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House members say phone calls are running 9-1 against the financial rescue bill, and that raises a question. If people really oppose the bill in those numbers—and there are signs they don't—shouldn't "representatives" vote that way?
That was the practice in Colonial New England town meetings, writes Michael Schudson in The Good Citizen. Citizens elected representatives at town gatherings, and "there was a tendency for the meetings to control representatives by providing them mandates or instructions to carry out."
The ties between elected official and voter were looser in the middle and Southern colonies, but the notion that representatives should pay any attention at all to citizens was something that distinguished American democracy. In Britain, representation didn't mean that there would be consultation with voters. Accountability came with elections. Between votes, British representatives made up their own minds. In the colonies, however, representation "had begun to imply, as it did not in England, that the representative should not only use his own judgment but also speak for his constituency." Representatives were "expected to possess local knowledge and to identify with the interests of their constituents." They were supposed to "vote the district."
The conflict early in American democracy, Schudson wrote, tugged between "representatives' obligation to their own best judgment of the public good and their responsibility to the interests of the people."
During the debate on the Constitution, there was an attempt to tie the votes of representatives directly to the will of the people living in the district. (Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein tells this story the best in Why Societies Need Dissent.) The question was whether the Bill of Rights should contain a "right to instruct" representatives—a Constitutional guarantee that citizens could tell their elected officials exactly how to vote on particular pieces of legislation. Anti-federalists made this proposal as a way to restrict their representatives, to constrain the power of the federal government. It was also, to be sure, a more direct and complete fulfillment of the democratic promise of the revolution. After all, shouldn't politicians do what voters demand?
The country chose a different course, wisely so, according to Sunstein. Early American communities were isolated and extraordinarily homogenous. That insularity was a disadvantage. Decisions were made with limited information and without hearing different points of views. Moreover, like-minded groups were prone to grow more extreme in their views over time, increasing the chance that decisions made locally might be indefensibly severe.
Connecticut's Roger Sherman made the argument against the right to instruct amendment:
The words (of the right to instruct amendment) are calculated to mislead the people, by conveying an idea that they have a right to control the debates of the Legislature. This cannot be admitted to be just, because it would destroy the object of their meeting. I think, when the people have chosen a representative, it is his duty to meet others from the different parts of the Union, and consult, and agree with them on such acts as are for the general benefit of the whole community. If they were to be guided by instructions, there would be no use in deliberation.
The purpose of pulling people together from around a vast and quite diverse country was that you might actually learn something from a representative with a different point of view. Sunstein told me that one of the most profound insights of those who rejected the "right to instruct" was "to see heterogeneity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively what might be done to solve problems. It turned this vice into a virtue. I think that was the most important theoretical contribution the framers made. And at the best moments in our history, that's what's happened."
It would be a stretch to say this has been one of the country's "best moments." Congressional districts, even states, have grown more homogenous as people have sorted into like-minded communities. The advantages of deliberation Sherman recognized were lost in partisan rigidity long before the financial system needed bailing out.
The benefit of this crisis (and we're really scratching to find one) is that perhaps Congress will rediscover the use of diversity. That's a start. We'll worry about enabling "people not to hate each other" another day.
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When leaders of the House looked around for a consensus to confront what they were convinced was a national emergency, consensus had left the room.
There are plenty of stories about yesterday's tactical failings. But Monday's partisan collapse was also a product of at least three changes that have been taking place quietly for the past 30 years. All were underlying reasons for yesterday's disarray.
Reason No. 1: The Middle Has Gone Missing
Here's a chart compiled from vote tallies in Congress collected by political scientist Keith Poole (and others; here's their site). You can see that a sizable portion of Congress fell into the ideological middle from the end of World War II until sometime in the mid- to late-1970s. Then those who fell into the category of "moderate" began disappearing.
By 2005, only a smidgen of Congress could be described as moderate. By the time of the 110th Congress, Poole writes, "There is no overlap of the two political parties. They are completely separated ideologically."
In Congress, the time from 1948 until the late ‘60s "was the most bi-partisan period in the history of the modern Congress," according to a recent paper. Lots of moderates produced lots of bipartisanship. When House leaders over the weekend went looking for a middle place where they could build a bipartisan bill, there wasn't any middle to be found. There hadn't been a middle of any appreciable size for nearly 20 years.
Reason No. 2: Congressional Districts Have Grown Lopsided
Members of the House increasingly come from districts where one party or the other has an overwhelming advantage. Members of Congress don't have to be moderate because their constituency is overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic.
(Most journalists are convinced that gerrymandering is the prime cause of growing House district partisanship. It isn't. The evidence is pretty thick that districts are growing more lopsided because Americans are choosing to live among like-minded others, not because of legislative monkey business. Check out Alan Abramowitz's paper here. Keiko Ono comes to the same conclusion here. So does Bruce Oppenheimer at Vanderbilt, but there's no immediate link.)
Congressional districts have grown more partisan because of how Americans are moving and settling—because of the big sort. Many Americans now live in like-minded communities so isolated that they have little understanding (or sympathy) for those people and places with different opinions. Americans have become like the people of Babel, wrote congressional scholar Nelson Polsby. We live in the same place, but we speak different tongues. The trouble is, Polsby observed, "to undertake great public works it helps if everyone speaks the same language."
Members don't speak a common language because they represent communities that have been moving apart for the past three decades.
Reason No. 3: They Don't Live Here Anymore
Members of Congress used to live in the District of Columbia. They'd bring their spouses, and their kids would go to local schools. There was life outside the Capitol. Members would get together on weekends. They would meet at school plays, have drinks after work, eat breakfast on the weekends. Republican leader Robert Michel and Democrat Dan Rostenkowski would share a car on the drive back and forth between D.C. and Illinois.
Members don't live in Washington anymore. They fly in on Monday or Tuesday and are back in their districts as soon as the week's business is done. Now "the interaction that occurred over many decades between members, after hours ... and on weekends and with their spouses, simply does not occur anymore," said former Republican House member Vin Weber.
Members don't live in D.C. anymore because they are afraid to, and have been since at least 1990.
Rick Santorum, a young Pennsylvania conservative, ran against a seven-term incumbent that year. Santorum was losing to Doug Walgren until he started running a television commercial about the "strange" house the incumbent owned in Northern Virginia. It was "strange" because it wasn't in his district back in Pittsburgh but in "the wealthiest area of Virginia."
When Santorum unseated Walgren, the social life of Washington, D.C., changed. "Now you don't move your family to Washington," Weber told a conference at Princeton. "Now you live in sort of a dormitory with members of your own party." (After midterm losses in 2006, the homes of former Republican House members went up for sale at 129, 131, 132, 135, and 137 D St. Southeast. Talk about sorting!) The social glue created over coffee while sharing a Sunday newspaper is missing.
Congress works best when members have mixed relationships. If a person is simply an ideological opponent, it's easy to turn him into the enemy. But if your kids are in the same school play, that opponent is also a friend. Legislatures work most smoothly if they are slathered with some social grease.
Among some African peoples, it was against custom to marry within the tribe. Anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote about how these intertribe marriages created "cross-cutting" relationships among people. The marriage rules forced different tribes to interact, to know one another. Those mixed social ties reduced the chance of misunderstanding or war. The saying was, "They are our enemies; we marry them."
The simple need for mixed social relations is lost to Americans, who increasingly live in homogenous communities and attend like-minded churches.
It's apparently lost to Congress, too. We're living with the result.
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Over the past few decades, Congress hasn't done a very good job of solving problems. (Congressional scholar Nelson Polsby once described Congress as being in a 30-year period of stalemate.) Now we expect these guys to rejigger the world's financial system six weeks before a presidential election? Holy smokes!
If we step back, we might be able to see why Congress has been so unproductive over the past 30 years -- and why Americans will undoubtedly be skeptical of whatever solution comes out over the next few days.
We don't trust government. Republicans, Democrats, or Ron-Paulians, none of us trusts government to do what's best, and we haven't for some time now.
In the late 1950s, eight out of 10 Americans said they could trust government to do the right thing most of the time. That level of faith in government remained high through 1964 and provided the foundation for LBJ's Great Society. In 1965, Johnson was able to pass the Voting Rights Act and Medicare (with the support of half the Republicans in the Senate). He created the Appalachian Regional Commission and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. The first class of children enrolled in Head Start.
That's what a president and Congress could do when voters trusted government.
Beginning in the mid-'60s, however, there was a "virtual explosion in anti-government feelings," wrote Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider. (Yep, CNN's Bill Schneider began life as a top-notch academic.) The decline in trust was "among the largest ever recorded in opinion surveys," one scholar wrote, and within a few years only one out of four Americans trusted government to do the right thing. Democrats lost the 1966 midterm elections, the Great Society was kaput, and Congress' dormant period had begun.
The decline in trust in government has been permanent, and it has permanently changed the terms of national debate. Vanderbilt political scientist Marc Hetherington argues that the decline of trust put Democrats at a perpetual disadvantage. Democrats found themselves proposing government solutions to problems that not even Democrats trusted government to carry out.
(Hetherington found the perfect example of the Democrats' dilemma: In 1964, only 41 percent of Americans wanted the federal government to integrate schools. Although sentiment for integrated schools was nearly universal by the early 1990s, support for federal intervention had dropped to 34 percent.)
As trust declined, the reach of government shortened. Americans found it harder to reach a consensus. Johnson and Bill Clinton were two poor boys from the rural South. The first planned the Great Society; 30 years later, the other declared that the "era of big government is over." The difference, Hetherington contends, is that in the early 1960s, people trusted government in its ambitions.
By 1995, most of those answering a Washington Post poll said they opposed more federal spending to help the poor. Some people had an ideological objection. Most didn't. Most people were against more Great Society-type programs because "the federal government (could) not do the job right."
By the 1990s, Americans didn't trust government to do much of anything at all.
Journalists have blamed this "crisis in confidence" on a "crisis in competence." Who could expect a public to trust a government that had brought us Vietnam, Watergate, WMDs, and, now, a multibillion-dollar financial implosion? Government got what it deserved.
The trouble with that argument is that it ignores the scope of the problem. At the same time Americans lost confidence in their government, so did the English. And the Aussies, French, Italians, Japanese, and Germans. The decline in confidence wasn't something special to the United States, a homegrown product of our politicians' failures. It was common to all industrialized countries. The lack of trust is a function of modern prosperity.
So, we've muddled along, putting off problems (health care, immigration, whatever). We've made it through, patching together solutions and spackling over the gaps with Game Boys, wine-tastings, and the wonders of HDTV. Mostly, we've looked for private solutions to public problems.
Now we need government again. We can't do without it. But we've forgotten what it was like to trust government to take on exactly the kind of big job it was created to do.
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