So Andrew Sullivan got a bunch of his readers a bit worked up with a recent post entitled “Ted Cruz Is Right.” Cruz was speaking about the recent vote to raise the debt ceiling when he said:
What Republican leadership said is we want this to pass, but if every senator affirmatively consents to doing it on 51 votes, then we can all cast a vote no and we can go home to our constituents and say we opposed it. And listen, that sort of show vote, that sort of trickery to the – to the constituents is why Congress has a 13 percent approval rating. In my view, we need to be honest with our constituents. And last week, what it was all about was truth and transparency. I think all 45 Republicans should have stood together and said of course not.
Sullivan’s comments:
A-fucking-men. The entire Washington dance of wanting things to pass but not wanting to actually vote for them is both an inevitable part of political maneuvering and also deeply corrosive, if allowed to become the norm, of representative democracy. There has come a point in Washington where what would appear to sane outsiders as an act of preposterous hypocrisy, weaseling and cowardice … has simply become routine. And the umbrage of two-faced Senators complaining that they actually had to take a stand on something is, once you allow the layers of world-weariness to peel off, an obvious affront to, well, all of us.
One of the great things about Sullivan’s blog is his unwavering dedication to reading and publishing reader feedback, and he received a lot of it regarding this post. In a follow up, he quotes a reader taking issue with his validation of Cruz on the basis of the filibuster, insisting on the importance of distinguishing between a vote for cloture and a vote for the bill (or nomination) at issue. It was a pretty good point I think.
Sullivan apologized for oversimplifying (“the compression”) and noted that he’d received a lot of objections in his inbox. He then offered the following in the way of clarification:
[I]n so far as McConnell wanted to avoid a filibuster, I agree with many readers that it was a good thing. But McConnell’s motive was not opposition to filibuster abuse. It was not wanting to vote for something he actually supported, for fear it could damage him for re-election. Of course, that kind of maneuvering is necessary now and again. It can be a regular tactic in tough political choices. But when it becomes completely reflexive – when so much of public policy is determined not by sincere positions on policy but almost entirely by cynical, self-interested positioning, it’s no surprise Americans loathe Washington so much.
I think Sullivan is looking at this the wrong way. Or at least, the point of view he’s expressing seems to ignore the bigger issue, which is that what McConnell is doing works.
I share Sullivan’s concern about apparent acts of “preposterous hypocrisy, weaseling and cowardice” becoming “routine” or “reflexive.” I too lament the sad, cynical, self-interested maneuvering of our lawmakers, and our ever-declining level of national discourse.
But I have to ask: who, exactly, is Sullivan talking about when he refers to “sane outsiders”? Because if he’s referring to America’s general electorate, it doesn’t seem at all clear that the behavior at issue in these posts “appear[s]” to those outsiders as especially deplorable. Or perhaps it “would appear” deplorable (emphasis mine d’uh) if they bothered to make themselves aware of it. The point, though, is that all these loathsome political machinations work. American voters simply don’t hold their politicians accountable for the sort of behavior Sullivan is talking about.
Sullivan writes “when so much of public policy is determined… almost entirely by cynical, self-interested positioning, it’s no surprise Americans loathe Washington so much.” But this doesn’t make sense. Americans are not exactly powerless here. If they loathe Washington so much because their democratically elected representatives are determining policy through “cynical, self-interested positioning,” then Americans can choose not to democratically reelect those representatives.
But we do reelect them. Almost always. In 2012 the reelection rate in the House was 90%; in the Senate it was 91%. So who’s really to blame for all this? We’d all like politicians to always vote their conscience and work together in good faith to serve the interests of their constituents, to never prioritize their individual interests. But we also know that for the most part they won’t; politicians respond to incentives just like everyone else, and our system of government was set up with this reality in mind. The true measure of our approval or “loathing” is the ballot box, not an opinion poll.
If our representatives in government are determining policy based almost entirely on cynical and self-interested positioning, and we’re reelecting them year after year after year, then it seems to me that, if they aren’t actively incented to act out of such naked and cynical self-interest, they sure as hell aren’t incented not to.
How have we arrived at this point? Why have American voters done almost nothing to hold accountable the elected officials who routinely engage in behavior we so uniformly claim to abhor? How is it that Congress can have a 9% approval rating, but 90% of its members get reelected?
My delicate and polite answer to that question is that a large proportion of Americans just aren’t well enough informed about the various policy debates and proposals, the parliamentary tactics, the maneuvering and deal making, the CBO reports, the role of the Fed, and so on. Americans are busy people with jobs and families and hobbies and many of them understandably lack the time and/or the inclination to research and formulate a balanced and well-informed perspective on every issue.
Sometimes, though, I think maybe we’re just fucking dumb.
Obamacare has been pretty much the biggest political issue in America for years now, so I don’t think I’m demanding that everyone be a political junkie when I say I find the extent of this country’s ignorance on the subject depressing and pathetic. In 2013 roughly 40% of Americans didn’t even fucking know that Obamacare was law!
I mean, holy shit people, almost 30% of us can’t even name the fucking Vice President!
Everyone’s into shrinking the government and cutting the deficit, but no one wants to cut Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security or (to a lesser extent) Defense. We’d rather cut foreign aid, which Americans think is 27% of the budget (it’s 1%), or “waste.”
After cutting taxes more than two dozen times and saying as much basically every time he spoke in public, only 12% of people in 2010 were aware that Obama had lowered taxes.
So, Mr. Sullivan, I do hear you. There is something to what Ted Cruz is saying: it just feels shitty to watch the Senate Minority Leader angling to vote “No” on something he actually does support just so he can go back and tell his constituents that he opposed it.
But I just keep coming back to the fact that when he stands up there and says to voters that he stood against the President raising the debt limit, it’s going to work. Sullivan wants to blame McConnell for taking advantage of this, but shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why we give him an incentive to do so? Why we make it so goddamn easy? How we’ve let ourselves becomes so susceptible to oversimplification and misleading bromides?
Seriously, come on. Look at those reelection stats again. We all carry on and bitch and whine and shake our fists at the fuckheads in Congress, and oh politicians are such cynical self-serving slimeballs, we claim to have a higher opinion of cockroaches than Congress, we give them an approval rating of nine fucking percent… and then we send them all right the fuck back for another go around.
Remember back during the aftermath of the Newtown shooting, when it was looking as if we finally might make a little bit of headway on some basic, common sense gun regulation? And then came that widely circulated poll showing that over 90% of Americans supported background checks as a condition of gun purchases?
And then… nothing happened. Still hasn’t. This has been the subject of much hand wringing on the left. How is it possible that we can’t get a background check bill passed if more than 9 out of 10 Americans support it?
Many people have suggested plausible answers to this question, and many of those answers point at least in part to fear of retribution from the NRA, with its formidable fundraising machine and almost unparalleled electoral influence. I think this is basically right, but I don’t think it’s enough to just leave it at that. We need to pause a moment to really appreciate what it means for an elected official to oppose the will of 91% of American voters because he or she fears the retribution of a single lobbying group.
Because the NRA doesn’t just get to decide who gets elected—the voters do. What the NRA does is influence those voters, and they do this mainly through election advertising. So here we have members of Congress representing an electorate that overwhelmingly supports a particular measure, but they defy that support for fear of NRA attack ads demanding they be voted out of office for supporting the measure.
Again, take a moment to absorb this. We live in a world where a politician cannot vote for a bill supported by 91% of American voters because he believes those voters will punish him for it on election day. He figures, well, maybe they’d say they support it now, but next election cycle the NRA’s going to spend tons of money on ads attacking him for something like “falling into line with Obama’s effort to curtail our Second Amendment Rights and supporting a gun control measure that destroys freedom,” then cue his opponent solemnly pledging to stand up for the Constitution and fight to preserve our freedoms and oppose the Communists in Washington at every turn, and now our poor Congressman is stuck trying to be like, wait a second, come on people, all I did was vote for this one small thing that you supported, but at that point no one’s listening because ZOMG ISLAMONAZIBAMA MARTIAL LAW DURRRR. And really why should he put himself through all that?
And you know what? He’s probably right. Lots of people who would have supported background checks in a vacuum or to a pollster probably would turn on their elected officials the minute they see an ad attacking them for supporting “gun control.”
That’s the real problem. We can talk all we want about our elected leaders’ naked self-interest and lack of integrity and the cynical political maneuvering that increasingly drives so much of our policy making in this country. But I don’t really see how it’s going to stop as long as we keep rewarding it.
Gun control will happen when voters make it a priority. When they say to their Congressman, I too believe in Second Amendment Rights, but I also believe that there are some basic steps we can take to make the country a little safer, and I’m going to cast my vote for someone with the courage and the integrity to defy the NRA and get those measures passed. And I’m not going let the NRA trick me into holding that against you the next time around.
Politicians will stop their cynical political positioning when we stop being so easily fooled by it. They’ll stop playing these silly games when the silly games stop working. I really do think that to a large extent it’s on us.
I’m not really sure what anyone can do about this, and honestly it’s a little disheartening for me. I just don’t know how to get people more engaged and informed in a balanced way. And I do understand the temptation to blame the politicians for not having the integrity to speak plainly and fairly about policy issues, in a way that acknowledges the existence of nuance and complication and the possibility of good-faith disagreement and compromise. I just don’t see how we can expect it if we don’t demand it on election day. But for us to do that we have to have a rational, well informed, engaged electorate capable of seeing through the bullshit and not so easily susceptible to vague emotional rhetoric and oversimplified ideological hand waving.
I’m not convinced we have that. The information is out there, but there’s so much of it coming from so many sources of various reliability with various agendas, and it’s just so easy to “inform” oneself extensively within the confines of exclusively biased left- or right-wing sources.
I don’t know the answer. Campaign finance reform is probably part of it. But I do have one suggestion: we need to talk about it amongst ourselves. Politics has to stop being such a taboo topic of conversation, and the fact that it is demonstrates how emotional—rather than sober and rational—our engagement with political issues has become. If we can’t talk about issues amongst ourselves for fear of souring relationships or provoking emotional outbursts, how can we ever hope to reach consensus? We cannot relegate our engagement with matters of such importance to a one-way conversation with cable news pundits and canned political speeches. I really believe that if we can engage each other in even tempered, rational conversation, where we share the facts and the data that support our views (or be exposed for lacking it), and really try to understand each others’ point of view, then maybe, slowly, that will “trickle up,” and our elected leaders might someday follow suit.
Probably not though. What with all the people who still don’t accept evolution or climate change, not sure what I can say to them. Maybe we’re just fucked who knows.
The Reason Files 