In Indiana last week, we saw the results of what’s been termed a “revenge tour”: Five of eight incumbent Republican state senators were defeated in their primaries by candidates backed by a vindictive, heavily financed campaign from the very top of their party.
Why? Because their cooler heads had prevented a risky midterm redistricting.
“Faction” and the damage that factions do (particularly successful majorities) were the greatest fear of the founders. James Madison, the primary theoretician and de facto main author of the Constitution, famously told his crew in Federalist 10 that:
“Complaints are every where (sic) heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens … that our governments are too unstable; that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
And here we are.
I’ve always been intensely interested in how party systems work. How do people with very individual needs and expectations of government somehow come together to create a collectivity? The age-old answer has been “compromise” – giving up a little of your ideal position to get something “sort of” like it.
Madison assumed that frequent elections, and the paranoia of the (temporary) majority, would offset the temptation to flay the minority party, or the public good, because the current majority knew that they might very well be out of the majority in the next election and their recent victims would turn on them like rabid dogs.
Why compromise? Self-interest. Likely the most important driving force in politics.
There is no perfect system that gets you there: policy “compromise” is the gentle way of describing what can be a ferocious process of elimination. In game theory, it’s measuring the expected utility of shifting your preferred position for one slightly (or more) closer to that of your opponent, to get some, but never all, of what you want.
In legislatures, any legislature, without a will to compromise they either produce total gridlock – nothing gets done – or we face a tyranny of that majority.
Madison and company did not think much of parliamentary systems, with their strict party loyalties and lockstep voting, and they did not create one.
Parliamentary majorities command strict loyalty because the party is in charge of who gets to run, and where. If you “defect” from the party (do something the party leadership does not like or vote against the party’s position) you will be forced out.
Our Constitution has a system of “checks” on such behavior – candidates self-recruit and can try to run under any label. If the party diverges from their constituents’ interests, they can bail.
The founders believed that no party could be “all things to all people” and defections would occur. “Crossing the aisle” would be pretty common, they reasoned, with the wide set of constituent needs and opinions. And so it has been.
In the House, Republicans crossed the aisle through FDR’s terms. Ronald Reagan drew lots of Democratic votes in the House for his reforms. And Richard Nixon spawned an internal opposition in the GOP that was alarmed, natural and persistent.
But that’s history.
There is a mutant gene in the American system, in that we have always believed that most presidents would work for the common public good or be stopped by their own partisans. In their wildest dreams, the founders could not have predicted someone like Trump.
Mr. Trump has rarely cared much about the “representative” idea of “representative government.” He is malignantly focused on his own interests, not the interests of most Republicans, or the people they represent. His interference in Indiana is indicative of a much wider problem – sabotage of the system itself.
What’s happening here is not good for the effective functioning either party, and the GOP majority in the House is powerless to rein him in.
That majority cannot be allowed to extend past November.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Is Trump’s will now the Republican litmus test? | R. Bruce Anderson
Reporting by R. Bruce Anderson, Ledger columnist / The Ledger
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