Nationalized, very partisan politics in which elected officials are looking over their shoulders at a blend of ideologically motivated grass-roots and ideologically motivated mega-donors and falling in line…the real story of politics today—more sorting, less deal-making.
Read the whole thing. The best paragraph is the one that begins “It’s not dead…”
Pointer from Reihan Salam.
The late Murray Edelman, as rendered to me by the late Merle Kling, would describe politics in terms of insiders and outsiders. The “ideologically motivated grass-roots” are outsiders. The lobbyists are insiders. In Edelman’s major work, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, the insiders manipulate the outsiders by engaging in battles that are symbolic, and ultimately phony. Behind that smokescreen, they capture the goodies.
The dichotomy I have in mind is not between centrist deal-making and partisan extremism. The dichotomy is between insiders engaging in successful rent-seeking and outsiders falling for the political theatrics. I wonder if Yglesias would care to comment on the latter dichotomy, and in particular whether he can cite examples that suggest that the insiders are losing their mojo.
This is one of the most incisive posts I have seen recently. The enlighted elites(to which Iglesias belongs) does not want to see this issue as a struggle along the insider outsider axis, and they prefer to see as a along left, right and center axis.
This worldview is particularly appealing to progressives, since they have managed to reframe the discussion on most policy issues still at play so that left-of-center is center (even if only in DC, NYC and the Left Coast). It is also appealing to all in this class because it shields them from having to defend an insider class, of which they are first class citizens.
“I wonder . . . whather [Yglesias] can cite examples that suggest that the insiders are losing their mojo.”
What would such an example even look like through your paradigm, if not Yglesias’ purported new normal in which DC is deadlocked (preventing DC insiders from collecting ever more goodies), because of partisan strife that allocates political poer on a hyper-partisan grassroots level? It can’t just be a lot of incumbents losing power; I anticipate you would simply characterize that as one group of insiders being replaced with another.
I would look at complexity as a primary driver of this.
Democracy works within the limited bandwidth of public attention, but the government is always expanding in complexity. A single farm bill provision can be worth a billion dollars or more. How can the public be asked to dig in on such issues, when there are thousands of them? For most voters, the symbolism is all we have time for.
Maybe in Matt Yglesias’ town, most of the rent-seeking has simply moved further into the shadows. That is, thanks to gridlock and polarization in Congress, as well as to the rise of the 4th branch of government–the alphabet soup of federal agencies making up our administrative state–most of the rent-seeking is now aimed at the agency employees who are in charge of developing and implementing regulations.
For example, the Medicare Modernization Act was signed into law in 2003, but I happen to know CMS was still issuing rules based on its various provisions in 2008 and 2009. Heck, they probably still are. What was going on in that five to six year interregnum? Well, first they had to publish proposed rules for public comment, but what do suppose happened next? Furious lobbying behind the scenes by the various interested parties, I imagine.