Concerning those Polls

So, um. There's no real way to sugarcoat it: the polls right now look bad. We're mostly into the general election now; Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton is the basically-also-presumptive Democratic nominee. This match-up has been polled extensively since last summer, when it (to be more precise, the Trump side of it) first became plausible. And Clinton has led in the polls, constantly. At the worst of her email scandal last August, this got down to maybe a 1-point lead, but then it got bigger and for most of 2016 it's been pretty substantial. In late March Hillary was up by more than 10 point, on average. As recently as mid-April it was still around 9%.

Now it's 2%. This is, um, scary. The only thing that's made Trump's victory in the Republican primary anything other than utterly terrifying has been the thought that, of course, he's not going to win. Right now, if you look at the polls... yikes. It doesn't look especially slam-dunk that he's not going to win. And the question is what to make of this.

Obviously, given my nature, I'm going to say that we shouldn't worry too much, not commensurate with how bad it would be if we were entering this election with only a +2% advantage anyway. And I do think that's right. Equally obvious, though, is the fact that we should be somewhat worried, and that something about this current wave of bad polls is telling us that there is maybe more of a chance that things go the wrong way than we thought.

But the key to understanding what the polls are saying right now, I think, is that they're saying a different thing from a month ago. And from two months ago, and three, and four. That means we need to ask, what's changed? And there's a clear answer: Trump has wrapped up his nomination fight, while Clinton hasn't. And the Democratic side is getting nasty. We can see this in the polls, too. Bernie's hypothetical lead over Trump grew wider at about the same time Hillary's did, earlier in 2016, suggesting that that shift was caused by something about Trump (i.e., he got less popular). But right now, Bernie's lead hasn't budged. That tells me that the current shift is nothing to do with Trump, it's to do with Hillary. Note also that since mid-April, when it was Clinton 49%, Trump 40%, Trump's gone up just over 1%, while Clinton has dropped by nearly 6%. Again, this looks like a Clinton phenomenon, not a Trump phenomenon.

But I don't recall the last month as being a particularly bad one for Clinton. No new scandals, no major missteps. The latest rumor about the email thing is that she's been fully vindicated, though a formal announcement has yet to be made. Nothing's really been going on that would suggest Hillary's become that much more toxic a candidate... in the eyes of a disinterested observer, maybe. Not in the eyes of a Bernie supporter. And there's the rub: it seems basically certain that what's going on right now is that an awful lot of Bernie supporters aren't saying they'll vote for Hillary in the general election. (Nate Silver makes the same point in a series of tweets.)

So we basically know why the polls look like they do. The thing Hillary's people keep saying about how she's fighting two campaigns right now is correct. Trump has wrapped up the Republican side, and has gotten a bit of a boost from consolidating his party. More importantly, Hillary hasn't wrapped up her side yet, and the Democrats are if anything splintering a bit as our race draws to a close. So that's the big question of the election right now: once Hillary actually wins, and Bernie drops out, do his supporters go back to saying they'll all vote for her? Can he get them to do that? If so, then we're back to a baseline of Clinton +6% or +8% or maybe even +10%, and the election looks fairly comfortable, especially since I expect the campaign to wear well for her and ill for Trump. If not, then there's potentially a lot more danger.

I would really like to think that this is just a temporary phenomenon. Something similar happened to Obama back in 2008, when McCain had wrapped up the nomination but Hillary was still hanging on, and that too passed. And, hey--Trump got a boost when he wrapped up his nomination! And Republicans have way more reason to not support him than Democrats do to not support Hillary. Waaaaay more. You see prominent conservative pundits talking about how bad Trump is and thinking of running a third-party candidate or whatever. Bernie Sanders keeps repeating how much better than the Republicans Hillary is. It would just be bizarre if this election ends up with a Republican Party unified around Trump but a Democratic Party that can't unify around Hillary Clinton, one of its leading figures for damn near three decades now. So I remain skeptical that that's what's going to happen. Probably another month from now, the polls will start looking more like they should, and the best course of action until then is not to panic.

But I can't deny that the way the whole Sanders campaign is going right now has me pretty legitimately worried. I think he's done some real damage, and I think he's going to need to work real hard to repair it when the time comes. He'd bloody well better.

Yes, the Democratic Party Has a Real Ideology: Equality

It's become common, among intelligent, political-science-literate types, to say that the Democratic and Republican Parties are organized in qualitatively different ways. The Republican Party is highly ideological, the thinking goes: it's defined by a monolithic commitment to conservative principles. The Democrats, on the other hand, are commonly described as a coalition, maybe even a loose one, of different interest groups. Paul Krugman's latest blog post is largely in this same tradition, with one major variation; it repeats the "coalition of interest groups" description of the Democrats verbatim, but Krugman describes the Republicans as "an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of higher incomes for the donor class"--and, as he notes, "the base never cared about the ideology." It's not very hard to diagnose this particular fault-line in the party right now, since Trump basically represents a rebellion on behalf of the white-resentment-y voters against the donor class-favoring party elites.

But I've always thought that this description of the two parties is wrong. Certainly I think it's wrong as to the Democrats, and it might even be totally backwards. Certainly the common wisdom accurately captures the way the parties seem to behave in practice. But if you look deeper, I'm not sure it's so true. The Democrats do have an ideology. You could call it liberalism if you wanted, but egalitarianism is probably a better name. Liberal egalitarianism is better still, if not so pithy. I like that formulation, though, because I'm using the word "liberal" in its technical or political-theory sense, meaning generally a commitment to expansive individual freedom. I also demote liberalism, in this sense, to the position of modifier, with egalitarianism remaining the noun.

And I like that, because I do think that egalitarianism is the central organizing concept of the Democratic Party.

You Don't Have the Votes

"This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative," declares David Brooks in the opening of his column today. That sounds strange, given the general despair gripping the Republican Party, and in particular the "it would be nice if our party weren't so goddamn crazy" faction of the Republican Party, but his closing paragraph explains what he means:

We’re going to have two parties in this country. One will be a Democratic Party that is moving left. The other will be a Republican Party. Nobody knows what it will be, but it’s exciting to be present at the re-creation.

On the one hand, that sounds about right. I've long thought something along these lines: that the Republican Party as we know it has a clear expiration-date, that eventually it would have to reshape itself, but that I couldn't for the life of me imagine what it would come out the other side looking like. Brooks suggests that Trump represents the destruction of the old party, the "model crisis" in which the old Republican ideas, having grown unworkable over the past few decades, come crashing to the ground. This sets up an opening for a new Republican paradigm, a new model for the party.

But here's the thing: that new Republican Party doesn't have the votes. Not yet, and probably not for a long time. The big problem in American politics right now is that there's a section of the country, no longer large enough to win a general election, as it was back in the 1980s, but still big enough to dominate one party's primaries, which is bitterly committed to a mixture of what we might charitably call white nationalism and conservative Christian traditionalism. Those voters want nothing to do with the new Republican Party Brooks wants. They're angry about America's increasing pluralism, and about the fact that white Christians no longer get to just run everything without serious opposition. Hell, it's worse than that, for them, as this piece about Trump-as-Jefferson-Davis observes: like the South after the Election of 1860, these voters are looking at a bleak future of being consistently outvoted by those who would tear down the social institutions and traditions they hold most dear.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to be "compassionate," but these voters have, it appears, no compassion for anyone outside their own little group, and precious little of it even within the group.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to have an "expansive open" nationalism, but these voters are practically defined by the "closed, ethnic nationalism" Brooks decries.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to be "honest," but these voters feel so threatened by reality that they demand unwavering loyalty from their politicians to ideas they'd have to be either fools or knaves to espouse.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to focus less on economic theory and more on "sociology," but... well, okay, let's be honest. These voters don't give a damn about homo economicus and the conservative economic theories which have used him as their justification. As for sociology, though, I fear these voters only have interest in "binding a fragmenting society, reweaving family and social connections" in one way, and not one that involves "relating across the diversity of a globalized world."

The basic point is that the people voting for Trump like Trump. They like what Trump stands for, and it's everything Brooks is against. What's more, even those Republicans who aren't voting for Trump are mostly voting for Ted Cruz. Let's run Cruz through the Brooks checklist. Compassionate? Hah. He's one of the least compassionate politicians you'll ever see. Expansive and open in his nationalism? Try "let's see if sand can glow in the dark" and "let's secure Muslim neighborhoods." (Actually, file those under the compassion thing as well.) Honest? Well, I guess Cruz is slightly more honest than Trump, but he's hardly honest. And as for sociology, Cruz is as fanatic about Reagan-style conservative economic theory as anyone on the Republican debate stages. Probably more. So between Trump and Cruz, we're looking at close to 80% of the Republican Party's voters who really don't want the kind of party Brooks wants.

So while I'd sure like to think the Republican Party might rise from its Trump-induced ashes in a form similar to what Brooks describes. But I just don't see where it's going to get the votes. Because the thing is, the people who have been deciding to vote for the Republican Party these last few decades are a lot more like Donald Trump than David Brooks. Perhaps that's because what David Brooks is describing is a lot more like Barack Obama's Democratic Party than it is like the Republicans.

In fact, thinking about it a bit, it sort of seems to me like American politics, particularly in the coming years, is divided in something like three parts. The first divide is between people who think that, e.g., global warming and health care and poverty and race discrimination are the problems with the world (broadly liberal priorities) and those who think that, e.g., godlessness and sexual perversion and invading hordes of Muslim terrorists and racial entitlements are the problems with the world (broadly conservative priorities). The latter form the Trump/Cruz part of the electorate. It's the vast majority of Republicans, but probably not much more than a third of the electorate. Then within the first group there's a division between those with broadly conservative (in a traditional, 1950s sense of the word) ideas about how to solve these problems and those with more aggressively liberal, verging on socialist ideas about how to solve them. That last is the people supporting Bernie, plus those who would support him except for fear that he'd lose the general. So then in the middle, the people who have broadly liberal sensibilities about what the problems are but broadly conservative sensibilities about how to fix them, are people like David Brooks. And Barack Obama, at least as he's manifested as President. (It's tough to know how much more radical he might have been in his approach with fewer political constraints.) Of course, it's really more of a spectrum between Brooks at one end and Bernie on the other, with Obama and Clinton somewhere in the middle.

In a lot of ways, this three-way divide looks a lot like the Socialist/Liberal/Conservative party systems we see in many countries. And it would be really, really nice if we could end up kicking the Trump/Cruz-style conservative faction out altogether, and having something like a socialist party and a liberal party. But those reactionary conservatives aren't going away, not all at once anyway. It'll be many decades yet before we can have a party that includes the Trump/Cruz voters but isn't dominated by them. And in the meanwhile, given that people like Brooks are starting to wake up to the fact that the reactionaries really aren't the kind of people they want to be making common cause with, it's awfully tough to see how we're gonna get two parties out of this electorate in the near future.

David Brooks may think it's a great time to be a conservative, but he's looking at a generation of alliance with either the party of Trump or the party of Obama, Clinton, and *gasp* Sanders.

Thoughts on Merrick Garland

First of all, I must confess error: I really, really thought it was going to be Sri Srinivasan. It wasn't. Whoops. (I did however predict that Obama would announce his choice today, right after Trump has seized control of the Republican primary, thus helping with the "make Republicans look like damned fools" strategy.)

As far as the nomination itself, I think Garland is probably the unique solution to the question of "who would this President and this Senate pick as a nominee?" Now, of course, we know that this Senate has no interest in solving that question, and I actually think that's why it's important that Obama chose Garland. Senate Republicans oppose this nomination on spurious grounds of principle, and I think Obama has a solemn responsibility to contest that principle with all his might, lest it become settled precedent. That doesn't just mean nominating someone. It means nominating the very person he would choose if his goal was to reach a reasonable compromise with this Senate. After all, if this President has the right to participate in this process, surely so does this Senate. Nominating some liberal firebrand would feel more like Obama's responding in kind to the Republicans, saying, hey, pretty soon you guys won't be in office either, I'd rather wait until then.

Of course, that depends on Garland's status as someone acceptable to both liberals and conservatives. I've gone back and forth a bit on whether I think he should be acceptable from our side of things; basically what gives me pause is the possibility that he would be more conservative than Scalia on certain criminal justice issues. That's the area where Garland is said to be at his most conservative, and many of Scalia's idiosyncratically liberal stances were in that area. It would rub me a little the wrong way for the Court to get worse on any major set of issues by dint of replacing Antonin Scalia. But right now I'm feeling pro-Garland. Partly that's just because Obama nominated him, and I trust Obama's judgment. Partly it's because, while Scalia did have a few liberal views about criminal procedure, mostly he was awful on criminal justice stuff.

But partly it's just because Obama has successfully appealed to the small-d democrat in me. It's not fun when the other side wins, but sometimes they do, and when they do, it's their right to participate in governance. Garland, as the most reasonable compromise between President and Senate, is the correct answer to the question "who should replace Scalia?" in terms of how our constitutional system is supposed to function. And while I applaud Obama for his willingness to reject lopsided compromises that would shift public policy in a conservative direction when it comes to ordinary matters of legislation, I do think it's kind of different here. There's a real argument that it would be a dereliction of duty to just leave the seat unfilled for a year because Obama hoped that his side would be in a more commanding position after the election. And, of course, Garland would shift the Court massively to the left compared with Scalia, even if he might not do so on every single issue. We also might get another opportunity to shift the Court leftward if Justice Kennedy retires sometime soon; I've heard rumors to the effect that he's maybe not doing so well. Garland would probably be a really good Supreme Court Justice, even if I might not agree with him about everything, and frankly, I'm not entitled to a nominee I agree with about everything right now. So, count me in.

That being said, by far the most important thing about this whole situation is that he's not going to end up on the Court, not as a result of this nomination in any event. (Watching him tear up at his press conference earlier I couldn't help but feel kind of sorry about that, even though I'll probably like the Justice who ends up in the seat in his stead better.) I bet the Republicans are really regretting that they decided to take this pseudoprincipled stand right now, because as a matter of pure strategy, the obvious play is to fold like a cheap suit and confirm Merrick Garland. Their party is going to nominate one Donald J. Trump. He's more than likely going to lose to one Hillary Rodham Clinton. It's not even clear that they'll be rooting against that result. And when he loses to Hillary, she'll likely wind up with a Democratic Senate. At the very least it'll be a less Republican Senate than we've got now. If this vacancy is still open then, they'll be longing for the days of Merrick Garland. But having staked out this supposed constitutional principle, they can't follow the strategic logic without making it painfully obvious that they were lying earlier.

And their idiocy isn't just a matter of strategy. They're saying that they want "the American people" to have a say in the process, but in cutting the people who elected Barack Obama out of the process, they're also cutting the people who elected them out of the process. Honestly I feel like they're betraying their constituents more than anyone else.

I also think it's very likely that if, as I think is likely, we get President Hillary and a Democratic Senate next year, the Senate Democrats will both be entirely within their rights to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees (thus ensuring that no Republicans have an ounce of influence over Hillary's nomination), and will be kind of likely to do so. Those same Senate Republicans will have spent a year instituting a blockade on spurious constitutional grounds purporting to defend the right of the people; they'll have forfeited any right to block the President and Senate that the people chose from making their preferred choice.

Oh, and one final point: people are talking about what will happen during the lame duck session. Suppose, for instance, that the Democrats win big, taking the Senate and holding the Presidency. Well at that point, Republicans should leap to confirm Garland, right? Yes, but Obama shouldn't let them. He's perfectly within his rights to withdraw the nomination, and if the vacancy is still open on November 9th I think it would be entirely proper of him to do so. Indeed, even if he left the Republicans with a little sliver of time to vote Garland through before withdrawing the nomination, he would be perfectly within his rights to decline to sign the commission, thus defeating the appointment. His rationale would be as follows: "look, I wanted to work with you to fill this seat, but you insisted on waiting until after the election, and you lost. You've forfeited your right to be a part of this process; I'm done with you." Particularly if Hillary's position in the polls looks commanding, he might even want to announce that a little in advance of the election. One way or another, it would be unacceptable to allow this Garland nomination to serve as a "heads we win, tails we don't lose very much" device for the Republicans.

I wish I could say that the next little while will be very interesting, but unfortunately it looks like the plan is for just nothing to happen for many months, and then eventually we'll see if it had an effect on the election. Ah well.

So, the Republicans are Running the 1836 Whig Play, huh?

It looks like, in the wake of Super Tuesday, the anti-Trump forces within the Republican Party, decreasingly a.k.a. the Republican Party, have recognized that Trump will "win" the primaries, in the sense of getting the most votes, winning the most states, and having the most delegates pledged to him at the convention. Their goal is to keep his delegate count below the 50% threshold so they can get to a second ballot and then ignore him and nominate someone less, y'know, Trump. And this means jettisoning the old anti-Trump strategy of consolidating around a single champion. Now they want Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich to all stay in for the long haul, each performing well in different areas of the country and collectively denying Trump a majority even though no one opponent will have anything like his overall support.

If that strategy sounds familiar, well, it shouldn't, unless you're familiar with the 1836 election. There, Martin Van Buren was running to succeed Andrew Jackson, and the anti-Jacksonian Whigs ran this exact same play. William Henry Harrison was their real candidate, but he wasn't on the ballot in every state. Instead, they ran Daniel Webster in Massachusetts, Willie Person Mangum in South Carolina, and Hugh L. White throughout much of the South, with Harrison as their northern and midwestern candidate. The plan was to deny Van Buren a majority in the electoral college and thereby throw the election to the House of Representatives, which the Whigs controlled. It was a fascinating moment in American politics: had the Whigs succeeded, they might have made this multiple regional candidates strategy the norm in American politics for the party that controlled the House.

They, uh, didn't succeed. Van Buren won 15 states and 170 electoral votes, compared to 7 and 73 for Harrison, 2 and 26 for White, one (Massachusetts) and 14 for Webster, and one (South Carolina) and 11 for Mangum. That's 170 for Van Buren, 124 for the various Whigs: a majority for Van Buren, and a third term for the Jacksonians. Four thousand votes in Pennsylvania could've swung that state for Harrison, taking its 30 EVs out of Van Buren's column and making the Whigs' gambit work. But they didn't, and it didn't, and the strategy has never been tried again.

Until now.

We'll see how it goes. I mean, it won't go well, that's for sure: if it "fails" it means they nominate Trump, and if it "works" it means they deny the guy who won their primaries the nomination and he probably storms out and runs as an independent and throw the election to Hillary and the party humiliates itself. But as between those two, we'll see how it goes. Good luck!

Ronald Reagan and the Meaning of Trump

So, it sure looks like Donald Trump is going to seize firm control of the Republican primary tonight. His eventual victory and nomination will be, pretty literally, unprecedented: there's been nothing remotely like it since the 1970s primary reforms, and pretty much by definition there couldn't be prior to then, because party elites literally picked the nominee themselves. This means we can't really avoid talking about, y'know, what exactly the whole Trump phenomenon means. Is it the break-down of the Republican Party? Is it a rise of bigoted, authoritarian sentiment? What's going on?

Here's my take, and it's a relatively optimistic one. The key thing about Trump's campaign is that the guy running it is Donald J. Trump. Or, to give him his full title, "businessman Donald J. Trump." That's right, his title doesn't even get capitalized! Unlike "Senator" or "Governor" or "Secretary" or whatever. He's a not-politician, or rather he's a dilettante politician. And this matters because we really have seen a fairly similar campaign before. It's basically Ronald Reagan's campaign. Reagan was a celebrity who had been a liberal Democrat for decades, switched to more conservative views in the 1960s (alienated by the Civil Rights Movement, perhaps?), had a brash demeanor on the campaign trail, did not have the world's most sophisticated understanding of public policy, and openly appealed to racial resentment and white identity politics. Remember "welfare queens" and their Cadillacs?


In a lot of ways, Trump is running the Reagan campaign. Why does it feel so different, then? Why is it so different? Because I do think it is different. And I think it's different because Reagan was a real politician, Governor of California before even his first unsuccessful run for the White House. Back in 1968, and 1976, and especially in 1980, this was a campaign you could run and win with. Nixon ran something similar, and won with it, in '68 and '72. Republicans ran a somewhat more polished version of the same play in the elections directly succeeding Reagan. But then something changed: the demographics. White identity politics is not going to be a strong enough force in American politics for very much longer to actually deliver the Presidency. There just won't be enough white people.

And all the real politicians can see this coming. They saw it coming a mile away in 2013, when they tried to get away from the white nationalist image with immigration reform. Didn't work. Its champion is falling relatively flat in the primary. And that's because, while white nationalism is in decline, there's still enough of it to dominate a Republican primary--and it's been seriously inflamed by a Mr. President Barack Hussein Obama. Actual politicians know they need to try to get away from this, but of course they still need it to win the nomination. And so we get Rubio, awkwardly trying at once to broaden his party's base and to pander to the existing base. He's in a bind.

Donald J. Trump is in no such bind, because he's not a politican. He has no commitment to the Republican Party; he doesn't give a damn about the future. Running a forthright version of Reagan's old campaign is plenty to win the nomination, and so he's blundered in and done it. And it's working, so far at least; I still believe, and/or hope, that there aren't enough of these guys left to win a general election, and that Trump won't be able to reinvent himself with Hillary running the "I don't know anything about white supremacy" clips on a loop 24/7. It's certainly got him closer to the White House than he deserves.

And so this, I think, is the real meaning of Trump. It's not about the rise of bigotry, but its decline. The Republican Party has always (in its current incarnation at least) basically been a "wars and tax cuts" agenda supported by, in large part, racist sentiments in the electorate. Romney and Rubio have tried to keep on playing that same old game, but it doesn't work anymore, because now all the real politicians know that they have to jettison many of the things that made their party attractive to the racists. They lose too many votes among non-whites, and there are too many non-white voters, to afford it. But the racist voters ain't happy about it. They were happy to go along with wars and tax cuts so long as the people they voted for defended America's white Christian identity. What they're not okay with is compromising on that national identity. The Republican Party knows it needs to make that compromise, eventually, in order to survive; that identity is dying. And that's opened up a space for any idiot willing to reject the compromise.

Enter Trump.

This is, of course, a hopeful story. It suggests that the current alignment of American politics really is shifting, that the alliance between the white nationalists and the Republican agenda is coming undone. There's any number of ways that could go. Perhaps we'll see a genuine split within the current Republican coalition that will persist for several elections, until something puts one side or the other out of their misery. Perhaps we'll see, in effect, a few cycles of "grand coalitions" behind Democratic Presidents while the rump Republican Party works through the dying throes of its dedication to racial resentment politics, unable to reach the median voter in a new, more diverse nation. Or perhaps the racial conservative faction will at some point concede defeat and splinter apart as a political force. They're not really united by commitment to conservative principles; some of them might find their way back into the Democratic Party, willing to support its pro-working class policies even though they're not thrilled with its stance in the culture wars. I can't say which of those is going to happen; I can say that we've known for a long time that the Republican Party as we know it had an expiration date, and it looks like Trump has come along to upset the apple-cart a little earlier than any of us had really dreamed.

Are We Due for a Realignment?

So, this has been a pretty crazy election. Right? No real argument there. So crazy, in fact, that Nate Silver just tweeted an interesting little observation. There have been six major "realignment" events in American political history, during which the dynamics of partisan politics have been reforged and new coalitions have emerged to define electoral conflicts for a generation or two: 1792, 1828, 1854, 1896, 1932, and 1968. The average interval between realignments has been about 35 years; indeed, three of the five intervals have been precisely 36 years. The last one was 48 years ago. That is indeed the longest reign that a single "party system" has ever had. Sure makes it seem like we're due for one, and sure enough, politics has gone crazy. Maybe we're in the midst of a realignment!

Donald Trump is the Inevitable Result of the Great Inversion's Completion

The latest CNN poll shows Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz as the three medalists (right now) in the Republican nomination. That's two not-actual-politicians who've spent years cultivating support among the right-wing fringes of society, plus one actual Senator practically every member of whose own party hates his guts. The three of them together are getting 66% of the primary vote right now. That's two-thirds of Republican voters, planning right now to vote for one of the three craziest candidates in the race. If Marco Rubio were to consolidate the Christie, Bush, Fiorina, Kasich, and Paul supporters, he'd be at a whopping 25%. There's a real inmates-running-the-asylum feeling here. And I know why.

The big story of American political history, well, since the Civil War at least, is what I like to call the Great Inversion. In 1890, there were two political parties, each consisting of a sharply-drawn and entirely coherent faction. One party represented the northeast and the Pacific coast; the other was for the most part based in the South. You'll note that every word of those two sentences would be the same if I replaced the year with 2015. The only difference, of course, is which was the Democrats and which the Republicans. During the interim the two parties switched places, Democrats shifting from the party of John C. Calhoun to that of Barack Obama, while the Republicans went from the party of Lincoln to the party of, well... evidently Donald Trump. And all through the middle of that time period, things were messy.

Executive Agreements, Iran, and Missouri v. Holland

So. A bunch of Republican Senators have apparently written an "open letter" to the government of Iran regarding negotiations currently taking place between Iran and various Western countries, including the United States. This is, shall we say, highly improper. It would rather easily answer to the description "unconstitutional," in a vague, amorphous sense (obviously there's nothing for a court to review or invalidate, but the letter is pretty clearly inconsistent with an overall constitutional structure in which the President is given primary responsibility for diplomacy, out of a felt need for the nation to speak with one voice in foreign affairs). Arguably it also at least skirts the line of being illegal, under the Logan Act of 1799, which bans unauthorized citizens from corresponding with foreign governments to try to influence their behavior toward the U.S. (Although obviously the Obama Administration is not going to prosecute these Republican Senators for this offense, even if they're guilty of it: prosecuting your political opponents, generally not great politics. Also the law is of dubious constitutionality (and they could easily have mooted the whole issue by just reading their "open letter" into the Congressional record, invoking the Speech and Debate privilege, which is absolute).)

But that's not the point, of this blog post at least. Rather, what interests me about the letter is the way it helps tie together some thoughts I've been having of late about "executive agreements." Because that's the main thrust of the letter, which purports to explain certain "features of our constitution" which Iran should keep in mind while negotiating. By this they mean the esoteric fact, which surely the leaders of Iran have never encountered before, that the United States has the world's worst treaty ratification system, requiring a two-thirds vote in the Senate that is basically impossible to obtain even on totally uncontroversial things. This means, the Senators accurately note, that any agreement reached in the present negotiations will be a mere "executive agreement," which, they note, a new President could revoke unilaterally. This is, if you take it on its face, a pretty majestic display of concern-trolling: it's not that the Senate Republicans are opposed to the deal (which would make it a little tougher to deny the Logan Act violation), they're just concerned for the poor Iranian government, which might find itself being misled by that nasty Obama into thinking it has a binding agreement, and might do something like act in reliance on that belief, only to find that, in fact, the next President pulls the rug out from under them. We wouldn't want that, now would we.

But of course, they are right: the deal would only be an executive agreement (because we all know that these same 47 Republicans would vote against ratifying the treaty that will never be drafted, let alone presented to the Senate, before they even read its language (which is why it will never be drafted)). So... what? What exactly are executive agreements, in the constitutional structure? How are they different from treaties? Are those differences relevant from Iran's standpoint? (Spoiler alert: the answer to that last one is "no.") Like probably most people who've ever heard the phrase, I first learned about "executive agreements" in my high school civics class (okay, it was AP U.S. Government, which might explain why we learned about executive agreements...), and have always had the general sense that they're just this thing, this informal treaty-like thing, that doesn't require Senate ratification but also therefore in some vague way doesn't have the same kind of force of law. That way of discussing them leads to the feeling that there's something vaguely unsettling or illegitimate about them. But there isn't, and seeing why requires merging the great big lesson of a class I'm taking this semester, Administrative Law, with the great case Missouri v. Holland.

The Rationalization of the United States Senate

There's an interesting thing about the Democratic Senators who were defeated for re-election last night, or who retired and saw their seats taken by Republicans: they were almost exclusively from red states. Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Mark Begich of Alaska. Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Tim Johnson of South Dakota. Max Baucus of Montana. Only two came from "purple" swing states, namely Tom Harkin of Iowa and Mark Udall of Colorado, and in Colorado's case it has only recently started swinging. The result is that the losses tended to be concentrated among the more moderate Democrats, and therefore the Senate Democratic caucus which remains is more ideologically consistent than the current one.

Consider the following maps. First, here's the Senate on the eve of the 2006 elections:

Now here's what the Senate will look like next January:

That second map looks a lot more like your average Presidential election, doesn't it? Note that these Senates have similar numbers of Democrats, 45 in 2005 and 46 in 2015 (probably). But we've gained one net Democrat in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Oregon, plus two new ones in Virginia and a gain in Missouri that's kind of anomalous for these purposes. We've lost, on the other hand, Democrats from Louisiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa, along with anomalous losses in Wisconsin and Illinois and the loss of both seats in Arkansas. Almost all of that has had the effect of lining the two parties up better with the real political/cultural dividing-lines in the country.



And in 2016, the Democrats will have pick-up opportunities that are mostly on the Democratic side of this line. Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire are probably their best chances to gain seats. Those four would give us a 50/50 Senate that would basically be blue states in blue, purple states in purple, and red states in red. Really the only exceptions would be that Republicans would have a Senator from Maine and that Democrats would have Senators from West Virginia, Montana, and North Dakota. (Arguably Indiana is also an anomaly, but since Obama did win it one time it's hard to deny it its place among the vaguely purple-ish states at least.) Perhaps Democrats might also deserve one of North Carolina's two seats given that they have been competitive there of late, but Richard Burr should be somewhat vulnerable as well so that could happen. It's not impossible that Iowa will be competitive, or that Democrats could manage to take the second seat in Ohio. All of this would be entirely consistent with the basic geography of American politics.

And what all of this means, I think, is that if Democrats have a 2016 that's as fun as it should be, their restored majority caucus should be a lot more ideologically cohesive than their current one. So even though it will probably be smaller, say in the 51-53 range instead of the expiring 55, the median Senator may not have gotten much more conservative, and might even have moved somewhat to the left.

Of course, until then we have a median Senator who comes from the interior of an extremely cohesive Republican caucus, but it's not like the next two years were gonna be big ones for legislation anyway.

Work, Dignity, and the Labor Market

About a month ago I wrote a post arguing that liberals should not favor making federal anti-poverty programs conditional on employment, as doing so would be coercive. Shortly thereafter I wrote another post questioning the implicit assumption of my first post that the kinds of things people do as paid employment generally have net negative utility for the worker, compensation aside. Part of the issue there is the sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, or accomplishment that people get from working, or, to put it another way, a sense of dignity. In the past couple of days two of my favorite political bloggers have written posts about work and dignity: Paul Krugman and Kevin Drum. Krugman was basically responding to Paul Ryan, and Drum was responding to Krugman. I have a few thoughts in response to the whole sequence that, I think, help clarify my earlier remarks.

Gratuitous Swipe at Phyllis Schlafly

I happened to notice Matt Yglesias tweeting a link to this piece by Phyllis Schlafly, noted unintentional comedian. She's at her unintentional-comic best, arguing quite brazenly that Republicans must oppose immigration because immigrants all vote for Democrats. It's honestly quite hilarious; you should go read it, and laugh at it. I have two somewhat more serious points to make about it, though, one of which is on the issue of immigration and one of which ties in with my last post.

First, Schlafly argues that she doesn't oppose immigration for racial reasons, since even new European immigrants seem to be left-wing. Furthermore, this fact, that immigrants and children of recent immigrants are more left-wing than the existing median of the society to which they immigrate, seems common to all Western democracies. I would simply like to note that there's a reason for that, a reason rooted in what conservatism has become in the modern world: an apologia for entrenched power. Immigrants by definition enter a society which already has a power structure and one in which they have no pre-existing position. The faction which generally seeks to keep power where it lies and uphold existing power structures, even when power is quite significantly concentrated or when those in power got their power unjustly, will naturally not tend to appeal to their concerns. Immigrants, then, have perhaps the most fundamental motive of any group to turn to the faction supporting the deconstruction of existing power dynamics, and of a generally more egalitarian and inclusive distribution of power throughout society.

Second, toward the end of her piece Schlafly describes limiting immigration as something which must happen "[i]f the Republican party is to remain a party that is conservative and nationally competitive." It is no coincidence, I think, that the thing she's arguing for to achieve both of those goals is one which would, she hopes, keep the nation from getting less conservative. But it's too late. The modern Republican Party's very definition of conservatism is one which the American middle finds flatly unacceptable. Republicans have had amazing success getting people to look past that basic fact, and vote for them anyway; they may yet continue to do so in this year's midterms. But in Presidential years, when turnout is uniformly high even among less-empowered groups (see above), it is no longer possible for a party to be "conservative" the way Schlafly and her ideological kin use the word and also competitive. It's too late. And yeah, a big part of why it's too late is America's changing racial identity, the long-term decline in the percentage of the population who can reasonably identify with the historically-powerful rather than the historically-powerless. There is doubtless much more at work as well, though; something must be forcing the Republicans to define themselves in such unacceptable terms rather than adjusting to remain competitive.

Like I said in my last piece, I could write a dozen blog posts about why this is going on and barely scratch the surface. I just thought it was interesting that basically the very next thing I read after writing that post was one hell of an illustration of my point: Republicans are at this point so very wedded to a truly radical ideology, they're admitting as much and acknowledging the need to change the composition of the electorate to their advantage, rather than, I don't know, trying to convince the actual median voter that they should vote Republican. God forbid they have to do that, that the majority of the people might actually get to choose how to govern themselves. Oh, and of course the great thing about admitting it is that you just make it worse; you do very little but send to these Hispanics and Asians and Muslims the very strong message that no, the Republican Party does not like you, it does not think you can be real Americans, and it does not want you here, as such. Thanks, Phyllis, for saying out loud the really, really embarrassing thing you're all thinking.

Candidate Quality Might Matter, Chris Christie Edition

A CNN poll conducted from January 31st to February 2nd found that Hillary Clinton led five named Republican candidates by amounts ranging from fifteen points to twenty points. That kind of makes it look like, if Hillary runs, she'll be President (given that her lead in the Democratic primary is big enough that, were her own polling figure replaced by her margin over her closest competitor, she would still be in better shape than she was at this point in the 2008 cycle), though obviously it's early and this is just one poll. But there's an interesting comparison with the last incarnation of this same poll, conducted from December 16th to 19th of 2013. In that poll, Hillary's largest lead over these same five men was twenty-one points, but her smallest lead was... negative two points. It looks, in other words, like the 2016 Presidential landscape changed dramatically over those six weeks. Except the thing is, virtually none of the numbers moved. The absolute difference between the December margin and the Groundhog Day margin for the five match-ups were one point, two points, five points, seven points, and... eighteen points. Okay, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan are doing a bit worse now than they were a couple months ago, but the story here is Chris Christie, who has spent those six weeks imploding like a black hole from which no political ambition can escape. And this, I think, is an interesting little case study for the political science concept that candidate quality is not an important variable in Presidential elections, that only the so-called "fundamentals" matter.

At first glance, the most obvious conclusion is that the Christie example strongly suggests that candidate quality does matter. In December, the Democrats and the Republicans had an equal number of high-quality candidates seen as serious contenders for the nomination, one. The match-up between the two of them suggested that the election could be something like a toss-up. Now, the Democrats outnumber the Republicans in quality candidates one-zip, and the poll suggests that the Republicans are in line to get slaughtered. Plus or minus one quality candidate could, it appears, alter American politics for the next decade more or less single-handedly. Thank you, Mayor of Fort Lee, in other words. And I think, on a certain level, this conclusion is absolutely correct. Candidate quality matters, a lot. Ask Senators Coons, Donnelly, Bennett, McCaskill, and Reid.

But I think there's an extra level of subtlety, and in the end this Christie datum suggests a refinement, albeit a substantial one, rather than a rejection of the idea that candidate quality is irrelevant.

The Congress That Wasn't There

Steve Calabresi has, I believe, been known to observe an interesting feature of the U.S. Constitution which, he thinks, reveals something about how the Founders viewed the Executive branch. While Congress is clearly considered the most important of the three branches, hence its placement in the first Article and that Article's length compared to those establishing the Executive and Judiciary, it was only really supposed to exist part of the time. Congress would have a couple of sessions per year, each lasting a couple of months. The rest of the time Congressmen would be at home in their states or districts, and given the state of transportation in 1789 it would be no easy thing to re-assemble Congress when it wasn't in session. When its members were out of town, in other words, Congress basically didn't exist. The President, on the other hand, always existed. He has no sessions and no recess; he's the President for every hour of all 1461 days of his term. The idea, Calabresi would (sensibly, I think) infer, is that the laws always need enforcing, but they don't always need changing. That, after all, is what a legislature does, at any given moment, and if the existing set of laws is working well enough you don't need anyone to do any new legislating all the time. The President can just set about running the government with the authority given him by the current laws. Now, Calabresi goes on to draw various conclusions about the scope of executive authority, I think, but that's not my point here.

No, my point is about what happened to this disparity between the President and Congress over time. Basically, it went away. As transportation has improved, we've reached the point where Congress does basically always exist. They're in session all the time now, except maybe over Christmas. Even when they're in recess, they could reassemble for an important vote with less than a day's notice. This has corresponded with a decline in the sensibility of the "laws don't always need to be changed but they always need to be enforced" point. In 1789, there wasn't that much statutory law. Most of the law was common law. That made the idea that the existing corpus of statutes would be working well enough to get along for a couple of months without any new laws relatively plausible. With the explosion of the regulatory state, a federal code that governs basically everything the Constitution allows federal governance of, and an incredibly complicated feedback process between the administrative agencies, the subjects of their regulation, and Congress, that idea is a lot less plausible now. We need a Congress basically all the time, or at least a Congress that's on call all the time and getting stuff done nearly all of the time.

But while it is a lot less plausible now than it used to be, that old idea hasn't lost all relevance. In fact, the current Congress basically might as well be out of session, back in their districts with a month's journey back to Washington. There is no overlap between the set of non-trivial legislation Barack Obama would sign into law and the set of non-trivial legislation that John Boehner and 217 of his closest friends would pass through the House. More to the point, everyone knows this, except maybe some centrist media types. Even if there are some ideas for new legislation that you'd think would satisfy both parties' agendas, Obama Derangement Syndrome prevents the Republicans from admitting it. So we don't get any new laws. But we have old laws, and Obama gets to administer them. That actually gives him a lot of policy-making authority, which he'll hopefully make major use of this year. That's somewhat different from the 1789 concept, but the similarity is unmistakeable: our government right now consists of an executive branch, a judicial branch, and an extensive legal code, with a legislature which could in theory exists but is currently choosing to act like it doesn't.

Now, no one is exactly happy with the current state of federal statutory law. And Republicans are surely not happy with letting Obama use his authority to enforce such things as new environmental regulations. There are probably things Congress could be doing, major pieces of legislation it could be passing that should be net improvements over this President-and-no-Congress status quo from both parties' perspective. But the Republicans aren't willing to offer Obama anything that he'd find better than the status quo; that's Obama Derangement Syndrome, wherein the simple fact that Obama likes something is sufficient reason for Republicans to dislike it, independent of its actual merits. They keep offering him things that they want but that he doesn't want; given his ability to just keep on takin' care that the laws be faithfully executed, he has absolutely no reason to agree to those things. Thus the era of manufactured crises: every time the status quo expires, every time we actually need new statutory authorization for the government to continue operating, this dynamic vanishes. Obama can't just keep on running the government. In theory, taking away that floor on potential outcomes gives the Republicans the power to get Obama to agree to something he likes worse than the status quo. In practice, Republicans also lose the floor on possible outcomes, and they're not as willing to free-fall into the abyss as they'd like us all to believe, for some reason. Or maybe they're just not willing for us to believe that they're that willing to fall into the abyss.

Either way, it looks like they've finally gotten the message that manufactured crises don't really work. That means we might be in for a whole year or so in which Congress pretends not to exist, and the President is perfectly happy to go along with that pretense.

A Modest Defense of Democratic Filibuster Hypocrisy

In 2005, Democrats filibustered a few George W. Bush judicial nominees, who they thought were particularly radical. For a while, at least. Then Majority Leader Bill Frist (yeah, remember that guy?) threatened to use the "nuclear option" to change the rules of the Senate while it was in session.* Democrats backed down. A bunch of moderate Senators crafted a deal in which Republicans agreed not to destroy the filibuster and Democrats agreed to stop filibustering. The nominees got confirmed, and hey, guess what? They're particularly radical. During the whole controversy, of course, lots of Democrats said a lot of stuff about how great the filibuster is, and lots of Republicans said lots of stuff about how terrible it is.

On November 21st, 2013, one day before the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and two days before the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, the Democratic Senate majority used the "nuclear option" to prevent the minority from obstructing executive nominees or judicial nominees other than to the Supreme Court. This isn't the first time we've had tons of Democrats now saying stuff about how horrible the filibuster is and Republicans writing paeans to it, in a bit of entertaining "everyone's a hypocrite!" theater. There's these two pieces, for example, by Slate's Emma Roller, showing the flip-flops of both President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Mostly I think it's true that everyone's a hypocrite on this, or more specifically that this is a prime example of my long-time theory that no one has any actual beliefs about procedure except as they relate to substance. Republicans, for instance, tend to favor a small federal government because most of what the feds do these days is somewhat progressive economic stuff, regulation and redistribution and all that, but when the feds are criminalizing marijuana, suddenly Democrats love federalism. Except, and I know this is easy to mock coming from a hard-core Democratic partisan, I honestly think the combination of the two Democratic positions, from 2005 and 2013, is a lot more defensible than the combination of the Republican positions, for mostly kind of happenstance reasons.

Don't Take Anything From Republicans

So, the Republicans just spent a couple of weeks frenetically devoted to their strategy of forcing Obama and the Democrats to give them everything they've ever wanted through hostage-taking. It didn't go so well. They were never actually prepared to kill their hostage, Obama knew it, and when they could no longer maintain their willingness to do the deed without actually pulling the trigger, they caved. Completely and utterly. They got nothing. Well, they got something, extra "income verification" for the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but it turns out this just says that HHS needs to issue a couple of reports assuring people that there isn't much fraud going on. So, nothing. Republicans lose. It was a lot of fun, and it crushed the Republicans in the polls, though not far enough that they can't recover. In any event, we're back to more or less normal politics at this point, which means budget negotiations between the House Republicans and Obama.

And the Republican stance on how these negotiations should go is the same as it's ever been: Obama should just give them stuff in exchange for nothing. Not in exchange for not blowing up the economy, or for not shutting down the government; no, for now they've given up those bits of "leverage." Just for nothing. If Democrats want to get rid of the sequester, at least partially, they should replace it with... more spending cuts! Like, more in the sense of more new cuts than the sequester cuts being replaced. This, well, isn't going to work. They couldn't get concessions for nothing from Obama back when they had hostages. If this is their offer, it's really not hard for Obama to just say, um, no. And on we go, with our government so divided that nothing ever gets done except when there's a manufactured crisis. Or, as Matt Yglesias suggests, the Republicans could give the Democrats something, something other than tax increases on rich people, to sweeten the deal. Nah, that won't happen.

But is there anything that Democrats should take, if Republicans were to offer it? Specifically if Republicans offered it as part of a deal the other side of which was entitlement cuts. And entitlement cuts, mind you, suck. They're long-term, and they're deeply regressive distributionally. The basic Republican long-term agenda is that they want to keep rich people from having to pay taxes, and in order to do that they need to slash safety net spending. But that's wildly unpopular (oh, did I mention it's wildly unpopular?), and it would play right into people's entirely-accurate stereotypes of Republicans as heartless pro-rich-people bastards, so they can't do it unless they get Democratic support to cover themselves with. That's their core political goal. We should be extremely hesitant to give it to them. The thing on the other side would have to be extremely important, and it would have to be something we won't really be able to get any other way. Is there anything like that?

Republican Denial of Tactical Reality, An Example

I recently wrote a post arguing that the shutdown is simply the clearest yet manifestation of what we liberal types have known for a long time, namely that Republicans are unfit to govern, and that their unfitness is largely due to the takeover of their entire mentalities by the "reality-based community" thing, including the strategic parts of those mentalities. Well here's a nice Dave Weigel post about how Republicans simply do not believe that the shutdown is hurting them politically. Which it is. You cannot look at the bulk of the polling data and claim otherwise. Hell, there aren't very many individual polls you can look at and claim otherwise. And this is a big problem: if Republicans really believed that they're doing damage to their party, and maybe that it's long-term damage that won't be easily undone, they'd have an incentive to back the hell off before it gets any worse. But they don't believe that, so there's no incentive. A blind man driving toward a cliff doesn't know to stop, and if he won't even listen to his sighted passenger that there's a goddamn cliff half a mile in front of them, well... you're in trouble.

Wait, What? John Boehner Edition

So I saw the headlines with Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) saying that not threatening to blow up the government's finances by failing to raise the debt limit would be "surrender." But I didn't appreciate the context. Apparently the point is that Obama suggested that, if Republicans really wanted to negotiate about stuff, they should fund the government long enough and extend the debt limit far enough to cover the negotiation period. Boehner said that this would be "unconditional surrender" for the Republicans, and that our government doesn't work like that. (I.e., with unconditional surrender by one side the precondition to have negotiations.) Never mind that, you know, if there were no statutory debt ceiling and even if the appropriations process were such that government shutdowns didn't happen, the House Republicans control a crucial veto point of the U.S. government and would therefore have plenty in their arsenal going forward. Nuclear disarmament is not the same thing as unconditional surrender if you maintain your fleet of fighter jets and big ol' conventional bombs, after all.

No, what flabergasts me about this quote is that what Obama is proposing would be completely pointless from the good-guy point of view, which is to say, it wouldn't actually involve disarming the Republicans at all. It's like the broader point about how you can't, you can't, you can't negotiate over the debt limit because if you do you cement a pattern of brinksmanship over it that will inevitably end in financial armageddon, only in fast-motion. The threat would go from "we'll blow up the world tomorrow!" to "we'll blow up the world next week!" Great. That's real unconditional surrender, guys. You're not surrendering anything. You're surrendering one week of world-non-blown-up, and presumably if you win the battle then in the end it won't matter exactly how many weeks it took before you did so. I might be missing something here, although honestly between myself and John Boehner I trust the analytical abilities of the former a whole hell of a lot more, but if I'm not missing anything, John Boehner is saying that holstering his nuclear gun, in the full knowledge that, unless his adversary does what he wants, he'll be able to take it out again in an hour or whatever, constitutes unconditional surrender. Holstering might even be the wrong analogy because it suggests that the other guys could overpower him or something; it's like lowering the gun to where it's pointing at the other guy's feet instead of his chest. And the other guy doesn't have a gun. Surrender! Surrender, I say!

Seriously, you can't make this shit up.

We Told You So

If you ask people whether the Iraq War was a mistake, most of them will say that it was. Like, two-thirds or more of them will say that. If you ask in 2013, at least. But if you asked people in 2003 whether they supported the war while it was starting up, most of them said they did. Only a few radical liberal types opposed it. You'd think that the fact that most people now agree with the substantive position they were advancing ten years ago would have had some sort of vindicating effect. Nope. As Paul Krugman likes to say, "it remains true ... that for the most part you’re not considered serious about national security unless you were wrong about Iraq." Apparently having been right is not a sufficient defense to the charge of having been a liberal dissident from a mainstream center-right consensus.

Well, it looks like the liberal dissidents might get proven right again. As Krugman himself notes, not surprisingly, the supposedly neutral political establishment has long just sort of assumed that Republicans were highly competent at governing, that they were the party of hard-nosed pragmatists to the Democrats' well-meaning but ineffectual idealists. But now the Republicans have shut down the government. In what they practically admit is a temper tantrum. Competence! No, what we're seeing this week is a party that is fundamentally unfit to be even a small part of the business of governance. And this is not even one tiny bit of a surprise to those of us who've been paying attention the last decade-plus. By which I mean, of course, liberal dissidents. We've been saying that the Republicans were unfit to govern since, well, since forever, but especially since the events of the Bush Administration.

The key, I think, lies in two realizations. First, that Republicans honestly don't care about doing government well. They may even be ideologically hostile to it. After all, according to Saint Ronald, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Government is never the solution, just the problem when it tries to be the solution. So why bother trying? Or more to the point, governing competently provides strong empirical evidence rebutting the central claim of Republican ideology, namely that there's no such thing as competent government. Much better to bungle things, or even better, not to deliberately bungle things but to put people in positions of power who are woefully unsuited for them, with bungling the inevitable result, and then talk about how the government always bungles everything!

That's the substantive reason why Republicans are unfit to govern; the other is tactical. Among the virtues of democratic politics is supposed to be that it provides incentives to the greedy, unprincipled politician nevertheless to do the right thing, because doing the right thing keeps you in power. It's sort of like the way capitalism claims to harness private self-interest to create common good, and about as successful, namely, somewhat in general but with gaping exceptions. But that requires, well, rational self-interest on the part of our greedy, unprincipled politicians. Republicans, however, have bought their own hype, specifically the "reality-based community" hype. Here's that passage again, from the original Ron Suskind article:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

I don't really have cause to analyze this quote afresh. For my purposes the point is that this kind of thinking has crept from the substantive areas of Republican thinking, and in particular the foreign policy substantive areas, to the strategic and tactical areas. The far-right flank of the Congressional Republican Party, in making its demands of leadership as to how they conduct themselves in dealing with the rest of the government, does not draw on, you know, reality. There's not even an attempt to understand what actions will lead to what consequences. It's government by slogan, except it's not just government by slogan, it's maneuvering by slogan. And the thing about detaching yourself from reality is that you don't actually escape it, and sooner or later reality comes back to bite you in the ass. Hard.

For the "are Republicans fit to govern?" purpose, though, the crucial thing is that you won't see it coming. If you truly escape the reality-based community, you lose the ability to know when you're about to make a huge mistake. Hell, you sort of commit in advance to not knowing when you're about to make a huge mistake. That would be listening to the evidence, after all, which is apparently a sign of weakness. So you make huge mistakes, which is to say, you don't avoid the kinds of behavior that will be even a predictable disaster. The combination of these two features is that Republicans have no inherent interest in governing well and lack even the capacity to understand their supposed incentives to do so anyway. That's a dangerous combination, and it all adds up to being deeply and fundamentally unfit to govern. And people like me have known about this since, well, since the reality-based community thing, and since Hurricane Katrina at least. And we've been saying it. Finally, finally the Republicans have misbehaved badly enough that some mainstream types are noticing their fundamental unsoundness, perhaps on the same scale as what happened during Katrina.

So on behalf of we liberal dissidents, who have seen through the Republican Party all these years and whose positions reality has almost inexorably born out over time, and who never ever get credit for having been right, and who are never ever considered to maybe, just maybe, be right the next time too, I just want to say, we told you so.

The Shutdown, Presidentialism, and the Constitutional Crisis This Time

There have been three great political and constitutional transformations in our nation's history. The first covered the period from 1776 to 1789, during which the country declared and then won its independence and eventually settled on a particular form of government, a federal constitution. The next covered the period from, let's say, 1857 (though the starting-point is kind of arbitrary since it had been building for a long time; 1861 would be perhaps a more conventional answer) through 1870. This was, obviously, the slavery crisis, during which the country fought a whole bloody war to answer the question of whether it would keep having slavery. The third was the Great Depression, with the true constitutional crisis period lasting roughly from 1929 through 1937, though the economic difficulties lasted a while longer. The first two were separated by approximately seventy years; the latter two were separated by approximately sixty or seventy years. Projecting forward seventy years from the last one gets you... a few years ago. Or, to put it another way, if you buy this rough extrapolation (which you probably shouldn't, it's incredibly crude), we're about due for a constitutional crisis. Maybe overdue.

Notice anything that could be called a constitutional crisis?

If so, you're not the only one. The federal government is currently shut down. In a couple of weeks it will, unless something happens to change this, hit the statutory debt limit, after which it will not be allowed to sell government bonds to raise revenue to cover the gap between tax revenues and spending obligations. No one knows what happens if that happens. Maybe worldwide financial chaos and depression. Maybe President Obama just ignores the debt limit, which might avert the former and would definitely trigger a full-blown constitutional crisis in its place. One way or another, it won't be pretty. All of this is, of course, happening because the party which controls one of two Houses of Congress, and does not control the White House, has decided that it will refuse to participate in averting these catastrophes until and unless the President basically enacts the entire policy platform of the man he just convincingly beat to secure his re-election. Or maybe even until he enacts something even more ideologically extreme than that, i.e. more extreme than this party's own primary process could endorse. This is, uh, a constitutional crisis. Right on schedule.

It's been building for a while, although fairly few of us have seen it coming particularly long in advance. Some, however, say it could've been foreseen a very long time in advance. Say, two-hundred years or more. As Matt Yglesias details in this post, eminent political scientist Juan Linz spent his life crafting a persuasive argument that presidential democracies are inherently unstable. Essentially this is because, in a parliamentary system, there is only one Government. That is to say, the party with the majority in Parliament just plain governs, with all the powers and responsibilities that entails. If they screw it up, they lose the next election, and the other party (or maybe a new one) gets a chance at the whole "governing" thing. In a presidential system, on the other hand, there are two independent political powers within the government, each with a claim to democratic legitimacy: the President and the legislature. What happens if they don't get along? What happens if they really, really don't get along, such that they cannot between the two of them govern? Linz says there's just no way to resolve that dispute consistent with the principles of democracy, so something else, typically the whims of the military, has to choose a winner. Steve Calabresi, my former professor and perhaps the foremost champion of presidential government, makes a number of good points about the weaknesses of Linz's case, for instance that most of the examples he cites are Latin American countries without a strong judiciary that can act as a potential dispute-settler between the political branches. Still, the current crisis in Washington looks an awful lot like a Linz-style collapse of presidential government, right?