Big Politics Gathers Power
Big Politics represents the first member of the three-headed Beast—the Beast being whatever cuts people down from lawfully enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We lead with Ezra Klein (Why We’re Polarized):
You can think of Washington as a machine for making identity-protective cognition easier. Each party has its allied think tanks, go-to experts, favored magazines, friendly blogs, sympathetic pundits, determined activists, and ideological moneymen. Both the professionals and the committed volunteers who make up the party machinery are members of social circles, Twitter worlds, Facebook groups, workplaces, and many other ecosystems that would make life very unpleasant for them if they strayed too far from the faith. And these institutions end up employing a lot of very smart, very sincere people whose formidable intelligence makes certain that they typically stay in line. To do anything else would upend their day-to-day lives. What’s worse is that it never feels cynical, it never reads as rationalization. It always, always feels like our honest search for the truth has led us to the answer that confirms our priors. The problem, of course, is that these people are also affecting, and in some cases controlling, the levers of government.1
What does it mean to be bought and sold by a party? When you have two political homes that are so different, a choice to change between them is nearly unthinkable. You either have a partisan home, or you inhabit the wilderness—the place of no coalition, no party power, no money machine, no apparatus to move countless people to place a checkmark by your name on the ballot because of three little letters (DEM or REP). The way for Big Politics to gather power is to make sure that whoever wins election can’t really do anything outside of rewarding big players with big wins—corrupt interests, corporate interests, special interests, etc.
Politics has gathered power since the founding, but Big Politics has gathered power since the post-Civil War era with the rise of progressive nationalism. I’m referring to the supposed defeat of states’ rights that came with the defeat of slavery and the rise of “Woodrow Wilson ideology”—an ideology that fostered the creation of the federal administrative state. The literature on President Wilson gives us a key insight into our present 110-year predicament in the making; Wilson loved the British parliamentary system of politics. He loved seeing the members of the House of Commons debate policy and then have the Prime Minister and the Cabinet put those policies into action as a governing coalition.
Here's the rub—we don’t have anything close to that system in the United States. The founders didn’t want an English Parliament. It was not until the 1830s that the British constitutional convention established that the Sovereign must select the Prime Minister (and Cabinet) from the party whose views reflect those of the majority in Parliament. This effectively created one-party government after a winning election. The American founders never witnessed this before the Constitution was ratified.
This mismatch in federal government style is highlighted by the widely cited Beltway political observers Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism.” The authors argue as follows:
We believe a fundamental problem is the mismatch between parliamentary-style political parties—ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional, and politically strategic—that has emerged in recent years and a separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will. Students of comparative politics have demonstrated that the American policy-making system of checks and balances and separation of powers has more structural impediments to action than any other major democracy.2
This sentiment was recognized in a widely cited paper from 1990 by Spanish political sociologist Juan Linz. In “The Perils of Presidentialism”, Linz argues that parliamentary style governments are more effective and stable since the party in power following an election controls the legislature and establishes the executive branch (Prime Minister and Cabinet) from its own ranks. This accountability allows for a somewhat unified agenda. The presidential system can leave the legitimacy of rule in question as different majorities can express their will across different branches of government and overlapping election cycles. The challenge with presidential systems includes a legislature whose work is vetoed repeatedly by the president, and possibly a president whose popular agenda with the public may be unacceptable to the legislature. Only party comprise has enabled this to work over many decades in our country.
Alongside the presidential system, the founders envisioned a dual republic with rights reserved to the states that are not enumerated to the federal Congress. The eras of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II tilted operation toward strong presidential leadership that could move the nation quickly. However, our system is overwhelmingly designed to be driven by Congress, not by presidential elections and executive power. In the United States, we have individual states that rival other nations in terms of population, economic output, land mass, and other characteristics. The ability of these states to mostly govern themselves with limited federal government involvement beyond the requisite legal immigration, national security, interstate commerce / transport / communication, and monetary superstructure is clear from past experience.
The administrative state of the federal government gathered enormous power with the New Deal politics of FDR. Following that, global wars only cemented the active resource build of the federal apparatus to operate in vast influence of political objectives. As Big Politics gathered power, big interests sought business deals and favors to take on global economic interests and dominate domestic market share. National politics become ever more dominant in American life, and political establishment figures began to network in circles with other leaders in business, academia, and private institutions of power. Hence, from 1930 until present, the concept of the elite political class became a fixture of American political dialogue.
Thomas Jefferson warned about the identification of the political elite:
Mankind by its constitution is naturally divided into two parties: Those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the elite. And those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as most honest and trustworthy. In every country these two parties exist; and in every one where people are free to think, speak, and write, these two parties will declare themselves.3
So, Big Politics is a force that drowns out the notion of representative government or democracy. This point is captured by Emily B. Finley, in her Wall Street Journal article from September 2022 titled, “’Democracy’ by and for the Elites.” Finley is also the author of The Ideology of Democratism. She explains the problem of democratism.
President Biden’s Sept. 1 speech in Philadelphia on “unity” is a poignant example of the confusion surrounding the concept of democracy. Mr. Biden declared that MAGA Republicans threaten “the very foundations of our republic.” The phrase a “threat to American democracy” is so commonplace these days that it hardly carries any meaning—except that it encapsulates the reigning ideology of our time, an ideology so pervasive that it almost goes unnoticed. It is like the air we breathe.
I call it democratism. It is an imaginative and idealistic understanding of popular rule that disdains ordinary people and looks to a cadre of so-called experts to operate the levers of power. Under this ideology, “democracy” and “the people” are rhetorical cover for the will of the elites. Think of social media’s censorship of misinformation in the name of “supporting democracy” and “upholding free expression.” How is it that censorship passes as upholding free expression?4
So, democratism is a description of the front that members of Big Politics put up to play on our sense that our government is by the people. Many of the most vocal champions of democratism have been advocates of this political heist, using the word “democracy” as justification for what is actually authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter if it’s being projected from the right or from the left, it’s all the same.
Finley calls out Woodrow Wilson as an example of a democratist.
Remembered as an archdemocrat, [President Wilson] advocated some of the most undemocratic measures in American history. He set precedents that until recently would have struck most Americans as violations of the First Amendment. By now, however, many on the left would look at the Sedition Act of 1918—which made it illegal “by word or act” to “oppose the cause of the United States”—as reasonable given Wilson’s promise to make the world safe for democracy. The related Espionage Act of 1917, which directed the postmaster general to censor news and publications critical of the World War I, is a precursor of President Biden’s ill-fated Disinformation Board and his administration's collusion with Twitter and Facebook to censor dissent about Covid.5
A more modern example of democratism is Barack Obama’s 2011 “We Can’t Wait” initiative, in which he chose to institute policies by Executive Orders and administrative rulemaking. Essentially, we can’t wait for a dysfunctional Congress to do its job.
Somehow, the elite politicians of our day deliberately try to lead us to believe that holding elections fulfills the goals of democracy. In reality, Big Politics rules the system beyond the results of any particular person or party coming into office. And what’s worse? The manner in which we are taught to demonize those who vote differently than we do by those who perpetuate the game of Big Politics. Finley astutely concludes: “What better way to pre-empt the opposition than simply to declare it “a threat to our democracy”?”6
Ouch! Perhaps we’ve been had by the Beast of Big Politics.
Notes for new readers:
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Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 97.
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2016) 102.
Steven Rabb, The Founders' Speech to a Nation in Crisis (Atlanta: Liberty For All Publishers, 2020) pp. 40-41.
Emily B. Finley, "Democracy by and for the Elites," The Wall Street Journal, [September 25, 2022], https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-by-and-for-the-elites-biden-wilson-jefferson-democratist-popular-rule-threat-america-tocqueville-11664114737 (accessed November 13, 2023).
Ibid.
Ibid.