I’ve had some ideas, but I am the first to admit they are no well hashed out and my political science knowledge is sorely lacking. However, this is more or less how I thought about the traditional American political system and its nice to have some back-up from Matt.
Historically, the United States has been dominated by an ideology of non-partisanship driven by precisely the suspicion that the interests of a party or faction are not those of the country. And for most of America’s history, when parties were largely non-ideological, this made a ton of sense. A non-ideological party, after all, is basically just an interlocking web of patronage networks and party machines. If a Democrat is in the White House, then Tammany Hall gets to reward its supporters by handing out federal jobs in New York City. The machine couldn’t care less what the president thinks about “the issues” (unless the issue is civil service reform) it just wants a president who recognizes his affiliation with the machine.
This is suggests that side payments or patronage was a key part of making the American political system function. If you look at it through my lense this makes sense. If you can milk the political system for profit it no longer becomes a zero sum game between incumbent participants.
Everyone who is in power has a strong interest in maintaining the existing power structure because it provides profit for them both. That is you are a Democrat and I am a Republican but we are both milking the same cow, so we might as well get along.
When cow milking no longer becomes acceptable then we are pure enemies locked in a zero sum battle. Hence, an inevitable descent into constant warfare.
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Tuesday ~ September 6th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Lord
Cow milking is still acceptable, the problem is there is less milk to go around. It is easy to compromise when everybody is left better off, hard when it means everyone will end up with less. (The areas that are growing are those that mean we are worse off for having to pay more for them.)
Tuesday ~ September 6th, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Benny Lava
Patronage on the federal level didn’t begin until Andrew Jackson and the spoils system. The civil service exam was an attempt to refrom crass patronage.
Tamney Hall is a city level patronage system that enabled Irish immigrants to have access to society. In some ways America’s notions of corruption and patronage are melodramatic. In some countries you have to bribe the garbagemen to collect your trash. The civic institutions in America are surprisingly honest.
The thing to understand about American democracy is that it is a two party system but the two parties are and always were a coalition of competing interests. The Republican party was founded as a coalition of Whigs, free soilers, and know nothings. The interests of the abolitionists didn’t always mesh with the interests of the anti-immigrants. Indeed in the South the party split into two factions; black and tan and Lilly white Republicans. Not much different than the Evangelical Christians, seniors, libertarians, and whatnot competing within the current Republican party. Their ideas don’t always align. The Democrats too, just look at how often Yglesias lines up against labor unions.
Wednesday ~ September 7th, 2011 at 8:55 am
Th
I think the GW Bush administration is a great illustration of your point about milking the same cow and getting along. But the Bushies changed/expanded the mechanism for the transfer of milk from sending money through local officials to sending tax dollars directly to their friends through privatization contracts and narrow tax cuts/loopholes. I think this changes the dynamic by making it harder to shift the flow of funds.
Scratching the back of your supporters will become ever more expensive due to the difficulty of stopping or even slowing the flow to your opponents’ supporters. It will primarily have to take the form of new spending or tax breaks, both areas where Bush excelled. The Homeland Security and DOD contracts are huge and every bill through congress for 6 years had some very narrow tax change tucked into the fine print.