In Tom Tomorrow's war between Tepid Moderates and Right-Wing Nutjobs, do we even have to ask who'll win?

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

"The only way to ensure compromise when parties are polarized as they are is to make the failure to compromise politically costly to individual members of the minority party."

-- Jack Balkin, in the Balkinization blogpost
"Parliamentary Parties in a Presidential System"

by Ken

As of this morning, at least, the much-bruited -- in Village circles, at least -- "compromise" between the administration and congressional Republicans on extension of all the Bush tax cuts had fallen apart. But as Howie has been suggesting, given the administration's track record in these matters, it seems just a matter of time before the administration capitulates totally, or maybe more than totally, giving the R's more that they're demanding, in the name of "compromise."

Of course, in return for all this "compromise" the administration will in return get . . . well, nothing. You have to laugh, or maybe cry, at the GOP's dire threat to allow virtually nothing to pass Congress while the matter of the imminent expiration of the Bush tax cuts is dealt with, meaning of course dealt with the way they want it dealt with. Not that I doubt the Rs' sincerity. I'm prepared to believe that they'll make good this threat. What's left unsaid, though, is what happens after the capitulation. Exactly what legislation do you suppose the Party of Nonono is considering allowing to pass?

Of course, the question remains to what extent the Administration is uncomfortable about the policy result. I specify policy result to distinguish it from the political result, which you'd like to think the folks in the White House can't be happy with. The usual justification for icky policy choices is that they're necessary to achieve desirable political goals. This administration has the distinction of having produced basically right-wing results in a wide range of policy areas while while getting the political crap beaten out of it. Well done, Master Rahm!

Howie has been pointing out, this is a crucial calculation in figuring out why so many of the Obama administration's policies -- once we separate out what appear to be actual policies from stuff that just happens -- turn out to be wholly consistent with what one might expect from a right-of-center Republican administration. (You could certainly make a good case that the Nixon administration was a lot closer to the actual center, at least on domestic issues.) The evidence has become pretty overwhelming that these policy outcomes are what the president actually believes in. Like the so-called health care "reform" package that so studiously preserves the prerogatives and profits of the insurance and drug industries. Oh sure, during the campaign he said a lot of stuff that could have been interpreted to mean that he was really offering us hope and change. But that was, you know, during a political campaign. During a political campaign people say stuff.

A "PARLIAMENTARY" PARTY IN OUR PRESIDENTIAL SYSTEM?

By now this is all old ground for DWT readers. Goodness knows, Howie and I have both railed endlessly about it. Tonight I want to throw in a case offered by Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale, where he also directs the Information Society Project. My attention was just today directed -- via a lovely post by Digby -- to the piece from which I quoted at the top, on the "Balkinization" blog, so I'm just now directing your attention to it.

Balkin's suggestion is that the American government has fallen victim to a disconnect between our "presidential" system of government and the realignment of our political parties into something closer to a European "parliamentary" system.

Parliamentary parties can work well in parliamentary systems with proportional representation; majority coalitions are formed by bargaining between parties to form new governments. In parliamentary systems ideological coherence and relatively tight control over individual members may actually help coalition parties make credible bargains to form successful governments.

But parliamentary parties are not well designed for the particular forms of give and take that are generally required in a presidential system. In a presidential system, members of different parties are expected to regularly cross party lines to form coalitions on particular questions (rather than on the formation of a government as a whole). Ideologically coherent and politically polarized parties do not perform these functions particularly well. Indeed, the most recent example of the rise of parliamentary parties in the United States is the party system shortly before the Civil War, in which political compromise increasingly became impossible.

In Balkin's terms, it seems clear that the Republican Party has completed its "parliamentary" transformation. We made fun of the R's while they were (a) jettisoning everyone leftward starting from what was once the political center and (b) enforcing strict party discipline on everyone left behind. But the result is a party capable of maintaining strict ideological discipline. (All they have to do to take power is con enough voters to go along with them.) Oh sure, Susie Q. Collins and those few others who like to make believe they're not party hacks are allowed to talk about the possibility of voting contrarily, but it will most always be under conditions that won't ever exist in our real world. When it comes to voting time, they'll vote right.

Professor Balkin does note that the Democratic Party hasn't been quite so completely transformed. This seems to me to be understating the case. True, the party has shed, or lost, its most extreme right-wing elements. The old Dixiecrats have long since migrated to the party of Lincoln (ha!). But the reason the Democrats are so woefully unable to stand up to the Republicans seems to me precisely because it has steadfastly refused to stand for anything, the better to maintain the ideologically wide-ranging coalition it is.

Why does it matter that the R's have transformed themselves into a parliamentary-type party?

In a parliamentary system, the party out of power has no obligation to govern, since the majority party (or coalition of parties) controls the levers of power. Instead, the main goal of the party out of power is to destroy the party in power's coalition and take over control of the government. The party out of power hopes to win a vote of no confidence or force the majority to call for an election in a disadvantageous political climate.

In the American system, with fixed terms for the president, it is not possible to call for a vote of no confidence. As a result, a parliamentary party in a presidential system will do the next best thing. It will attempt to force the wheels of government to grind to a halt and make the populace sick of the president's party, reasoning that if the voters become disgusted with government, they will take out their anger on the party associated with the current Administration.

The key point is that even though cooperation from the minority party may be necessary to govern effectively in a presidential system, the minority party does not have sufficient incentives to cooperate if voters will not punish them--and may even reward them at the next election--for making things worse instead of better. An opposition parliamentary-style party in the Senate can also seek to prevent the president from staffing his Administration or appointing new judges. An opposition party in control of either House can use the appropriations process to defund policy initiatives, undermine efficient administration, and hinder legal enforcement. Finally, an opposition parliamentary-style party can attempt to harass the President through investigative hearings and (as in 1998) through impeachment.

Balkin summarizes very nicely, I think, the fix we're in:

The original goal of separation of powers was to create incentives for deliberation and compromise. With parliamentary parties, deliberation and compromise are not taken seriously, because they do not assist the opposition party. Equally important, the opposition party can use its various forms of intra-party control to keep individual members from defecting and making too many deals that would advantage the president's party. The goal of the minority party is decidedly not to reason with the President's party, or to enable a series of deals between moderate factions for which the President might take credit. The goal, rather, is to make governance impossible so that the voters will punish the President's party and the minority party can take over.

This is what our current system has come to, and in my view, it is both pathological and unsustainable in the long run. Not only will it will produce ever more bitter and more polarized politics, it will also produce bad and ineffective government that will harm the national interest.

So how does the good professor see this playing out?

One should not assume that Congressional Republicans are acting this way because of bad faith or some set of personal failings. Rather, given the evolution of the Republican Party into an ideologically coherent parliamentary-style party in a presidential system, the Republicans are acting rationally. The Democrats, conversely, need to understand that they must work hard to break the Republicans' united front. They will not be able to do this simply by being nice to Republicans, or by attempting to meet the Republicans half-way, for if the Republicans are smart, they will not be assuaged by compromise. Their best strategy is to make Americans thoroughly disgusted with government in general, so that they will throw Barack Obama out of office in 2012. If the Democrats want to achieve anything legislatively in the next few years, they must create strategic problems for individual Republicans, causing them to break ranks despite the best efforts of the Republican leadership. The only way to ensure compromise when parties are polarized as they are is to make the failure to compromise politically costly to individual members of the minority party so.

The next time the Democrats become the minority party, they will have abundant incentives to do precisely what the Republicans are doing now, precisely because the Republicans have shown these strategies to be effective in a climate of ideological polarization. The Republicans fully developed many of their current tactics before the Democrats for three reasons. First, the failure of the Bush presidency and the tarnishing of the Republican brand made the development of these oppositional strategies more urgent for the Republicans following Obama's 2008 victory, when the Democrats controlled the presidency and both Houses of Congress. Second, the Republicans became a more ideologically coherent party more quickly than the Democrats did because they continue to be driven by a powerful conservative social movement. Third, the Republicans have learned how to use campaign finance to discipline their members more effectively than the Democrats have. (In fact, the Democrats, eager to regain power, had recruited a more ideologically diverse group of candidates in 2006 and 2008). But there is no reason to think that the Democrats will not eventually adopt many of the same tactics that the Republicans have perfected if, once again, they find themselves out of power.

To which Digby (here's the link again) adds an eminently sensible take:

I actually think there is every reason to believe the Democrats will not adopt many of the tactics Republicans have perfected because they are just not temperamentally equipped to do it. I think they will continue to pretend, as the media still does, that the beautiful world of Tip and Ronnie will return if only these awful people would just stop making their congressmen and Senators do things they don't want to do until they are pushed hard by the people to change their ways. At this point they do not have a whole lot to lose by losing --- the revolving door takes very good care of them if they promise not to make too many waves, which is exactly what they hate.

Read the whole piece, it's not long and it explains how we got here and why it's a problem for a presidential system. (For instance, you can't call for elections when gridlock makes it impossible to govern.) And although he doesn't mention it, it's also why silly centrist notions like this are destined to do nothing but split the same party that's already outmatched by the hardcore Republicans, thus ensuring that the lunatic fringe of the GOP will continue to have the upper hand.

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