Personalities and Institutions

February 28, 2010

Jonathan Chait rips into the notion that congressional dysfunction is just the result of viewing politics “as a zero-sum game where one side wipes the floor with the other side.”

Except politics is a zero-sum game. [...] Democrats lost from [Sen. Evan] Bayh’s retirement and Republicans won, which is why they’re celebrating.

Now, public policy isn’t a zero sum game. But to expect politicians to put aside their political interests for the good of the country is wildly unrealistic. A well-designed system is supposed to align politicians’ interests with the greater good, to the highest degree that’s possible. The best way to do that is to give the majority the power to implement its agenda in the belief that this agenda will create positive real-world conditions that the voters choose to reward it with continued support. You can’t count on the minority party to lay down its most powerful weapon so that the majority party can rack up bipartisan achievements.

The belief that the filibuster is okay, but minority parties should just use it less often and start acting nicer is the equivalent of the belief that the financial system was totally fine, there just needs to be less greed and more caution. Of course, there are people on Wall Street who believe that, too — you don’t need to change the incentive structure that rewards taking on systemic risk, they say, you just need people to listen to their better angels. This sort of misguided notion is probably endemic to people who sit on the inside of any institution and see it in personal rather than systemic terms. The belief among official Washington that moral restraint can persuade politicians from ignoring their political interests is exactly such a fallacy.

I don’t think it makes much sense to treat institutional problems with anything less than institutional solutions. You can change the rules of the Senate, or you can change the two-party system. Good across-the-aisle relationships among individual senators will not reliably produce bipartisanship unless undergirded by systemic forces (like southern racism in the mid-20th century) strong enough to outweigh partisan ideology on election day.

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