SALON

Republican Party

Wednesday, May 5, 2004 9:33 PM UTC

“Americans have not been energized”

Historian James Chace talks about the presidential campaign of 1912 and how its spirit of progressive reform could energize the 2004 election.

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James Chace’s “1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs — The Election That Changed the Country,” to be published by Simon and Schuster next week, is an account of the election that defined the Progressive era, crystallized the agenda of reform that had been largely thwarted by reactionary forces for decades, and changed the political parties, especially the Republican Party, in such a way that its impact is still felt in the election of 2004.

Chace is best known for his brilliant biography “Acheson,” about Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was the ultimate “wise man” in the foreign policy of the American century. Chace is an incisive and original analyst of international affairs, author of numerous books on the subject and former managing editor of Foreign Affairs. He was also an editor at the New York Times Book Review and editor of World Policy Journal. Chace is currently professor of government and public law and administration at Bard College. In “1912,” he exercises his skill as a historian to bring to life the most important campaign of the early 20th century. Salon spoke to Chace this week on the personalities and underlying currents of that contest and their continuing influence on today’s politics.

There are a number of critical elections in the 20th century — 1932, 1960, 2000 come to mind. What drew you to 1912?

Interestingly enough, what drew me to 1912 was the “what if” of history. I’ve spent my whole life writing articles and books on foreign policy, and yet this election had nothing whatsoever to do with foreign policy. It was almost completely on domestic issues of the Progressive period. But the implications for foreign policy were profound. Had Theodore Roosevelt been nominated by the Republican Party — and he would have been had he not been cheated out of the votes he had gained in the primaries — he would have been president in 1912 and Woodrow Wilson would have lost. This would have meant that Roosevelt would have continued to make the Republican Party a party of reform, which is what he stood for at the time, indeed, almost radical reform. In terms of foreign policy he might very well have brought the United States into the First World War after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, in which case the war might have ended far sooner and certainly with a less drastic peace than the one imposed on Germany. This might well have changed the course of the 20th century.

I gather from your comments that you have a somewhat more charitable view of Roosevelt than historians had once upon a time. By and large it seems that you take a more jaundiced view of Wilson and a more charitable view of Roosevelt. What brought you to that kind of favorable opinion?

I think that Roosevelt was a man who really grew in office. When he was president from 1901 to 1909, he changed in many respects. He came in as president after the assassination of President McKinley, whose vice president he had been. At that time he was what I would call a patrician reformer; that is to say, he’d been police commissioner of New York City, he’d been governor of New York State and he’d always been for certain kinds of reforms because of the greedy behavior of the great trusts and the very bad state that most workers found themselves in. Roosevelt wanted to make things better. He also wanted people to rise above their own sort of sectarian interests.

What do you mean by that?

He saw America as a country that should have both the businessmen and the workers working together in a kind of community and so to rise above the factionalism and to end the terrible treatment that many of the unions received at the hands of the capitalists of that period. Nonetheless, he was not someone at that time who understood the importance of such issues as women’s suffrage. But he grew in office to the extent that he dropped to a certain degree his imperialist longings. He regretted that America had taken the Philippine Islands. In his foreign policy as president he became a mediator in some very important disputes in the world. For example, he received a Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation in 1907 of the Russo-Japanese war. Later he also acted as mediator in the so-called Tangier crisis, when France and Germany might have come to blows over Morocco. He wanted the United States, above all, to play the role of a great power in the world, to make America’s growing economic strength give America a military and naval power and a diplomatic role to play.

He grew in other respects, too. By 1912 he had embraced women’s suffrage; he called for broad health insurance for everybody; he spoke out very strongly to get rid of child labor, to get decent working conditions. His views toward black Americans became more pronounced. He realized they must be allowed to vote, and he wanted to use the authority of the federal government to make sure that they were able to vote. So, in many ways, he grew as a man. The boisterous, brash Roosevelt, who was a fiery imperialist, and the man who was for reform, but very modest reform, became radicalized through those years.

Well, we know that Roosevelt was capable of the kind of cynical maneuvers that politicians use. Let’s reconsider the notion of getting votes for the blacks. In the South those blacks who were able to vote generally voted Republican. So his aim in this was to make sure more of them could vote. But this meant continuing to cede the white South to the Democrats.

It was definitely a problem in 1912. The South was very much a Democratic stronghold. Blacks did traditionally vote for Republicans, the heritage of Lincoln. What Roosevelt wanted to do was retain the black vote, which would normally go to Republicans, but also get whites, who had traditionally voted for Democrats, to vote for radical Republicanism. And that he was not able to accomplish. For one thing, the Southern whites never forgave Roosevelt for having had a very distinguished black American for dinner in the White House shortly after he became president. Booker T. Washington dined in the White House, and the Southerners never let him forget that.

Of course, your book actually focuses not just on personalities but on the election of 1912, and I suspect that after spending a long time studying that election there are certain features that must have struck you. Would you like to share with us some of the more, shall we say, amusing or interesting facets of the election?

There were, of course, four people running. It is very important to understand that this book is not just about Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson — the two most prominent men — but also William Howard Taft, who was president after Roosevelt’s first two terms; in fact, he was put in as president because Roosevelt really wanted him to carry on with Roosevelt’s work. Then there was Eugene V. Debs. Debs ran a number of times for president as a candidate of the Socialist Party. In 1912 he received the greatest percentage of votes that the Socialist Party ever had in this county, almost a million votes. That was almost solely due to the power and personality of Debs. And finally, of course, there’s Wilson, who won because Roosevelt and Taft split the vote of the Republican Party.

Let me say a few more words if I may about the other men. William Howard Taft came from a very distinguished family in Ohio, and became a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s when he served as Roosevelt’s secretary of war and as governor-general of the Philippines. He was a very decent man. His politics were moderately conservative Republicanism; he was not against reform, but he was not a person who wanted to rock the boat too much, whereas Roosevelt was only too willing to rock the boat. Basically, Taft was a perfect lieutenant. When Roosevelt announced in 1904 that he would not run for a third term, he tried to find someone who he believed would carry on the policies of reform he had started, and Taft seemed to him finally the logical man to do that.

Taft himself never wanted to be president. He had always hoped to someday be on the Supreme Court, but his wife was an ambitious woman and she very much wanted her husband to become the president of the United States. Twice Taft turned down offers by Roosevelt for nomination to the Supreme Court and finally agreed to run for president. What happened was that Taft was not able to manage things the way Roosevelt was. Roosevelt was able to handle the archconservatives, which Taft was unable to do. Roosevelt found that the policies he urged were not being carried out the way he had hoped for.

So there was a deep split between them that got increasingly bitter. I might also add that Roosevelt liked power. He was only 50 years old when he left the presidency, the youngest man ever to serve, and he missed the power that he had had as the president of the United States. That definitely added to the bitterness he felt at betrayal by Taft.

Woodrow Wilson was a conservative Southern Democrat. He had been president of Princeton University and was picked by the political bosses of New Jersey as the perfect person to run for governor of the state. They thought he was reliable, he was reasonably conservative, but he was honest and moderately reformist. Wilson therefore was elected governor, but then turned on the bosses and put through a highly reformist program in New Jersey. He became increasingly one of the most likely candidates for the nomination by the Democratic Party in 1912 because, as I say, he adopted many of the reforms, some of which had been Roosevelt’s reforms, although not as radical as Roosevelt’s. And after an incredibly tense convention that went to 46 ballots in Baltimore, where at one point he tried to withdraw his name, thinking he would not get the nomination, he finally secured it through the machinations of Democratic war horse William Jennings Bryan, who had been the Democratic nominee three times before.

Roosevelt now sought the Republican nomination in 1912. It was the first time the primary system became really important, and he won a number of the primaries with enough delegates behind him to secure the nomination. But at the Republican Convention in Chicago the party regulars managed to disqualify something like 80 delegates — voting delegates for Roosevelt — and hand the nomination to Taft.

Roosevelt then helped to form a new party, the Progressive Party, known in history as the Bull Moose Party. This was a party made up of middle-class reformers, schoolteachers, well-meaning intellectuals, some populists, a lot of people supporting women’s suffrage like Jane Addams, and municipal reformers, particularly those who were fed up with the bossism that reigned in the great cities of the United States. Roosevelt became their standard-bearer. In his opening speech he declaimed, “We stand at Armageddon to do battle for the Lord.” Roosevelt was invigorated in this campaign, and it was a very, very lively and strong campaign that he ran.

The fourth man was Eugene Debs, an extraordinary figure in history — American labor history, certainly. He grew up in Terre Haute, Ind.; he worked on a railroad as a fireman, but was a decently well-educated man, read French and German. Eventually he joined the Socialist Party, but the greatness of Debs lay in the fact that he never lost sight of the goal of what was called industrial unionism. The only powerful organization when Debs came around was the American Federation of Labor, but that was a craft union. You had to be a skilled worker with a skilled craft to be in that union. The ordinary, unskilled worker was excluded from the union. Debs saw that what was needed was a broad-based unionism, a unionism where the skilled craftsman would join with the unskilled laborer in one great strong union. Throughout all of that period he himself was the dominant national figure of the Socialist Party and of organized labor.

It seems clear that 1912 as an election with major issues and colorful candidates would tell us something about the quality of electioneering. Could you just talk about some of the election strategies and the quality of public presentations that the candidates made?

This was the period before television and radio, so what you had in this period were orators. You would speak for an hour — two hours was not at all unusual. People came out in droves to see the candidates, but they expected to be entertained. It was also really the beginning of whistle-stopping campaigns, where you get on a railroad and just go from town to town with the candidate speaking from the rear platform of the train. The two most gifted orators were Debs and Roosevelt.

One of the most noteworthy things that happened in that campaign occurred in the late stages in October, when Roosevelt was campaigning in the Middle West. He came out of his hotel and went to get in his car and a man tried to assassinate him. A man picked up a pistol and shot at him, and Roosevelt’s life was saved only because he had a 50-page speech in the pocket of his coat. He was bleeding and the bullet went through the speech into his chest. Nonetheless, he insisted on going on to make his speech, against the advice of the doctors. No one could stop Roosevelt: He got up and walked onto the platform in front of about 5,000 to 10,000 people, opened his coat where he was still bleeding and said, “It takes more then a bullet to kill a Bull Moose.” And he spoke for another 45 minutes with a bullet in his chest. It was one of the most extraordinary performances in American electoral history. He then went to a hospital, where he spent the next couple of weeks. All the other candidates stopped campaigning until he was able to recover.

One reason that 1912 was so important was that it was the beginning of the idea of the direct primary system. States — not all of them, but many states — were beginning to have primaries, so the parties couldn’t simply be left solely in the hands of the political bosses, although they nonetheless remained powerful. So you had to really get to the people in a way you might not have had to in an earlier period. You had to get out, get to the people and get them to vote for you.

I’m a little bit surprised. Maybe it was just an oversight, but you mentioned Debs and Roosevelt as orators. I would have thought that Wilson was a better speechmaker. Maybe Roosevelt was a better stump speaker?

The point about Wilson is that he was extremely eloquent in his speeches. He wasn’t, however, a stemwinder kind of speaker. In other words, if you read the speeches, or if you listened carefully to them, there was no question he was extremely eloquent. Wilson’s father was a preacher. As a boy Wilson would sometimes spend time in front of a mirror practicing speaking well. But Debs and Roosevelt would whip up the crowd. Taft, by the way, made almost no speeches whatsoever during the campaign. He used the organization of the Republican Party to get the nomination. But that he ran at all was because he was so angry at Roosevelt for the things that Roosevelt had said about him and their then broken friendship.

Perhaps you could say a little something about the legacies of the election. What happened because of the election? What would you highlight as significant changes either in public policy, or in the parties, or in the strategies of campaigning?

Between them Roosevelt and Wilson really invented the modern presidency. By this I mean the strong use of executive power to get their programs through. From roughly right after the Civil War to the McKinley presidency, the presidency as a whole was really a weak presidency. The presidents themselves believed that Congress should play a dominant role, and it certainly did so. But when Roosevelt came in, he had to find ways in which he could assert executive power legally. And he found various loopholes, and executive orders, where he could do certain things. Most of the lands that he saved from destruction by loggers or others were done by executive orders, rather then votes by Congress. So this was a strong assertion of executive power — and that has been the dominant role of presidencies in the United States in the 20th and 21st century. Wilson himself also used executive power strongly when he became president.

The other thing is that because the spirit of reform was so strong in the Progressive period, Wilson adopted many of Roosevelt’s radical ideas. The result was that the first two years of Wilson’s first term resulted in a great deal of very important legislation: the income tax, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, better hours for workers. He pursued a number of policies that probably never would have passed had they not been prepared for by the strength of progressivism that Roosevelt and Debs espoused.

The other reason why this election changed the country was the split in the Republican Party. Of course, there had always been people who were more liberal or more conservative in the Republican Party, as there are in all parties. The difference in 1912 was that the split between Taft and Roosevelt polarized the party very, very deeply. And that split has never really been healed. With the coming of Ronald Reagan to the White House, and now of course with George W. Bush, it seems that the conservative wing is now in control of the party.

As for the inheritor of the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, it was, of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal in 1933 picked up the programs that Theodore Roosevelt espoused — the use of strong executive power to curb corporate excesses and promote social justice. Theodore Roosevelt used to say he wanted to use “Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends.” What he meant was that Alexander Hamilton believed in strong use of executive power, and that it should be used to make a stronger democracy throughout the country. That was certainly what Franklin Roosevelt felt. And Franklin Roosevelt had served with Wilson as his assistant secretary of the Navy and had married the niece of Theodore Roosevelt, so he had learned from both men. Wilson, however, was a kind of warning to him because Wilson had been unable to get the League of Nations approved, largely because he had refused to compromise with some of the reservations that the Senate wanted to put on the Treaty of Versailles, which were not all that serious. There was a deep stubborn streak in Wilson, which was finally very self-defeating.

Any last thoughts you have about this election and its import for those of us in this election year who turn to “1912″ in hope that there is a lesson for us?

I think the most important lesson is the need for reform. The masses of Americans today have not been energized toward the kind of reformers that they had in 1912. You need dynamic candidates to articulate the issues, to stir up the people — just as these men at the beginning of the 20th century were trying to deal with the inequities of industrial capitalism and, in Roosevelt’s case, to regulate the thing. In Wilson’s case he wanted to break the trusts so there would be more competition. We now are facing monopolies and a need for universal healthcare and better education — progressive policies — a century later. Masses of people were mobilized and energized in 1912 to create an America committed to social justice and economic opportunity for everybody.

Mark Lytle is a history professor at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. More Mark Lytle.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 2:48 PM UTC

GOP to modernity: Stop

For House Republicans, the less we know about our country and our planet, the better

By House of Representatives Republican leadership (Credit: AP)

Watching the antics of the House GOP, you get the very strong sense that if the class of Republicans elected in 2010 were offered a chance to repeal the Enlightenment, they would leap at the opportunity. The great flowering of science and philosophy that reached critical mass in the 17th century employed human reason to batter away at the dogmas of blind faith. But as far as the Tea Party seems to be concerned, that was just one big wrong turn.

The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can’t handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that’s part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on “demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics.” In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 — the current version is the fourth major iteration.

Most sensible people consider the ACS to be extremely useful, the kind of thing that government is really well equipped to carry out. That is not, or at least did not used to be, a partisan statement. Both private and public sector policymakers use ACS data to make important decisions. The federal government allocates $450 billion annually according, in part, to information derived from the ACS. Businesses also consider the ACS vital, which explains why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, rarely a fan of government spending, is opposed to the House action.

Even conservative economists are leery: The clearest evidence that the House GOP has gone completely beyond the pale can be seen in a Businessweek article reporting that representatives of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute all declared their support for government data gathering. If you don’t understand what’s going on in the U.S. economy on a granular level, you’re flying blind. This should not be a controversial statement.

Even the Wall Street Journal is appalled — although the lead sentence of its editorial criticizing the funding cuts required some remarkable calisthenics before reaching the point of disapproval.

With the contempt of the Washington establishment raining down on House Republicans for voting on principle, every now and then the GOP does something that feeds the otherwise false narrative of political extremism.

Marvelous! In one sentence, the Journal’s editorial writer manages to deny, not once, but twice, the self-evident fact that the current crop of House Republicans occupies the nethermost regions of right-wing extremism, while at the same time admitting that, yeah, well, in this one case they are indeed bonkers.

There’s been no end of media chatter focusing on the importance of the data gathered by the ACS. We’ve also heard how the Constitution specifically enjoins Congress to gather demographic information “in such a manner as they shall by law direct.” And, in fact, the current form of the ACS follows the mandate set forth by a Republican Congress in 2005.

The sponsor of the House measure, the freshman Florida Republican Daniel Webster, claims that ACS questions are too “intrusive” and “the very picture of what’s wrong in D.C.” He seems to be projecting. The very picture of what’s wrong with D.C. is exquisitely captured by daily demonstration that one of our leading political parties is dedicated to the proposition that the less we know about what is going on in our economy or on our planet, the better. If science tells us that one of the consequences of human activity is an overheated planet, then the answer is to defund climate research. If data gathered by the ACS gives us a better understanding of where poverty may be growing as a result of economic policies put into place over the past few decades, best to just to close our eyes and ignore it.

Which brings us back to the 17th century. It’s no stretch to argue that both representative democracy and the Industrial Revolution flourished in large part through the application of Enlightenment principles. The founders of the United States were very much a product of Enlightenment ideals. Looking for an Enlightenment avatar? Think Ben Franklin. Progress is built on the accumulation of knowledge, and ideological rigidity shouldn’t be able to compete against the truth that derives from a better understanding of our universe. And yet that’s where we are today — watching as one of the two major political parties in our country becomes not just more and more distrustful of science, but also opposed to the very notion of information-gathering — and governs accordingly.

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Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

Friday, May 18, 2012 7:27 PM UTC

Mitt’s favorite new dodge

Romney and the GOP insist the economy is more important than social issues. Why can't we address both?

By Mitt Romney (Credit: AP/Carlos Osorio)

One of the most overused metaphors in a writer’s arsenal is the one about “walking and chewing gum at the same time.” As a hiker and Big League Chew enthusiast, I particularly hate this cliché. Nonetheless, I feel it is fitting right now because it so perfectly summarizes the argument being made by Republicans. They now insist that America cannot simultaneously walk the walk on equal rights and also chew economic gum.

In the last week, Colorado was the testing ground for this talking point. At the presidential level, Republican nominee Mitt Romney criticized a Denver television reporter for daring to ask about his position on, among other issues, same-sex marriage. Before restating his opposition, he scoffed at the question, asking: “Aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about [like] the economy? The growth of jobs? The need to put people back to work?”

At the same time, Colorado’s Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”

Obviously, it’s perplexing to see the Republican Party allege that social issues are insignificant and “divisive.” This is, after all, the party whose most recent presidential nominating contest was dominated by attacks on contraception — the same GOP whose politicians have made an art out of riding a “guns, god and gays”-focused agenda to electoral victory.

But while such naked hypocrisy is enraging, the substance of the Republican rhetoric about gay rights is downright offensive. Essentially, conservatives are asserting that we cannot extend equal rights to all Americans and fix the economy. In the process, they are deliberately insinuating that the twin goals are somehow contradictory.

Well, you might ask, do they have a point? History says no. Our country’s story is the story of multitasking — a tale of extending the franchise to women while passing progressive legislation to deal with crushing economic inequality, a tale of both passing civil rights legislation and creating Medicare.

In light of such achievements, would anyone retroactively argue that America should have opposed the campaign to let women vote because the economy was so bad in the early 20th century? Would anyone insist that lawmakers should have halted civil rights legislation in the 1960s because there was a simultaneous need for a War on Poverty? Probably not, because most of us recognize such arguments for what they are: diversionary non sequiturs whose real goal is to preserve institutional bigotry and prejudice.

That’s the same objective of today’s GOP when it comes to rights for same-sex couples. For proof, just consider the abruptness of the shift: the Republican Party that spent the last decade insisting that we should simultaneously cut taxes, prosecute foreign wars and fight to limit a woman’s right to choose an abortion now suddenly says we can’t even discuss equal rights because of a recession.

The language changed not because the new “can’t walk and chew gum” mantra makes sense (seriously — would any sane person really claim that a bad economy justifies continued persecution of lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people?). It changed because the cause of equal rights is involved. And, clearly, that cause is what today’s Republicans are now most committed to stopping — no matter how much their flawed logic indicts their credibility.

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David Sirota

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 5:36 PM UTC

Jon Huntsman for New York City mayor?

Yes, please. It would be very funny to see him lose

By

Yes, Jon Huntsman should definitely run for mayor of New York, because I never tire of watching Jon Huntsman get rejected by voters. The best part of a Jon Huntsman campaign is when his well-heeled supporters very sincerely and tragically argue that the fact that no one wants to vote for Jon Huntsman is a sign that the Republic itself is in peril. They would get so sad and melodramatic when he got 10 percent of the vote.

Now, there is no evidence that Jon Huntsman is planning for run for mayor of New York City, but one of his annoying daughters tossed this one out there last night:

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 4:50 PM UTC

Ron Paul sets up Rand for 2016

The cult libertarian hero keeps his campaign alive, barely, as he prepares to hand the reins to his son

By Ron Paul and Rand Paul (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)

So Ron Paul says he is going to stop actively campaigning, but his supporters will continue to rack up delegates by storming state conventions. What will he do with these delegates? That is still unclear. (Barter them for gold?) What is the point of this strategy, exactly? Also unclear, but the Daily Beast’s Ben Jacobs today says it’s part of a “sneaky maneuver” to help his son Rand out. Ron will continue to consolidate power but will not appear to be actively sabotaging the party’s nominee. Dave Weigel says the maneuver is less sneaky and barely a maneuver: He doesn’t want it to be a huge embarrassment when he loses Kentucky, the state his son represents in the Senate.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, Paul declined to endorse Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who endorsed Paul in 2008. Johnson was, formerly, the Republican presidential candidate all those young “liberal” college stoner Ron Paul supporters should have gone with if they’d wanted to support a candidate who believed strongly in liberty but who wasn’t a racist Alex Jonesian conspiracy-mongering goldbug loon. But Johnson had “extensive executive experience” instead of a blimp and a sweet logo, so he did not win over many Paul fanatics.

Ron Paul’s strategy seems to be a gradual takeover of the Republican Party itself, instead of attempting to build a Libertarian alternative to the GOP. I think he’ll find that he can get the party to happily sign on, at least rhetorically, to his fiscal message, as they continue to ignore his popular and populist isolationism and his eminently agreeable but politically untenable positions on criminal justice and civil liberties, forever. The party, in other words, will continue to co-opt whatever they find electorally useful about the Paul phenomenon, as the Tea Party movement stole his iconography and messaging wholesale while attaching it to the same religious-right/nativist sentiment that has driven the party’s activist base for decades.

But Paul thinks the future lies with his son Rand, who shares many of his father’s enthusiasms and beliefs while also appearing to be more acceptable to the mainstream. Various Paul allies and a few other Republicans strongly suggest that Rand is gearing up for a 2016 run; which would mean, of course, that they expect Romney to lose, but that they need to not appear to be rooting for Romney to lose.

The problem is that what makes Rand Paul more acceptable to the mainstream of the Republican Party is what makes him more repellent than his father. Take, for example, Rand Paul’s funny joke this last weekend about Barack Obama and gay marriage.

The president recently weighed in on marriage. And, you know, he said his views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical but I wasn’t sure that his views on marriage could get any gayer. Now it did kind of bother me, though, that he used the justification for it in a biblical reference. He said the biblical Golden Rule caused him to be for gay marriage …

And I’m like: What version of the Bible is he reading? It’s not the King James version. It’s not the New American Standard. It’s not the New Revised version. I don’t know what version he is getting it from.

Haha Barack Obama is so gay, he should read a Bible for once. Libertarianism!

Nick Gillespie, of the libertarian Reason Magazine, does not get this joke. The crowd, at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, did seem to get it, or at least they appreciated it. But Rand sounds very different when he speaks to Iowa conservatives than he does when interviewed by Gillespie and Matt Welch. (His address received a nice notice from Robert Costa of the National Review, who did not mention his funny joke.)

While Rand Paul may be, as Gillespie says, the most libertarian senator, he is also not an actual libertarian, as demonstrated by his support for anti-constitutional anti-immigrant legislation and his very vocal antiabortion position. He is also a dumb lout, and I tend to think that having the Senate’s most libertarian member be a dumb lout is not actually that good for the Libertarian movement. When he makes explicitly libertarian arguments, he makes them dumbly. When he goes all anti-gay talk-radio bigot culture warrior, which he does increasingly frequently, he does so dumbly. (If he wants to be a mainstream politician and presidential contender, it was certainly dumb to appear — more than once — on the radio program of Truther/Birther/New World Orderer/every-other-conspiracy promoter Alex Jones, but for some reason he almost entirely escaped mainstream press scrutiny for these appearances.) While I don’t feel much affection for Ron Paul, he seems both significantly smarter and leagues more principled than his son the senator.

If the “electable” face of libertarianism is a fratty anti-gay, anti-choice nitwit like Rand Paul, I will stick with socialism, thank you. And I wonder if the Paul family’s plan is to promote “liberty” or to promote the Paul family.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Sunday, May 6, 2012 9:00 PM UTC

Partisan death jam

The two parties aren't just making progress impossible, they're destroying our political system. An expert explains

By (Credit: iStockphoto/duncan1890)

If you thought the debates over the debt ceiling last year – one of the most striking examples of political dysfunction and gridlock in recent memory — were over, think again. Although Republicans agreed to a small raise and to put off discussion of the issue until after the upcoming 2012 elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox, “We’ll be doing it all over” in 2013. Clearly, the partisan rupture that’s dividing Washington is not going to heal any time soon, but how did things get so dire to begin with?

When congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein say “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” – the title of their book – they’re being serious (subtitle: “How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism”). Mann, the W. Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, began the Congress Project in the midst of the 1978 midterm campaign to track the institution as it evolved. What they’ve found since hasn’t been encouraging.

In their book, Mann and Ornstein trace political dysfunction to the present, illuminating the basic incompatibility they see between the U.S. constitutional system and two highly partisan, parliamentary-like parties. Mann and Ornstein argue that the adversarial, winner-take-all climate we find ourselves in today makes it extremely hard for a majority to act in our two-party governing system. Though both parties engage in corruption, they believe the current Republican Party – which they argue is unpersuaded by fact and science, and has little in common with Reagan’s GOP – tilts the political system into “asymmetric polarization” with its refusal to support anything that might help Democrats, no matter the cost to collective interest.

Meanwhile, changes in mass media, a populist distrust of non-military leaders deemed suspiciously “elite,” and the insidious connection between money and politics join to create the terrible recipe for a truly dysfunctional political system. At a time when we’re facing serious national and global problems, they write, “The country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively.” But there’s hope. Mann and Ornstein dedicate the second half of the book to outlining what specific institutional restructuring won’t work and what will, as well as what the public and media can do to be part of positive change.

Salon spoke with Thomas E. Mann about how the media plays into the partisan warfare, the role of the Citizens United decision in the upcoming election, and what we can do to make American politics less dysfunctional.

I’m wondering how you chose the book’s title.

It is a rather unusual title, isn’t it? We were thinking through titles and somehow we got in our minds Mark Twain’s quip about Wagner’s music, which is “It’s better than it sounds.” And so we were thinking relative to how our dysfunctional political system looks and we said, “Well, we’ve gotta say it’s worse than it looks, but that would make no sense to people who think it looks horrible already.” So we put the “even” in it – “It’s even worse than it looks.”

We are two long-time students of American politics and Congress. We’ve really become exceedingly discouraged about developments in our politics and in thought. And we’ve become frustrated by what we think is a commentary about it that ends up not being especially accurate and, frankly, reinforces the destructive dynamics of the system by leading the public to think it’s all hopeless: They’re all the same, it’s a corrupt system, it’s an utterly incompetent system, and therefore removing, in many respects, any basis on which a public could actually change that system. Instead you get a kind of visceral reaction: “Throw the bums out!” And that usually has the effect of reinforcing whatever you have now or making it worse.

How is partisan confrontation more serious today than it has been since you began studying American politics? 

It’s the worst we’ve seen in our 40 years of observing up-close Congress and the presidency and the American political system more broadly. We’ve gone through very difficult periods in our politics: polarized times in the post-Reconstruction period; turn of the 2oth century; we’ve, of course, just had exceptionally traumatic times before the Civil War; and difficulties in the early 1800s as well. So we make no claim that this is the worst ever, but if we’re comparing ourselves now to the pre-Civil War period, that’s not such good news, is it? What we can say is that the parties are more polarized than they have been in over a century. We can say that the Republican Party is more conservative than it’s been in over a century. We can get that evidence from looking at behavior within the Congress and patterns of voting, but we can also see how, in many respects, that public aligns with those polarized parties.

Some people make an argument, which we believe is more myth than reality, that the public is overwhelmingly moderate, centrist, pragmatic, independent, and it’s only the elite, the partisan elite, that engage in their own wars and cause the problems – that they don’t properly represent the sentiments of voters. We think that’s wrong, that the public – at least, the public active enough to vote – and in those who do more than voting particularly, are very much a piece of this now. We’ve kind of sorted ourselves into two warring parties. We’ve done it by a choice of neighborhoods in which to reside, on the base of our own ideological dispositions. A whole host of factors have led us into areas of people with like-minded values and beliefs and preferences, and that actually encourages the developments in Washington and, frankly, in state legislatures around the country that many people bemoan. So that’s part of it, why we think it’s exceptionally bad now.

Another part is that we’re facing the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, and yet our political system is set up in a way in which it’s very hard for an opposition party to be open to participating in any solutions to that because that would legitimize the party in power, which would keep them from getting there. And so they are engaged now in an ever more permanent campaign to obstruct, defeat, discredit, repeal anything that is done by – usually defined as – the president’s party. And we’ve now seen a willingness to engage in hostage-taking and a game of dangerous threats,  which lead to the downgrading of American currency.

You explicitly dispel the media myth that both sides are equally guilty of partisan misbehavior. What’s different about the current Republican Party?

It’s a very important piece of the argument that we’re making. I’ve already indicated to you that in ideological terms, as best as we can measure, the Republican Party is the most conservative it’s been in over a century. But I think just as importantly, it’s become a party that believes it’s essential to stick to your principles and not engage in any kind of collaboration with – negotiating or compromise with – the enemy, which is defined as the other party. That’s unusual. And then you put that together with simply no respect for facts, for evidence, for science, and add to that the willingness to simply reject the legitimacy of the other side. It’s as if we were replaying the election of 1800 and the party that eventually won wouldn’t take office because they were deemed illegitimate or vice versa. The peaceful transfer of power, the respect for the office of the presidency, the willingness to say, “We have our differences, it’s important to discuss those but in the end we’re all Americans,” and so on, that’s rejected by a whole lot of Republicans right now.

Our politics and governing system just doesn’t work very well when one of our parties has strayed – in both policy and process terms – far from the mainstream, because we have a system of separated powers, we have numerous veto points, and it really does require willingness at some point to work across the aisle. If we had a parliamentary system of government, then these parliamentary-like parties would be OK, because you would, through an election, create a majority and that majority (the government) could put its program into place and then be judged accordingly for five years later. But we don’t have that. We have a system in which a minority can frustrate the efforts of the majority, not to simply get a better negotiating position, which is the way in the past it has worked, but to literally stop the new president’s or new majority’s program dead in the water. And that together is what created our dysfunctional politics.

And how does the media contribute to all of this?

I think the “mainstream media,” that is the non-partisan or ideological press, is utterly helpless in the face of the reality that we have right now. That is, the strong journalistic norms of fairness, of balance, of getting the full story, which tends to be interpreted as both sides out, has in effect created a distorted view of what’s happening in the world, and the irony is many individual members of the press know it. So I guess the biggest problem with the press and, again, by that I’m talking about the sort of press that aspires to practice good journalism, and not simply to be a partisan or ideological participant in the political wars, that they have basically assumed that getting both sides, letting the warring parties and individuals speak, is the best way to cover the story and also provide a little safety from charges of political bias. And in so doing, they’ve actually helped to perpetuate the very problems that we have. And I say that as a friend and admirer and regular reader of many, many, many members of that press.

How do you think Obama’s election affected the dysfunctional atmosphere back in 2008?

Let me say, it’s worth looking back to the Clinton presidency, especially the first couple of years and last couple of years. Because he ran on a tax cut, but then was persuaded that he had to do something to deal with deficits and he spent most of his first year trying to do it. He never got a single Republican vote in the House or Senate for this. And he was attacked, subject to dozens of corruption investigations, most of which ended up being bogus, and in the end he was impeached! In 1998, by a Republican House that had just been dealt a setback in the election because of its talk about impeachment. So this has been in the works for some time. But I think Obama has intensified and accelerated it. Certainly his race is a consideration. But so too was the threat of a Democratic president mobilizing constituencies that are growing and potentially putting the Democratic Party in a dominant position. So all of that conspired to convince the Republicans in Congress, who’d just taken a shellacking, to develop a strategy – which is now well-documented – before Obama was inaugurated, to sit together to oppose everything.

In part two of the book, you outline many major institutional changes that you think definitely will, or definitely won’t, work. Can you speak to some of the solutions you do support? 

As you say, we devote one chapter to saying what not to do. We try to pare down some horrible ideas that get great credence in the public discussion. We say we need to change our electoral system in ways to increase public participation because that would have diminished some of the intense ideological views expressed by the public as a whole. We need to change the institutional arrangements so that the routinization of the filibuster can be destroyed – it is a modern phenomenon and we have some ideas about that. But in the end, we say it’s the electorate that has to rein in the insurgent outlier, and that’s very problematic just because of the confusion of what would make for a better, more workable system. And so, the odds are, depending on what happens with the economy, that Obama will win. But Republicans could easily hold the House and take the Senate. And therefore, Republicans might be encouraged to basically have the same strategy of opposition as they have now. We argue in the book that it’s the public that produces divided government, but in times of highly polarized parties, that’s a formula for gridlock, inaction and government dysfunction.

And the individual citizens of a democracy must have a role in this change as well.

What the public could do is what democratic theory tells us they would do, which is that if one party goes too far from the mainstream of public thinking, public preferences, accepted democratic processes, they’ll be reined in by the electorate. So an overwhelming across-the-board Democratic vote would probably so shake the Republican Party that those who have been distressed within the party by recent developments would have an opportunity to come forward as a new kind of leadership with alternative programs and platforms. But that seems very unlikely to happen, so what we’re probably going to have is Obama figuring out a way to use the expiration of all of the tax cuts in the beginning of the sequestration of defense and other things as a way to force a compromise with the Republicans because, in this case, the status quo is unacceptable to them.

It’s going to be a tricky bit of maneuvering but I think that the thrust of our argument is all these so-called bipartisan or nonpartisan efforts to sort of bring the parties together and find a bipartisan solution: It’s a pipe dream. It’s ridiculous. It can’t happen. So we’re going to have to figure out, voters and politicians, how to operate in a hyper-partisan system, and hopefully get leverage at times to force action that is actually responsive to the country’s problems.

Looking ahead to the coming election, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, what sort of alternative to corrupt campaign funding do you see?

We argue that efforts on the left for full public financing of elections right now is simply impossible given the interpretations the Supreme Court has made about the First Amendment as applied to money and politics. Such systems have to be voluntary; they get overwhelmed by the independent spending group like, in its latest manifestation, the super PACs, and it’s sort of a pipe dream. There are individuals out there writing books, making the case that money is the root of all evil and if we just get it out of the system our politics will return to a healthy equilibrium. We think there are a lot of problems with money in politics, and we need to deal with them, but the problems go well beyond that. Given the composition of the court, there are only incremental things one can do: increasing transparency, trying to generate more small donations, and looking for ways to improve the process that way. The others are as much pipe dreams as those on the right calling for a balanced budget amendment.

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Lucy McKeon is an editorial fellow at Salon. More Lucy McKeon.

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