The Boy Who Could Change the World
Page 13
—David Segal
How Congress Works
Age 24
Given as a seminar at the Safra Center at Harvard University in the spring of 2011—Ed.
A Note from Professor Rebecca Sandefur:
Aaron took my course on social stratification during the year he was at Stanford. Our conversations after class and in office hours centered on three themes that animate this essay: whether stable organization is necessary to accomplish complex tasks that benefit society, why people are so often quiescent in the face of acts and organization that go against their interests, and whether democratizing access to information can on its own spur their mobilization. Aaron’s notes on this essay to his seminar colleagues ask for suggestions about style. If I were given the gift of speaking with him again, I would say: Keep it as it is, your own: supremely confident, unpretentiously brilliant, sincerely engaged. And thank you for this, and for everything.
for Becky Sandefur
Part One: Elections
You’ll probably never run for Congress. For starters, I bet you’ve never even considered it. Isn’t running for Congress a job for celebrities, larger-than-life figures, people with big egos and an unquenchable thirst for power? But that’s just the problem: the sort of people who want to run for office tend to be terrible officeholders. As Gore Vidal put it, “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”*
Metcalf, Fred. February 5, 2002. The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations (Penguin). ISBN 0141009217.
One theory of the ideal politician is of some kind of selfless public servant. Such a representative would fairly represent local interests, listening to their constituents and faithfully fighting for their views in the Capitol. They use their judgment and shared values to decide what’s best for the people they represent.
But such a man can only exist in a world devoid of conflict. If there are no deep policy disputes, then legislating is easy. But in most modern American communities, this is pure fancy. There are rich and poor, corporations and unions, left and right. Their demands are serious—and typically irreconcilable. No representative can faithfully represent their common interests because on the biggest questions of public concern there simply is no common interest.
As a result, the notion of “a national interest” is inevitably hijacked by the dominant group in society. Reagan, for example, claimed his opponents represented the special interests: women, poor people, workers, young people, old people, ethnic minorities—in short, most of the population. (“This confusion allows Reagan to treat the exploited as exploiters by contrasting the people with the ‘special interests.’”)† As a result, the people who claim to be simply representing their district end up playing something like the role Domhoff ascribes to the town newspaper:
Chomsky, Noam. October 24, 1986. “Political Discourse and the Propaganda System.” in Carlos P. Otero, ed. 2004. Language and Politics (AK Press). ISBN 1902593820, 541.
Competing [business] interests often regard newspaper executives as general community leaders, as ombudsmen and arbiters of internal bickering, and at times, as enlightened third parties who can restrain the short-term profiteers in the interest of a more stable, long-term, and properly planned growth. The newspaper becomes the reformist influence, the “voice of the community,” restraining the competing subunits, especially the small-scale arriviste “fast-buck artists” among them.*
Domhoff, G. William. April 2005. “Power at the Local Level: Growth Coalition Theory.”
The “rational choice” interpretation of this character explains this by treating the representative as a sly and cynical operator. Instead of fighting for a shared objective, the “rational” politician is driven by incentives. He does not vote the way he thinks is best for his constituents, but simply the way he thinks is most likely to get him reelected. If there’s something he believes is right, but is unpopular, he will drop it. Given a difficult decision, he’ll conduct a poll. And as his electorate changes, so do his views. He’ll tack to an extreme for the primary, then back to center for the general election.
The rational choice politician is an easy fellow to corrupt. If a special interest can help him win reelection, he’ll work for the benefit of that interest. But even beyond such blatant corruption, his whole view of his constituency is warped by his quest for victory. He doesn’t care about the people who live in his district, he cares merely about the ones that vote. And in the U.S., that means the wealthy: in a typical election, about 35% of the poorest quintile turns out; that number is 71% for the richest quintile.†
Cervantes, Esther and Amy Gluckman. January/February 2004. “Who Votes, and How?” Dollars & Sense. http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0104cervantes.html; Linz, Juan, Alfred Stephan, and Yogendra Yadav. 2007. Democracy and Diversity (Oxford University Press). ISBN 0195683684, 99.
Those numbers are even more exaggerated when you look at other forms of voter engagement. It’s obviously the wealthy who make the biggest campaign contributions, but they also are the ones who write letters to the editor and volunteer their time to political campaigns. As a result, any “rational” politician is going to skew their opinions toward the wealthy.
And this in fact is what we see. Bartels found a regression coefficient of 4.15 when measuring a member of Congress’s responsiveness to the views of their wealthiest constituents; compare this to a score of -0.11 for the poorest. As Bartels summarizes: “Senators’ roll call votes were quite responsive to the ideological views of their middle-and high-income constituents. In contrast, the views of low-income constituents had no discernable impact on the voting behavior of their senators.”*
Bartels, Larry M. 2010: Unequal Democracy. The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press). ISBN 0691146233.
But just as focusing obsessively on profit-making turns out to be a poor way to make a profit, focusing obsessively on vote-getting turns out to be a poor way to get votes. Voters don’t like a “flip-flopper.” Voters want a representative with strong beliefs that won’t waver, even in the face their own opposing views. Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) had a record of “controversial” votes, like opposing Bush’s invasion of Iraq or Clinton’s welfare reform. But even when they disagreed, his constituents appreciated these stands. As his campaign manager recounts: “In countless conversations with Minnesota voters, Wellstone heard comments like: ‘I don’t always agree with you, but I like it that I know where you stand.’”†
Blodget, Jeff. May 4, 2006. “Populism, Organization, and Conviction.”
And thus the third type of politician: the ideologue. A person with strong beliefs who sees elected office as a way to enact their beliefs into law for the greater good. They fight for ends and not for means. If their district opposes their decision, it is irrelevant except insofar as it will prevent them from getting reelected and thus pushing through more policies (that their constituents might also oppose).
Ideologues are constrained by the other two factors. Even as ideologues, most are hesitant to make decisions that go strongly against the interests of their district. And they often make “rational” compromises to get the support that will allow them to continue to serve.
Not only do ideologues want to run for office more than most people, there are groups dedicated toward helping and encouraging them. For example, Progressive Majority looks for young progressive activists in key states, trains them, finds a race for them, and helps them run and win. Perhaps you start off just running the school board, but if you succeed and learn the craft, they help you move up to higher office.
But there’s not much of an apparatus for encouraging selfless public servants to run for office. And they’re precisely the type least likely to run. As normal people they have normal ambitions and a normal level of interest in politics, they don’t burn with the desire to make the laws for their countrymen.
When communities were smaller a
nd more homogenous, they could be pushed into the job. Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. (Lyndon Johnson’s father) was just such a representative. A well-liked lawyer in town, he had repeatedly gone above and beyond the call of duty to help his friends and neighbors. He was encouraged to run for the Democratic nomination and won the vote unanimously.* But that was 1905. It’s hard to imagine many towns with enough of a functioning social system to make a collective decision like that, and even if they do exist, they’re surely too small to make up a whole congressional district.
Caro, Robert. 1982. The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 1) (Alfred A. Knopf). ISBN 0394499735, 43.
The first Congress had one representative for every 600 voters. If we imagine only half of them voted in the primary, and only half of those in the Democratic primary, you’re left with 150 voters—the number Dunbar famously proposed as the number of people one can maintain stable social relationships with.† You could imagine Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. personally knowing each one of the voters who unanimously elected him.
Dunbar, R. I. M. June 1992. “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size In primates.” Journal of Human Evolution 22 (6): 469–493.
Today we have one representative for every 208,000 voters. Even if we again assume only a quarter will vote in the primary, that’s still 50,000 people. Just to have a three-minute conversation with each of them would be a year’s worth of work—and that’s assuming that they were all lined up to talk to you, with no downtime in between conversations.
So instead of talking with voters, you talk at them: through TV ads and postal mailers and signs along the street. And all those things cost money. Instead of finding your friends and neighbors electing you to run, you throw fund-raisers for the wealthy and try to prove to them you have the right stuff.
Just as with candidates, we can imagine three different types of wealthy people involved in politics: the self-described public servant, who wants to support candidates that will actually help out the community; the cynical operator, who gives money to those who give him profitable laws in return; and the ideologue, who supports the candidates who believe in the same strong values they do.
But just as the candidates are drawn mostly from the ranks of the self-aggrandizing and ambitious, the campaign donors are drawn from the wealthy. Even our selfless public servant donor spends most of his time at the cocktail parties of the fellow rich. He may care about the poor beggars on the street, but it’s difficult to imagine he spends much time talking to them and considering their views. No, instead he supports sensible, moderate candidates who care about things like reducing the deficit and the other things he’s read about in the New York Times. (“We’re facing a fiscal crisis!” he insists, while millions are out of work, on the street.)
Similarly, the wealthy ideologue may fancy herself an activist, but she is not the sort of activist who chains herself to power plants and sleeps in abandoned buildings. No, she is an activist because she goes to fund-raisers for noble causes and serves on the board of worthy organizations. Like the “public servant,” even when her heart is in the right place it’s only natural that she’ll do a better job representing herself and the others like her. Protecting abortion may be a litmus test for her, but ending homelessness rarely is.
All types of donors see themselves, quite genuinely, as playing a role. They do not lavish money on anyone who wants to run for office because they have some deep beliefs in democracy per se. Instead, they support the candidates they agree with and snub the ones they don’t. This seems to them entirely natural—indeed, the opposite would seem bizarre. Would you give money to every shop that opens just because you support capitalism?
But just as the businesses that don’t receive patronage go out of business, the candidates that don’t flatter the wealthy don’t raise enough money to run a serious campaign. Perhaps you persuade the “public servants” that you’re the sober-minded serious type who can do this district some good. Or maybe you convince the local business executives that in exchange for their checks and those of their subordinates, they’ll get a representative who will earmark money to support their local business and loosen the insane regulations that hamper their growth (but perhaps not the ones hampering their competitors). Or maybe you convince the ideologue that you, too, care passionately about abortion and will be a strong voice in Congress to make sure that right is never weakened. And if you’re really good, you’ll do all three.
Republicans have an easier time of this, of course. It’s a lot easier to appear to be on the same side as both the anti-government ideologue and the local businessman choked by regulation, since both appear to want the same thing. (No surprise, since it’s businessmen who are funding the anti-government talk shows.) It’s a lot harder to be both a left-wing activist and friend of local business. And so the right-wing ideologues make out better than the left-wing ones.
The same is true all the way back. There are many more institutions dedicated to persuading fresh-faced college students that government regulation is the root of all evil than there are those that argue the unconstrained free market tramples on the rights of average citizens. That’s because the former can obtain grants from the “charitable giving” of wealthy businessmen, while the latter depend on the support of the odd old foundation or activist billionaire. And while the businessman may believe that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, billionaires and foundations have a strong aversion to extremism.
When you say “corruption in Congress,” people think of sleazy members of Congress in suits, making shady deals with lobbyists behind closed doors. But the real corruption starts earlier than that—much earlier than that. It starts at those fund-raisers, where the wealthy take the measure of the man, and decide whether he agrees with them enough to deserve their funds for his campaign. (I don’t think it’s quite fair to describe some people deciding not to run as corruption, although its effect is undoubtedly important.)
It is this—the filter—that is crucial. Everyone in Congress, everyone running for Congress could be a total saint, the perfect public servant, voting only in accordance with their genuine beliefs about what was best for their constituents, and the place would still be hopelessly corrupt. Because the issue is not just that the politicians skew their votes toward the whims of the wealthy once they’re in office, but that politicians who do not share the wealthy’s views never make it that far.
Imagine if they tried. First, they wouldn’t know any wealthy people to invite to the fund-raiser. Second, even if they somehow got some wealthy people to attend, they would seem odd and distasteful—perhaps even unelectable. These fundraisers are as difficult a gauntlet as any social filter—you have to know how to properly sample hors d’oeuvres and sip cocktails, while at the same time giving the “right” answer to every political question you’re confronted with. You have to persuade these people that you are one of them, that you share their vision, their worldview. That as a congressman you will make the same decisions they will. But, remember, they are not your actual constituents, they are the wealthy. Your average anti-poverty activist doesn’t stand a chance.
So let’s say you’ve done it. You’ve persuaded your wealthy friends to entrust you with the seed money necessary to kick off your campaign. What now? You’ve never run for serious office before, you have no clue about running a campaign. You’re the candidate, not the campaign manager. You don’t know even the first place to start.
Enter the political consultant.
Wherever there are unworldly people with pockets full of cash, there are unscrupulous professionals eager to lighten the load. Politics is no different. Like piranhas smelling blood, the candidate is quickly surrounded by consultants eager to help.
The typical campaign, in fact, is not run by a campaign manager, but a council of consultants, each hired for some particular job but justifying their exorbitant fees with claims of great expertise in “campaign strategy.” The campaign man
ager’s job then is to assemble these big shots on weekly strategy calls and carry out their expensive advice.
So the average campaign hires a mail consultant to advise on what they should send prospective voters, a television consultant to help create and purchase TV ads, a targeting consultant who uses “advanced models” to decide which voters to contact, and a pollster who conducts polls and then attempts to interpret their results. Now, with the Internet revolution, there’s also usually an online strategist who advises on using the website and email list. (There’s never any one advising how to attract and use campaign volunteers, because volunteers are not a profitable business.) The campaign’s backers also join in on these calls—perhaps there will be a representative from the unions (for the left) or the Chamber of Commerce (for the right), particular political groups (like EMILY’s List or the Club for Growth), and sometimes the national political party (D or R).
The consultants are not paid directly for their advice; instead they charge hefty markups for their normal services to cover the cost of their time. Thus while conducting a scientific poll costs under $1,000 in the average congressional district, a pollster will charge you $15,000 for a poll. And $15,000 is actually a special deal just for you, because they really believe in you and what you stand for—normally they’d charge $20,000 or even $30,000. “I’m doing this practically at cost,” they’ll claim. (This might even be true, if the “costs” include their inflated salaries.)