Postcards from Nixonland

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

For Obama’s first-year anniversary the New York Times rounded up some White House veterans to write about their respective presidents’ first years. This one, especially, surprised me:

It was in many other ways a very good year for President Nixon. He called to congratulate the Apollo 11 astronauts on their moon landing. He initiated a huge expansion of the National Endowment for the Arts and began the processes that led to the desegregation of public schools in the South and a historic reform of the government’s policy toward American Indians. He announced the “Nixon doctrine,” providing aid — but not military forces — to our anticommunist Asian allies. He signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Nixon was a pretty abominable guy. He brought this country to the biggest political and constitutional crisis it’s faced since the Civil War, and he did this riding on the back of racial politicking and fear-mongering, the effects of which still reverberate through our politics today. On the other hand, he did manage do so some good things to advance the causes of American liberalism. He expanded social security benefits, he created the EPA, and he poured a lot of money into our national park system. He also introduced a bill for universal health care, which, according to some historians, he might actually have had the political capital pass.

Now, I personally don’t buy the meme that Obama’s first year has been some sort of unmitigated calamity for American liberalism. But it definitely could have better. There are a lot of issues our country needs to tackle — primary among them is the need to save the middle class, to fix our banking industry, to fix our energy economy, and (yes) to fix our health care system — and the prospect that we’re going to be able to do these things does indeed seem much smaller than did a year ago. Yet that’s less Obama’s fault than it is the fault of the system, than it is a signal of the sclerosis of our governing apparatus. We’re entering into the fourth decade where our country has failed to take on a major domestic project and succeed at fixing it.

Looking back, it’s a scary thing when a conservative a-hole like Dick Nixon can deliver on change, while a guy like Obama, whose mandate is much larger and whose integrity is much, much deeper, has to struggle so hard. The lesson to draw from that, to my mind, is that our current problems — our current inability to solve problems — is less about Obama than it is about us, our country, how we conceives of our national community and how we legislates on our own behalf. Self government involves a great deal more than the nature of the man on top.

Money, Politics, and Citizens United

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

I spent this past week complaining about government dysfunction -- so I'd be remiss not to mention the Citizens United ruling. Of the many bad things that happened last week Citizens United is probably the most significant. The ruling will make our government worse. How much worse? It's not clear -- some argue that risk-averse corporations won't be inclined to amp up political contributions, wasting share-holder money and damaging their brands; some say that the barriers between government and corporations are already so permeable that this ruling amounts to little -- yet the point is, it will make things worse. The gap between legislators and their constituents (and the country they serve) will only widen, and the connection between corporations and the law will tighten.

Who can deny that? That an increase in corporate money means a decrease in legislator independence, in rational legislation, and in citizen trust in the system?

Specifically, I'd say there are two things we're going to see more of: the rich buying elections, i.e. influencing who gets into congress through the link between corporate campaign contributions and voters' opinions, and the rich buying votes, i.e. influencing what those congressmen do once they're there through the link between campaign contributions and the politicians who benefit from receiving them.

Money of course should never be able to buy these things. Money is for buying cars and hotel tickets and (sure) prostitutes -- but it cannot be for buying political power. The two spheres must be separate. That's what equality demands: that a proclivity for making money does not translate into the power to make laws (just like the power to make laws doesn't translate into the power to make money). Yet the merger of these two spheres, the economic and political, is already real. Consider the remarkable graph below, from Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels. He associates the votes of senators with the political opinions of their constituents, separated by income level:

This is a big subject. There are a whole lot of graphs to show and statistics to cite, but the point is commonsensical. There's too much money in politics. It makes our laws worse, it's inimical to justice, and it will, in the long run, undermine the institutional integrity of our legislative branch. Who knows what Citizens United will bring? But like I said: it will only make things worse.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of David Paul Ohmer

Martha Coakley and the Politics of Despair

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Here’s the deal: if Martha Coakley loses tonight it’s good news for Lloyd Blankfein, who’s worried about financial regulation reform, for the super rich, whose taxes will remain low, and for everyone generally interested in preventing Obama from governing this country. On the other hand, her loss is bad news for those of us who care about adequate health care coverage for all Americans and for those around the world whose cities will be wiped out by the effects of global warming. Coakley’s loss is bad news, basically, for any of us who believe that our country’s problems should be tackled head one. Not because she’s so great, but because she’s pivotal for the system to work. In my last post, “The Pathos of Helplessness,” I wrote about the need to re-assert the prerogative of governing ourselves as country — the need to open up the avenues for making effective policy decisions and for creating a culture of collective self-sacrifice. Scott Brown’s election would be a monumental strike against this.

If you want to understand what the “pathos of helplessness” is all about then look at any given video clip from the 9/12 rallies. See a fearful and angry people. Or review the obstructionism of congressional Republicans. See a group utterly determined to prevent legislative reform. Yet there’s also another side to this, and it comes in the form of despair. Here Andrew Sullivan gives us a beautifully depressing example:

Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she’ll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That’s all he can get now – and even that will be a stretch. The uninsured will even probably vote Republican next time in protest at Obama’s failure! That’s how blind the rage is.

Ditto any attempt to grapple with climate change. In fact, any legislative moves with this Democratic party and this Republican party are close to hopeless. The Democrats are a clapped out, gut-free lobbyist machine. The Republicans are insane. The system is therefore paralyzed beyond repair.

Yes, I’m gloomy. Not because I was so wedded to this bill, although I think it’s a decent enough start. But because if America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing a new president with two majorities, then America’s problems are too great for Americans to tackle.

And so one suspects that this is a profound moment in the now accelerating decline of this country. And one of the major parties is ecstatic about it.

Andrew Sullivan is one of our very best intellectuals. (His work on gay marriage, torture, and Iran, and his writings on Obama and Palin and the state of American conservatism, really are high points of internet discourse.) He’s not, in other words, a tea partier. Yet, honestly, his position of despair is exactly theirs. If you really believe in governing, in fixing our problems rather than drifting through them, then you have to believe in fixing the government and revivifying our civic culture. You don’t fix our country without starting there. And you certainly don’t fix it by telling us that the whole thing is helpless and corrupt and cannot be saved. The pathos of helplessness is two-fold: it’s the people who don’t believe in governing and it’s the people who don’t believe that we can if we tried. Both are, to use Sullivan’s word, “nihilism.” And both are part of the problem.

The Pathos of Helplessness

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

James Fallows makes a lot of good points in his long Atlantic article, “How American Can Rise Again.” I’ll highlight just one. Let’s call it “the pathos of helplessness”:

The full details are beyond us here, but the crucial point is that in principle, the United States itself has the power to correct what is wrong in each case. Take jobs, as a very important for-instance: the loss of middle-class jobs is America’s worst economic problem. But that would be so even if China were still as closed as under Mao. According to prevailing economic theory, a country’s job structure and income distribution are determined more by its own domestic policies—education, investment, taxes—plus shifts in technology than by anything its competitors do. That’s especially true of a large economy like America’s. Those policies are ours to change.

My problem with the “America is in decline” narrative is that it’s usually made to imply that China and India’s rise has some of direct barring on America’s problems. When people talk about America’s problems, they’re using talking about things like: a declining middle class, an absurdly inefficient healthcare system, an oil dependency, run-away debt — issues that have only a highly-abstracted relationship to our relative geopolitical power vis a vis China, and a more clear relationship with things like domestic policy decisions and public-private investment choices. Our problems are, quite literally, ours to change.

But you wouldn’t believe it by looking at Congress today. We’ve got one political party that officially refuses to take responsibility for solving these problems, and then we have an antiquated and dysfunctional political system that empowers them. We can solve our own problems — China has little to do with it one way or the other — but, probably, patently, we won’t. It’s remarkable and depressing. Fallows:

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

To me, fixing our government is the issue that needs to be tackled. Unless we fix our government, we can’t fix ourselves. Larry Lessig, who founded Change Congress and came over to the Harvard law school last year to start the Center for Institutional Corruption, uses the analogy of an alcoholic: his job’s in jeopardy, his home life is in shambles, his liver is failing; his drinking, clearly, isn’t his biggest problem, but it is his first problem, the one that precedes all the rest, the one that, until fixed, will continue to enable and exacerbate all the rest.

The positive news to come out of our healthcare reform debates is that all the dysfunction of our political system got brought to the fore in a very big way: the relentless obstructionism, the corrosive influence of money, the absurdly unequal concentrations of political power, the acrid partisanship, and, reflective of all this, the general loss of trust in the governing process writ large.

This isn’t simply an institutional failing. We have a political party that’s taken this generalized sense of political helplessness and turned it into a system of belief. And we’ve had thirty years of theory and politics attempting to legitimize anti-communitarian selfishness and greed. I think it’s fair to say that this is nothing less than a loss of confidence in the American system of self-government — in our specific institutions and also in the idea of a polity that not only goes on and gets on, but one that actively saves itself again and again, and that distributes the responsibility for doing that into the hands of the people. If there’s any truth to the “America is in decline” narrative then it’s in this: this loss of confidence in our own ability to govern ourselves. It has nothing to do with China and it’s up to us to change.