What’s ‘Political Dysfunction’?
I know it when I see it.
The titular question comes courtesy of Dave Schuler, who observes, “I’m seeing complaints from a variety of sources in the press about political dysfunction in the United States. I wish I understood what they meant.”
I was somewhat amused at the question, since it seems rather obvious we’re experiencing political dysfunction and have been for some time. Still, I must confess, actually coming up with a workable definition of the concept is challenging. But, as with the late Justice Potter Stewart and pornography, I believe I know it when I see it.
Dave offers this:
Since practically no one defines their terms these days, by inference I think they mean one or all of the following:
- The things that I want to do aren’t being accomplished
- People disagree
- People within the same party disagree
- The metrics I prefer, sometimes quite counter-intuitive and concocted to support a political point, prove that I’m right. Why do so many people think I’m wrong?
- Complaining about political dysfunction helps the people or party that I prefer
I suspect he’s being a bit cheeky here. But, again, it sure seems like we’ve been more dysfunctional the last few years than we were in the several decades that I’d been following American politics previously. This, despite things I want having not been accomplished, people—including members of the same party—disagreeing, and the like.
Dave counters,
I can tell you what I would mean by political dysfunction: when the most radical factions are setting the agenda and they are unable or unwilling to compromise.
So, within the Republican Party at least, the most radical faction is in fact setting the agenda and is unable or unwilling to compromise. I think the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has an outsized impact on the policy agenda, too, but they’ve been much more pragmatic in accepting half a loaf.
I don’t think that any of the points in the bullet points above are indicative of political dysfunction. I think they’re indicative of democracy.
Up to a point, I agree.
But, first and foremost, as we’ve noted for quite some time hereabouts, much of our system is undemocratic. That the Senate represents states and not people has been baked into the system from the outset but the resulting disparities have increased substantially over time. That disparity is also reflected in the Electoral College (since each state gets one Elector for each of its two Senators and another for each of its Representatives), resulting in two popular vote losers winning the Presidency in recent memory. And ever-more-sophisticated partisan gerrymandering has effectively made the party primary, not the general election, decisive in choosing members of the House.
Second, we’ve amplified the systemic imbalances with procedural ones. The filibuster, once rare and used only for the most controversial issues, is now normal order in the Senate, requiring a four-fifths supermajority to pass anything. The bastardized version of the Hastert Rule in the House means that, not only must a majority of the Republican Caucus support a measure before it’s put up for a vote but, effectively, nothing can be put up for a vote if it needs Democratic votes to do pass.
The result of all this is that, not only can’t we pass new laws—which I can at least conjure a conservative argument for on grounds of polarization—but we can’t conduct the ordinary business of government. We seldom pass budgets anymore, relying instead on Continuing Resolutions. We’ve got 400-odd senior military positions unfilled because on Senator is grandstanding on abortion policy. We’re facing, for the second time this fall and the umpteenth time since I became a Federal employee a decade ago, the prospect of a government shutdown even though only a handful of Members of Congress want that outcome and no particular policy fight is at hand.
The irony of the complaints about political dysfunction is that so many of those doing the complaining hold views quite divergent from those held by a majority of Americans and they would be even more upset if those majority views were to gain real ascendancy.
It’s almost certainly the case that the pundit class has views that diverge from the general electorate. But that doesn’t mean our national political machinery isn’t dysfunctional right now.
Dictatorship and oligarchy are orderly. Democracy is messy.
Here, we’re in full agreement. But the nature of democracy—and especially a system such as ours with separation of powers between branches of government and divided government in terms of partisan control—is a reliance on compromise. With an unpopular Democratic President in the White House and slim (and divided) Republican control in the House, we would expect little in the way of major legislation to pass. And I’m fine with that! When the country is divided, we shouldn’t expect movement in one direction or the other.
But, for example, pretty much nobody wants a government shutdown. There’s no real policy fight over the broad outlines of a defense budget or, indeed, a federal budget. Aid to Israel’s war effort is quite popular. Aid to Ukraine is decreasingly popular but it still enjoys plurality support. But Congress can’t get its act together.
Beyond the matter of day-to-day function, the entire system is at an inflection point unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.* Despite almost three years of evidence to the contrary, roughly 38% of Americans—almost all of them Republicans or Republican-leaners—think the last Presidential election was stolen. Roughly a quarter believe violence may be necessary to save the country. And a man with a roughly 50-50 chance of being re-elected is spewing eliminationist rhetoric and promising to use the institutions of government to go after his political enemies.
If that’s not dysfunctional, I don’t know what is.
________________
*I was alive but not politically aware during the peak of the unrest over Civil Rights-Vietnam-Watergate. Because we didn’t have the partisan sorting or information bubbles that currently prevail, I would judge that era less dysfunctional even though it was more violent. We did, after all, pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the War Powers Resolution, and would almost certainly have impeached Nixon on a bipartisan basis had a unanimous Supreme Court headed by a Nixon appointee and with three other Nixon appointees not ordered him to turn over the tapes, prompting his resignation.
That you were either composing this post, or at the very least preparing it for publication, while the former Speaker of the House was picking physical fights with his own caucus members, and a sitting Senator tried to challenge a congressional witness to a fist fight on the Senate floor is just poetry./
Really great post James. I think your views on political dysfunction match mine:
Especially when we look at the clinical definition of dysfunction, it’s not just outside-the-norm behavior, it’s literally impeding systems from working.
I realize this is tangential, but FWIW I think there is a straightforward definition of political dysfunction. First, I’d define “governmental dysfunction” as when a government is unable to competently perform its duties (building and maintaining roads, standing up an army or a police force, devising and enforcing various codes necessary for the public good) or fails to anticipate or respond to new circumstances or threats. The cause of this dysfunction can be structural, or due to incompetence, or due to loss of personnel, or political. So “Political Dysfunction” is the case where politicians cannot reach compromises necessary to provide the authorizations and directions needed for the government to fulfill its functions.
So, yes, by this definition we currently are experiencing political dysfunction.
I think your definition and discussion is a heck of a lot more insightful than Schuler’s. When the Congress can’t even pass a budget or elect a Speaker, it’s pretty obvious what dysfunction means at its most fundamental level.
Which has been true since the founding – IOW if we are experiencing greater dysfunction now, the cause is somewhere else.
This is indeed new and contributes to dysfunction.
I would agree that polarization is the major problem, the scale of which is either new, or a return to the pre-Great Depression norms.
One thing I’ll add that you don’t mention is how Congress has abrogated many of its responsibilities, particularly to the Executive. It’s dysfunctional that so much policymaking now consists of the Executive making some novel overreach of authority, which may or may not be reigned in by the courts while the legislature stands by and does nothing.
@Andy: I’m increasingly torn on the matter of delegation to the Executive. I don’t think it’s the way the Constitution is supposed to function but don’t really know how you’d manage a modern state, let alone one of the sheer size of this one, without having regulatory agencies fill in the details.
As I noted recently, one little-remarked-upon aspect of the Tuberville hold is to cast light on the fact that Congress can’t actually do the job it pretends to be doing here. There’s just no practical way for the entire Senate to weigh in on every GS-15 or one-star appointment.
Dave Schuler is simply not a serious person. The sooner you get that, the less time you need to waste on his bad-faith arguments.
Can you believe this guy?
Are we to believe that he really missed 1/6 or the leading GOP presidential candidate promising to “root out” his political opponents “that live like vermin in the confines of our country”?
Or is that supposed to be your regular “messy democracy”? If so, Schuler has no clue what “democracy” even means.
(Of course, he has no idea what democracy means, as evidenced by this:
The idea that dictatorship is less messy than democracy (apart from the military parades) is utterly ludicrous.)
@Andy:
Disagree. A system that functioned for a period of time can cease to function when circumstances change, and if the system cannot evolve, then the problem is the system. And by the way, the system functioned its way right into Civil War just about four score and seven years after it was created. Our system’s been a mess from the start. Maybe better to say that we’ve managed to keep an old jalopy running, but it can’t manage a modern freeway.
And what can we do about allowing the system to evolve? Fuck all because of the system. We have a dinosaur on our hands and all we can do is stare at the approaching asteroid.
@mattbernius: Impeding systems from working is the agenda for the right, and for some portion of the left as well.
Wealthy corporations thrive, at least for a while, when the government is incompetent to set and/or enforce workplace rules, environmental protection procedures, financial oversight, tax collection, etc. They want the government to be weak and incompetent.
@drj:
He’s the equivalent of an MLM trained on corporate PR and Wall Street Journal op-eds.
@Modulo Myself:
The cherry on top:
Wanna bet that the views “held by a majority of Americans” (source: “Trust me, bro.”) are 100% identical to the views held by Schuler himself?
Such a remarkable coincidence!
@James Joyner:
It’s a question of scope and scale. It’s weird to see the Executive and Courts go through the process of determining the limits of delegated Congressional authority and intent when Congress could remove all doubt. Instead, Congress does nothing.
But it’s not just about where to draw lines on regulatory authority. It’s also the Executive power grabs.
The primacy of partisanship means that the Legislative branch is no longer interested in protecting its institutional prerogatives when the occupant of the WH is in the same party. Hence partisans celebrate Executive power grabs they like and condemn those they don’t. There is an absence of principles here. I would like to see more skepticism of Executive power generally, and see Congress protect its institutional role, even against a President of the same party as that who controls Congress.
The problem is, I don’t know how to get from A to B.
@drj: @Modulo Myself:
I used to hang out at Dave Schuler’s blog years ago. He’s highly intelligent and an out-of-the-box thinker, but then it seemed to me that his train was going a bit off the track. He had a serious hate on for Democrats in Chicago – his home – and frankly, take a look at Chicago, he had beef.
@Michael Reynolds:
Right. I think we need to acknowledge that a lot has changed over time. Not only in terms of procedural rules but to @James Joyner’s point, the complexity and scale of what the government does. That’s before we get to how the population has scaled and radically changed over the last century.
All of that creates different stressors on the infrastructure of a system that isn’t easy to update.
You keep saying this, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why. You’d have to label anything to the left of Newt Gingrich as “progressive” for this to be true.
Hint: believing that climate change requires action is not a “progressive” position. Believing that people should be able to marry whatever one person they choose is not a progressive position; it’s mainstream centrist. Believing that the government should not only tax people in order to promote the general welfare, but should also actually enforce the tax laws, is not a progressive position. Etc.
@Michael Reynolds:
The issue, as I see it, is that changing the system is – by design – very difficult and requires a supermajority of Americans in support. As I frequently talk about here, how one gets from A to B doesn’t happen by magic, and the details and sequencing matter. We are currently a very divided country.
Making such changes to our system requires unity we don’t have . And if we had the unity necessary to make those changes, then our dysfunction wouldn’t be much of a problem anymore.
Additionally, there isn’t any kind of coherent movement that’s seriously attempting to build the political support necessary to make those big changes, much less one that is showing any signs of progress. There isn’t even a movement to make more achievable reforms, like expanding the House. Rather, it is just a bunch of us talking about it and complaining.
@Andy:
I think you too readily dismiss that while the system had undemocratic elements from the get-go (indeed, even more undemocratic than now) that we aren’t dealing with the same society as 1789. Moreover, the disjunction between the mythology (and expectations) of being “the greatest democracy in the world” and the actual function mechanisms of our constitutional system has increasingly led to more political and governmental dysfunction.
In simple terms: we are told we have a democracy, but in many ways, we don’t. That is going to cause cognitive disjunctions over time.
@Andy:
Another perspective: I used DOS 3.3 back in 1989, but it won’t run my computer today. Why not?
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think you make my point – the system is largely the same, it’s the country that has changed.
IOW, it’s one thing to say that the system needs to evolve to meet changes in American society over time, it’s quite another to suggest that the system is the cause of contemporary problems.
I don’t blame my car for being too small when I decide to have a bigger family, adopt two dogs, and get a job that requires hauling lots of stuff around.
And the fact is we do have a good track record. Many countries with better systems from a high-level academic perspective are more dysfunctional than the US and have not lasted. There is much more to making a society work and endure than achieving some kind of arbitrary standard for “democracy.”
@Andy:
Yes, and no.
We definitely have the longest-lasting constitutional order globally. (Although I expect the Chinese would argue about that standard in terms of longevity, as would even the Brits).
But it gets a lot more complicated making comparisons beyond that standard. We have only even been fully democratic since 1965 if one takes the notion of full legal suffrage as the standard. Germany has been democratic longer by that standard.
I would be curious as to your list of “countries with better systems from a high-level academic perspective are more dysfunctional than the US and have not lasted” in terms of “not lasted” so I can understand where you are coming from.
@Andy:
And weirdly I think you make mine: that the system is inadequate to the tasks and needs to change.
An example. A rather major example. Economists used to talk about fiscal policy and monetary policy in response to a recession or inflation. Biden managed to sneak in some fiscal policy, as did Trump, in response to the pandemic. But I’ve seen little talk of fiscal policy in response to the post pandemic inflation. Why? Because any realistic fiscal policy response to inflation would involve raising taxes, and as long as GOPs have 40 Senate seats that ain’t gonna happen. An entire class of government function is off the table leaving the Fed to deal with everything with the clumsy tools of rate manipulation. Didn’t used to be this way. Nixon famously said, “We’re all Keynesians now.”
@gVOR10: Ah, but Nixon was preaching Keynesian stimulus–tax cuts, spending boosts, and the like—to goose a flat economy, not tax hikes and spending cuts to cool off an over-hot one. That’s much easier.
But, yes, we’re very limited in our ability to raise taxes nowadays.
@DrDaveT:
I take that as a given in reading Andy’s comments, but I’m not an impartial observer.
@Michael Reynolds: I do wonder if the sheer corruption of Chicago politics doesn’t color his perception of the national scene. He clearly has disdain for Trump and the MAGA wing but does not see him as the wild inflection point most of us do.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think we’re in a kind of Catch-23*
The system needs to change.
The system cannot be changed until the country changes.
If the country changes, the system might be adequate again and won’t need to change.
*When a Catch-22 just won’t do.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
The fact that so many think I’m right-wing speaks volumes IMO. Anything that isn’t left-wing is automatically coded right-wing is my impartial view.
@Steven L. Taylor:
My point is that I’m skeptical that one can solve problems in society – including ours – via systemic tweaks.
A lot of countries throughout the world, particularly in Latin America, have done a shit-ton of political system changing and yet remain basket cases. On the other end, are the countries that don’t have formal constitutions and instead rely on more informal systems while being stable and democratic.
A country that can go through dozens of constitutions and not find one that brings stability suggests that the system isn’t the problem.
In a similar way, I think our present problems are not rooted in our Constitutional system, and so I’m skeptical that making the system more “democratic” would fix those problems.
@James Joyner:
I read Dave’s blog and still comment there. That is my sense as well. I’d speculate that from reading his views over the years that he’s jaundiced by the particularly bad and corrupt Democratic machine that runs Chicago and most of Illinois – which he’s seen a lot of firsthand as he’s been involved in politics, including working as a poll worker. I think this makes him proverbially roll his eyes when people claim Democrats have all these good and noble intentions.
@Kathy:
That’s a succinct way to put it.
@Andy:
What do you think legislation is for? Or, somewhat narrower, constitutional amendments?
I can point to a couple that solved problems in society.
“The system needs to change.
The system cannot be changed until the country changes.
If the country changes, the system might be adequate again and won’t need to change.
That’s a succinct way to put it.”
Countries always change. A system that cannot change when the country does is problematic. Unfortunately we are trapped. There is no way to change the system with the country as is.
Steve
@Andy: @Steven L. Taylor: I know I’m going to regret stepping into this, but here goes. I’ve followed politics long enough that I caught a whiff of tear gas on the fringe of a protest during the Chicago convention. In that time I’ve watched one key thing change.
In 1954 Eisenhower wrote to one of his brothers,
They are still stupid, but their numbers are no longer negligible, they are now legion. IIRC in Winner-Take-All Politics Hacker and Pierson noted that corporate spending on political influence took off in the mid 70s, originally in response to the EPA and OSHA. Kennedy reduced the IRS top individual marginal rate to about 70%. (Contra Laffer, the level economists had said for decades would maximize revenue.) But a 90% rate kept the number of politically active billionaires down, and we’ve continued to cut since Kennedy. The Goldwater campaign is, as far as I’m aware, the first to talk explicitly about using modern advertising techniques to buy an election. The funders of the Federalist Society invested heavily in getting judges that would say money = speech so they could push in more money.
One big thing has changed over the last several decades. Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey knew what it was,
Money has changed. Money has changed politics and governance. Didn’t somebody say something about “root of all evil”?
@drj:
Yeah, that’s what legislation is for. Hence why I’ve been complaining about Congress not doing its job. We ought to have more legislation!
And if people want a Constitutional amendment, then more power to them, but I don’t think the political divisions in our country will be solved or even improved by amending the Constitution in the ways that Steven and many others advocate for. And I say this as someone who generally wishes we had a different system!
@steve:
I look at the Temperance movement and see what they accomplished with steady organization, time, and effort. Yeah, their goal turned out to be bad, but it was a huge hill to climb and they did it over the course of decades. I also thing you have to give some credit to the effort to overturn Roe – not in terms of the goal – but in the fact that it was a four-decade effort that implemented an effective strategy.
Nothing is quick or easy. Changing the system requires work, effort, and time. Lots of people today talk about changing the Constitution and fantasize about it online, but no one seems willing to put their money and time where their mouth is. Talk, as they say, is cheap.
As long as no one seems willing to do what the Temperance movement did, or the opponents of Roe did, or for that matter, any other movement that took decades of hard work and effective strategy to reach a goal, then yes, nothing will be accomplished.
@gVOR10:
I think it’s love of money that’s the actual root, not money itself.
Of course, wealth is a different matter, right?
@gVOR10: Money = free speech. That is some real pretzel logic. Kinda like ignoring “a well-regulated militia “ part of the 2nd amendment. It’s just sad and embarrassing so many Americans fall for this crap.
@steve:
Lots of things can change while the underlying system remains the same. The problem comes when the system can’t support changes or adapt to them.
Some systems are set up with exceptions and exemptions. Others undergo radical change to adapt to different conditions, then revert back. Political systems are not so flexible.
It would be great if the means of choosing party candidates could change dependent on the level of polarization and such, or at least convenient. A bit like how a flight management system changes its operational “law” if certain sensors or flight surfaces become inoperative or unreliable.
@Andy:
To some degree, such coding is axiomatic in a binary system such as ours appears to be at this moment. “That which is ‘a’ cannot be ‘b'” and all that.
@becca:
True. But there are only six that count.
@Andy:
Which, in fairness, is not what you originally claimed.
And I don’t think I have ever pointed to Latin America as the place to look for answers. And while I would prefer some of their electoral systems, I would note that a lot of the structural problems in LA are linked to having copied US constitutional structures (most specially presidentialism and symmetrical bicameralism).
@Andy:
FWIW, I do not think you are right-wing. I do think that you are dispositionally predisposed to being small-c conservative about things, on balance, however.
@Andy:
I must confess, the way you keep dismissing the value of democracy/making our system more democratically responsive is more than a bit depressing.
Likewise, “the primacy of partisanship” means that the states are no longer interested in protecting their prerogatives either. In theory, states should be giving the federal government as little power as possible so as to maximize their own. In practice, the states have been transformed into nothing more then vehicles for pushing nationwide partisan goals.
Seems like an obvious outcome of the system the FF put in place. Not sure what they were thinking…
@Steven L. Taylor:
More to the point, it’s probably why so many neutral observers place Andy firmly in the right-wing bin. He does not think that “more democratic” is necessarily a good thing; he does not hear dog-whistles; he invents new forms of yoga if necessary to avoid putting the obvious interpretation on statements or actions by right-wing speakers (but does not take such pains with left-of-center speakers), he is not prepared to admit that historical racism continues to affect current populations, …
It all comes down to what counts as “right-wing”. He’s not a wingnut, he’s not a Trumpist (and good for him on both counts), and he’s articulate and thoughtful (even better), but the big picture is well beyond what I would classify as “small-c conservatism”.
The most anomalous feature of his discourse is his repeated vehement objection to anything he perceives to be black-and-white, binary alternatives. It took me a while to realize that he was using this as a mechanism to dismiss others’ positions, no matter how reasoned or nuanced, as “binary” — and thus not requiring rebuttal on the merits.
@gVOR10: Citizens United replaced the notion of “one person, one vote” with “one dollar, one vote.” Nothing can be done until that abomination is overturned or drastically modified.
@Andy:
I don’t think anyone is arguing that fixing our Constitutional system would “fix” our social issues.
What I think many of us are trying to point out is that structural issues with our Constitutional system (which was designed to govern a very different, significantly smaller nation than what we grew into) are exacerbating, amplifying, and, in some cases, helping perpetuate those social problems in unhealthy and ultimately dysfunctional ways.
This isn’t an either/or situation.
Given our many discussions, I think that ultimately you see this as an “individual agency” issue versus a “structure” one. I really think it’s worth spending a bit of time thinking about how structure always already influences agency. Which, again, doesn’t negate the impact of agency at all. Rather it’s to see them as being in an ecosystem relationship–and as such, it’s becomes possible for one or the other (or in actuality often both) to become out-of-sync when factors change.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m not dismissing the inherent value, I’m suggesting it won’t solve our present problems. And I’m certainly not dismissing the value of “democracy” and what counts as “more democratically responsive” is subjective.
@DrDaveT:
Well you are pretty much wrong about all of that, unsurprisingly. My small “c” conservatism is mainly about my strong opinion that the details matter, that process matters as much – if not more – than goals, and the importance of limiting principles.
For instance, what does one mean by “more democratic” and what is the limiting principle for democracy? Presumably, no one here wants a pure democratic system, so the question becomes a debate about which undemocratic features are necessary to guard against the well-known problems of too much democracy. For instance, I think Steven and I agree that our primary system is too democratic in that it neutralizes the ability of political parties to choose their own candidates.
I am against “more democratic” if it means ending the Bill of Rights, separation of powers, and independent judiciary, and federalism, just to name a few things.
So, I do not think “more democratic” is always and forever inherently good because the logical conclusion of constantly moving in that direction is mob rule. Should I just uncharitably assume that’s what you want?
I could spend a thousand words addressing your other misperceptions, but I think that would ultimately be a futile effort.
@Matt Bernius:
I actually would much prefer that we had a different system. And I’m not ignorant of some of the issues that our system causes, though I probably do not think the effects are as critical and important as others do, which is fine.
For example, I would strongly support getting rid of the EC in favor of the popular vote if that came up as a Constitutional amendment. But the question for me is how one gets from A to B. And what I see is a lot of people – primarily Democrats – complaining about the EC but not doing anything about it.
Moreover, there is almost zero support for more achievable reforms that would address most of the problems with the EC without an amendment – namely, expanding the House. In my view, the reason that we have seen PV-EC mismatches over the past couple of decades is primarily because the House has stayed the same while the population is massively larger. Expanding the House would also make gerrymandering less of a problem and would also make it easier to have majority-minority districts to increase diversity in the chamber. And, of course, it would be much more representative.
But again, no one is really interested in even talking about that, much less attempting it. Instead there is a lot of wishing about much more difficult and comprehensive changes with zero effort to try to make them happen.
Another one of my soapboxes here is that actions matter more than words. I take what people do as much more significant than what they say. And I think the ratio of words-to-action on these issues speaks volumes.
In summary, I do not think it’s about structural vs individual. Clearly, both have a role to play.
@Andy:
Except it isn’t subjective.
A popular vote for president is objectively more democratically responsive than the EC, to name one very straight-forward example.