Recently, my partner and I were walking around the Twin Cities Gay Pride Festival enjoying the day. We stopped at the Log Cabin Republicans booth just to say hello to folks. (I have been part of Log Cabin for years and staffed the booth at Pride for several years.) I ended up talking to this guy who had stopped at the booth to complain about the GOP. I expressed my support for McCain and he expressed his frustration with McCain and the GOP. He kept saying that he was undecided, but as he expressed his thoughts various issues, it became clear that there was a candidate out there that represented his beliefs and it wasn’t McCain.
After a few minutes of this, I finally told him: if you have these views, then there is a candidate out there that you should support: Senator Obama.
I told him this because I wanted to get back to enjoying the day with my partner, and two because this was a waste of time when it was obvious who really supported.
Obvious, to everyone but himself.
That experience taught me something. Our words are pretty meaningless: it’s our actions that matter.
I’ve been wondering lately about the use of words like “centrist” or “moderate” or “independent.” Being that I am a part of the Centrist blogosphere, I’ve seen those words used a lot. I’ve used those words. Centrists like to fancy themselves as above the fray, not like the hard partisans of the left and right. We are more interested in the greater interest of the nation than we do partisan interests.
I am beginning to doubt that. For a long time, I’ve thought that my centrist views were of a higher purpose than my more conservative or liberal friends. They had selfish interests: they wanted to support policies that favored their interests.
But the fact is, I am just as self-interested as conservatives and liberals. I have views on issues and I want my candidate to favor them. Oh sure, I dress them up in language that talks about the “common good” but hell, I am just as self-directed as anyone else. That doesn’t make me a hypocrite: it makes me human.
Ross Douthat, points to a great article by Nicholas Lemann about how interest groups and self interest in general are an important part of politics and not the bane of political that we centrists tend to think they are.
In his extensive essay in the latest New Yorker, Lemann uses The Process of Government, a book written a century ago Arthur Bentley. Lemann notes the premise of this book:
All politics and all government are the result of the activities of groups. Any other attempt to explain politics and government is doomed to failure.
He notes that in a century ago, the Progressives of that day believed that special interests were destroying the republic, and what was needed was to get them out and in their place have such innovations as direct vote or rule of experts. Bentley didn’t buy that theory, noting that the machine politics gave more insight to how politics worked than anything the reformers could come up with. While many then and now think interest groups are wrecking politics, Bentley thought that’s what politics was all about.
Lemann notes that Bentley’s view of pluralism, akin to the realist school of foreign policy, is not very much in fashion today:
Bentley’s insights are almost entirely missing from political discussion these days. Only in the realm of foreign policy is it permissible even to use the word “interests” in a positive way, and then they must be vital national interests. In domestic policy, interest groups (and particularly those in that ill-defined but malign category known as special-interest groups) are always the bad guys. So are their representatives in Washington, the lobbyists. We’re inclined to think that the wheedling of interest groups—tree-hugging anti-free-traders, the Sugar Association, AIPAC—distorts politics. (For Bentley, the workings of interest groups—in interaction with one another—constitute politics.) When a politician speaks at an interest group’s convention, we want to hear that he has somehow challenged or confronted the group, rather than “pandered” to it. Partisanship is bad, and “partisan bickering,” which by Bentley’s lights would count as a basic description of politics, is even worse. To an unusual extent, our Presidential candidates this year got where they are by presenting themselves as reformers, as champions of the transcendent public interest—as the enemies of Washington dealmaking-as-usual. For Bentley, there was no such thing as a transcendent public interest, and no politics that didn’t involve dealmaking, disguised or not.
The above paragraph reminds me of the disconnect I heard from supporters of Jesse Ventura when he was governor of Minnesota. Many commented they were disgusted by “backroom deals” by the two major parties in the state, and that government should work more efficiently. What they failed to see was that Ventura had to bargain with Republicans and Democrats to get things done, since he had no natural consituency to work with. In a democracy, you have to deal with competing interests and you have to find a way to work with them. There is no other way.
In regards to those who despair John McCain’s pandering and the loss of his “maverick” status, Lemann has this to say:
Closer attention to Bentley would help us understand why, as politicians succeed, they become more obviously attentive to interest groups, more obviously engaged in bargain and compromise. Hillary Clinton was this year’s version of the pandering, old-politics candidate, a role that proved more appealing the longer the primary season went on. But when she was a new face in Washington, back in 1993, her identity was pretty much the opposite. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have disappointed some of their early, ardent supporters by modifying many of their positions to accommodate the established and organized interests of their parties. Much of the conversation about the Presidential election over the summer has been about how censorious we should be about their “flip-flops.”
Back in 1993, Clinton was the First Lady and was shielded from having to deal with various groups. Fifteen years later, she is having to deal with various groups, from women, to gay rights groups, to union workers. The Hilary of 1993 would have never made it as far if she was running today, but the Hilary of 2008 got a lot farther because she started to deal with politics less as a “reformer” and more as a “wheeler-dealer” politician.
The same goes for John McCain. I am going to go out on a limb here, but I think that in reality, McCain wasn’t that serious about running for President in 2000 or at least never took it that seriously. Back then, he didn’t really try to court the various groups within the GOP, thumbing his nose at the establishment. (Not that I mind.) He had some backing from the media, and independents and centrists, but frankly, centrists were not organized to really make a difference.
In 2008, McCain is interested in becoming president. That means that he now has to deal with the various groups in the GOP, which is why he is “flip-flopping.”
While it might be discouraging that interest groups are not going anywhere, Lemann notes that Bentley believed this was more hopeful than anything. He writes:
At first, this all sounds shockingly cynical and depressing. We deeply want politics to have good guys and bad guys, good policies and bad policies. We want inviolable principles, like human rights, democracy, the rule of law, or carbon neutrality. Yet Bentley, who helped organize Robert La Follette’s 1924 Progressive Party Presidential campaign in Indiana, didn’t consider pluralism to be the stuff of defeatism; if anything, it was a call to action. People get involved in politics to get things that they want, which may or may not entail economic advantage. People matter politically only as members of groups, and groups matter only when they act, but political life is complicated: nobody is a member of only one interest group, and no interest group stands apart from other groups and behaves in a single, consistent way. Alliances are constantly shifting. No realm of government is immune to interest-group pressures, including the judiciary. (Liberals who, in the sixties and seventies, thought they could counteract the power of big business with institutions beholden only to the “public interest”—whether regulatory agencies or the courts—discovered that conservatives were capable of capturing any such apparatus.) The net result, according to Bentley, is this: “Intelligent actions, emotional actions, linked actions, trains of action, planned actions, plotted actions, scheming, experimenting, persisting, exhorting, compelling, mastering, struggling, co-operating—such activities by the thousand we find going on around us in populations among which we are placed.”
So, what does this have to do with Centrists? Well, everything. Centrists are pretty much individualists. We don’t want to get involved in politics, seeing it as dirty. We place hope in leaders that present themselves as “centrist” and then become more “partisan” as time goes on. We create things like “Unity 08” that fail to stir anything. Our more partisan friends do better because they are organized into groups that pressure candidates to their bidding. Unions make sure Democrats are less favorable to free trade; anti-tax groups make sure Republicans never pass a tax increase and keep cutting taxes. Those of us in the middle think simply sit on our duffs and hope that candidates will do the right thing. But we don’t press them to do what we think is right and we don’t organize groups to make them do what we want them to do. We just expect that magically, they will do our bidding.
This all explains a lot for me. For many years, I’ve worked in various centrist GOP groups and it has been horrible to get people interested to get involved to change things in the GOP. Many gay conservatives don’t want to join Log Cabin Republicans until the GOP changes its stand on gay rights as if that will happen magically. But as long as the Religious Right (which does understand the nature of politics) is there making sure candidates toe the line and punishing them when they don’t, and as long as their is no strong opposition pushing back, well candidates will be against things like gay marriage. Many moderate Republians bemoan what the party has become, but they don’t seem interested in joining together and fighting back. Again, the expect that this will all happen magically.
In the end, our actions matter. Nice sounding words won’t change a thing. As long as Centrists are willing to sit back and let the partisans do the heavy lifting, then we will always be frustrated.