of the race.  That might be Bachmann here.  Huntsman ignored Iowa to focus on New Hampshire, and Perry might as well hold on until South Carolina.