Recall Elections and Total Political Warfare

A recall election in Wisconsin tonight could result in the Democrats taking back the state Senate and remove Republican Gov. Scott Walker's ability to pass his agenda on a party-line basis. Great! On a substantive matter, I think it would be awesome if the Democrats win these recalls, and pretty sweet if Russ Feingold kicks Gov. Walker's ass in a recall of his own next year, too. But here's the thing: recall elections are a really, really bad idea. There are reasons why we let our legislatures sit for fixed terms of several years. You want government responsive to the people, definitely, but you don't necessarily want it to be a weathervane that follows every swirling breeze of public sentiment. Striking the balance between those competing desires was a big part of what the people who designed our government were thinking about. A recall process that allows for a new election at any time kind of destroys that balance. In theory, anyone who gets sufficiently mad about anything a politician has done to spend the money gathering signatures can force a recall, and once that happens all hell breaks loose (see: California, 2003). Recalls are a bad idea.

But I still support these recalls. And not just in the sense of "hoping the Democrats win." I think it was a good idea and thoroughly appropriate for Democrats to pursue these recalls. Why? Well, for starters, the Republican state government pursued wildly unpopular policies that they didn't particularly campaign on (though anyone with any sense could've told you they would pursue them nonetheless). If there is a situation in which recalls are proper, that's it. But it's more than that. The Republican strategy of the last few decades has been total political warfare: using every single possible bit of power they could find to pursue their goals, any prior traditions that such methods were beyond the pale notwithstanding. I've only heard brief descriptions of the twenty or so years before I started following politics, but of late this has been most notable with the filibuster and the debt limit.

Given this background of total political warfare coming from the Republican side, what ought the Democrats to do? They could say, "look, this total war thing is really destructive and it's bad for government. We're not going to get into this kind of fight." My problem with this, however, is that if you do this kind of unilateral disarmament, in this case by refusing to keep up in an arms race, you let the other side win. And then the lesson you send isn't "this stuff is bad," it's "if you do this stuff, you win!" And people like winning. People who conceive this strategy of total political warfare, moreover, are probably not likely to be swayed by your moral high ground. They'll be swayed by winning. The whole point is that they want to win so badly they're disregarding various traditions about fighting fair. So not only do you lose, and see lots of bad policies enacted, but you also don't do a damned thing to halt the use of extraordinary political tactics. So you should fight back. Use the same kinds of aggressive political tactics, especially in situations like the current recalls that allow you to claim some shred of moral high ground.

I should note, by the way, that I don't really blame Republicans for waging this kind of total political war. In The Once and Future King, when a young King Arthur comes up with the idea of fighting a real total war in which it's not just the little-people infantry who get killed but also the noblemen, the point is that war matters. When Camelot went to war it was because it mattered dearly to the kingdom that they win. Probably, given that Arthur's a good guy, there's also some kind of morally good cause he's fighting for. So winning genuinely is more important than the norms governing "gentlemanly" combat. Likewise, politics matters. If anything, it matters more than war, and it's certainly the only thing that reaches the same scale. And, while I disagree vehemently with Republicans about everything relevant, I certainly endorse their right to have strongly-held policy goals that they want very dearly to see fulfilled. And that means I respect their right to think that their most important priorities are more important than the rule saying, "don't filibuster everything." (The debt ceiling fight is a little different.)

The point is that you really need to design institutions so that people who want very badly to win the substantive battle will not find themselves incentivized to do things that are destructive for the country as a whole. Shutting down the Senate into a morass of cloture calls and burnt legislative hours is one of those things. Risking the assorted economic calamities associated with hitting the debt ceiling is another. Creating an atmosphere of constant uncertainty with the threat of recall elections is another. All of these things should be against the rules, formally. As long as they're not, though, it will be very tempting for all political parties, and especially unscrupulous parties, to use them. Until you reform these institutions, moreover, it will be appropriate for the more scrupulous good guys to use these same methods. I hope recall elections go out of style and the laws allowing them are repealed. But for now, I wholeheartedly support these recalls in Wisconsin, because we can't just let Republicans run roughshod over us with their extreme political tactics.

And go Democrats!