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The Democrats Can’t Move to the Center
On the most recent podcast, one of the hosts asked why the Democrats can’t move their party to the center, and instead seem to be sliding further and further left. The question was tossed off, but there is an answer to it, and the answer affects more than just the Democrats. Political organization is harder than it looks. This will require some explaining.
Parties and Interest Groups Explained
The main scholastic citations for this are Robert Dahl’s Who Governs (1961) and related works, where he lays out what I will call the resource theory of pluralism; and “An Exchange Theory of Interest Groups,” (1969) by Robert Salisbury, where he posits that interest groups are an exchange between an organizer and the people who contribute resources to the organization. Neither of these are obscure works, nor are they the dominant works in American Politics that they should be. What they argue is that winning a political contest requires organization, and then they look at the question of what this organization needs to look like.
There are simply models of organization: models that are great for teaching and for abstract reasoning -that simply posit two resources: labor and capital. We call the method through which labor and capital are substituted to produce the end-product a technology. And from this we learn the correct lesson that creating a product (a widget in the usual example) requires figuring out a technology for applying labor and capital. The entrepreneur who figures out how to do this creates a firm for the purpose of producing widgets.
No actual firm, however, works this way. Capital and labor are not infinitely substitutable. Different forms of labor are not mutually substitutable, nor are different forms of capital. McDonald’s had no franchises in East Africa until this year not because Kenyan’s don’t eat hamburgers, but because there was no efficient way to get the ingredients to Africa in sufficient quality. Neither the beef, nor the potatoes were adequate for use by the franchise. And so there were no McDonald’s restaurants when I visited in 2006.
Governing in America is not any different from any other form of production; except that the government produces public goods. Dahl argued that in order to produce a public good, you need to come up with a technology that allows you to combine the available forms of capital and labor efficiently. This does not reduce to “tax money,” though. There are many resources a political organizer needs in order achieve a given policy, and those resources vary from policy to policy. To run a city’s garbage service requires different capital than to run the city’s economic development policy. And, because organizing capital is hard, there are few people who can organize more than one policy effectively. As a result, there are typically hundreds of overlapping organizers governing a city or state (or country) in the United States. Governments that can get all their organizers to work more-or-less together succeed; those that don’t become sclerotic and eventually die.
Furthermore, the actual form the policy takes will depend on resources available and how they can be combined. Dahl gives an example of a military coup in the United States, which he argues is impossible because in order to pull it off, hundreds of officers and thousands of soldiers would have to coordinate their behavior without being noticed. Our system is simply not that centralized. I give my students the example of garbage collection. We have cheap garbage collection; from dumpsters at strategic locations around the city. We have expensive, rear-alley, garbage collection. And we have mid-cost curb-side recycling. Which policy will we choose?
Well, if the city’s tax base is entirely businesses, it will likely be dumpsters. Businesses produce a lot of trash, use dumpsters anyway, and want to keep their taxes low. If taxes go up to pay for curbside collection, businesses will leave. However, most cities are not that dominated by businesses. Residents pay taxes too, and they don’t like hauling their garbage to a corner dumpster. And they vote to that effect (even if the businesses, like in most cities, are still paying most of the taxes). Residents like rear-alley collection because it puts the least work on them. They just have to set the garbage out, they don’t even have to take it to the curb. But it is expensive, and those taxes might drive off business, meaning that residents would have to make up the difference. Finally, new technologies, such as side-loader trucks, make curbside collection very cheap, and much less labor intensive. This means that curbside collection, the middle option, can be offered to both businesses and residents at a price they will pay. And lo, most cities do a combination of things, but mostly curb-side.
But what if the city was only residential; no businesses at all? It might depend on the wealth of the city. A rich city, which was going to pay the full cost anyway, might still prefer rear-alley collection, and some do. A poor city might be unable to provide the service at all, and either need to contract with a neighbor or disincorporate so that the county could take over.
What matters is that who controls the resources influences the outcome. If you can’t get all the resources you need, nothing happens. It is impossible to assemble a coalition in favor of a coup; and so no coup will ever happen. There are many possible coalitions for garbage collection, and who owns which resources will determine which coalition dominates the policy.
Salisbury extended this logic to interest groups and political parties. Political parties are producing a coalition that can 1) win elections, and 2) govern once it has won. They do so by offering to different potential members of the coalition benefits for supporting the party. Those benefits might be material gains, or they might be policy preferences, or a role in the government itself. Producing these benefits, however, requires resources. If the party wins, they can extract those resources from the tax payers, at least a little. (Extract too much and you are pulling the money out of your own people.) If they lose, or if they need to supplement what they can extract from the government, they need supporters to ante up resources. Those resources may be money, but they could also be other services. Salisbury was looking at agricultural interest groups with a keen interest in crop insurance, for example.
A political party is a coalition of interest groups. Each of those interest groups needs support from the party to keep its own organization, and if the coalition gets too large or unwieldy, different parts of the coalition will start to extract benefits from other parts of the coalition; making the whole thing inefficient, unable to win elections, and eventually it collapses. Organizing to prevent this collapse is hard.
The Democrats and Republicans Today
To run a party, you need, I would think, at least four resources: voters, money, organizers, and ideas. Voters and money are obvious. Ideas are the justification for voting for the party. These are the narrative, if you will, that define both the formal platform, and the actual policies that will be implemented. Finally, you need organizers who can combine the other three resources into a party that can produce electoral victories.
The organizer has the hard task of this because if any group of voters is incompatible with the narrative, or with another group of voters, then the organization won’t form, or will need huge amounts of money to paper over the differences.
The GOP, because of its thorough collapse after Bush, is very decentralized. Both its ideas and its money are widely controlled by different people. We have eccentric billionaires, like the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson; who notably don’t agree with each other. We have East Coast and West Coast Straussians, Neo-Conservatives, Buchananites, SoCons, Libertarians, Burkians, Hawks, Paulites, and you get the idea. I think the fragmentation of our finance also matters. By most normal measures, Michael Steele’s tenure as head of the RNC was a disaster, but one of those disasters (the fragmentation of Republican fundraising into numerous allied groups and distinct party committees) probably benefited the party in the long run. The California-wing of the party can raise funds and support the Claremonsters, and the Inland Empire style of candidates, like Devin Nunes. The Tea Party groups can raise their own money and run their own candidates like Rand Paul, and supporting their own ideas-men, like Americans for Prosperity.
The Democratic party is far more centralized. Every year I review the literature on campaign money circulation, and the GOP is very decentralized, and the Democrats funnel all their money through a handful of groups which are all tightly interrelated. Organizing for America was Obama’s worst idea.
In the GOP, we have so many parts that we can fairly freely sub them out. This is what I take the “no longer relevant” claim to mean, if it means anything. We can boot one group of ideas-men and replace them with another. We can boot one group of financiers and replace them with another. We can boot one group of voters and replace them with another. There aren’t infinite variations on this, but Trump demonstrates the point. He and his people were good organizers. They booted college educated whites who wouldn’t yield on trade issues or character issues and replaced them with non-college educated whites for whom character was less an issue and trade was a “will they even bother to vote” issue. They booted ideas-men who couldn’t be matched with those new voters and replaced them with ideas-men who could. And the usual glue that held everyone together: the GOP’s money men? Donald Trump replaced them with free media coverage.
I’m not meaning to pass judgment here, I’m just describing how the organization works.
The Democrats cannot do this. They have many fewer groups of people they can sub in and out. Bernie Sanders had to work within the Democratic party because he lacked self-sustaining voters, money, and ideas. The voters are tied up in OfA, the money in the Clinton Machine. Sanders brought new ideas, but even today, the DSA’s plan is to take over and co-opt the Democratic Party, and assume that all the parts will continue serving the new masters. That the voters were tied up in OfA meant that Clinton didn’t even have full access to them, because they were Obama voters, not Clinton voters. How much will the DSA be able to access them?
The Democratic Party, however, needs to keep itself together, which means it needs to keep the DSA and other assorted leftist groups in the fold. They have enough of a foothold on the party’s apparatus that they cannot simply be ignored -and the Democratic Party lacks the multiplicity of parts to sub in and out to solve their problem.
Well, why not try to steal parts of the GOP coalition? Why not go after those disaffected college whites or try to win back the white working class as Bill Clinton suggested? Because those groups are incompatible with the money and ideas people in the Democratic Party right now. Tom Steyer and the George Soros are not going to modify their views anymore than Sheldon Addelson or the Koch brothers did -but there is no, as yet identified, equivalent of Donald Trump who can replace them on the Democrats’ side. Kamala Harris needs Steyer’s money and the DSA’s votes.
Eventually, the Democratic Party will have a year as bad as 2009 and 2011 were for the GOP. When that happens, the highly centralized nature of the Democratic party will fracture, and there will suddenly be a lot of money, voter, and ideas centers that Democratic politicians can try to re-assemble. We know this because they did it after 2004. Until then, the nature of the coalition awaits either a sui generis Donald Trump type, or they will continue to slide left because that’s where the mutually compatible money, ideas, and votes are.
Published in Elections
Does the left need to moderate to win, though? Long term, probably. But I think there is a real risk that someone as kooky as Sanders can win the presidency in the current climate.
Very interesting post. Which of the above two books would you expect to be more appealing to a historian?
Edit: I see the 2nd one isn’t a book.
I don’t actually know. Coalitions in American politics are at a high level fairly fixed, but at a low level very fluid. Trump wouldn’t need to lose much, and a Sanders wouldn’t need to gain much in order for Democrats to win.
If you have access to a library with journal subscriptions, you can understand Salisbury’s article in isolation. Dahl also wrote a number of articles on the same basic point. Both of them are -a rarity these days in political science -very detail oriented in their examples, so Dahl will give you a lot of detail about New Haven’s community in the 1960s, and Salisbury will tell you a lot about New Deal Agriculture politics.
A related observation is that for at least the last half century (actually for much longer, though WWII and the early Cold War years modified this) the main source of ideas and energy for the Democrats has been the far left.
A relatively small minority in a group (recent research suggests the number may be about 25%) can dictate what ideas and words are acceptable and unacceptable; this means that small cadres can have big effects. Even without what @sabrdance has brought us, for the above reasons alone the Democrats can’t move to the center (without a major catastrophe that shatters the party.)
The corollary of this is that coalitions and national unity governments are worse than useless.
Ooh! New Deal Agriculture politics. Gotta read that first, then. (Yes, I think I have access.)
The only Democrats who should be considered for President are Governors, since that will show if they can run a government.
At a glance all of their likely candidates are senators. Since they nationalize every issue, that makes a lot of sense.
Solid post, @sabrdance.
Very informative
Great post, Sabrdance.
I concur. Great post, Sabrdance! Another factor is the candidate pool. Right now, the Democratic leadership is older than I am. Plus, their voters are pushing them further left, as we see with the California Democrats and Dianne Feinstein and with Ocasio-Cortez. That may work for them locally, but is not likely to be successful nationally.
Lots to chew on here.
One major difference between private sector groupings and the US political party system is our party system both (unintentionally) forces parties to exist while (unintentionally) limiting the number of parties to two. This has lots of impacts that do not exist – or not anywhere near the same extent – in the private sector.
The most major of these impacts is forcing together smaller groups into alliances that are not practical or efficient, to a degree at which equivalent groups in the private sector would maintain an arm’s length relationship.
In the private sector, there may be more than two competitors in a given sector, or only one, or none at all, depending on the organic landscape in that sector. Keeping the number fixed at two (and punishing anyone who tries to work outside of those two parties) causes an incredible amount of inefficient friction which is usually rapidly dispelled in the business world.
If you go back a half-century, the current trend isn’t new, just magnified due to Trump’s personality and the rise of social media. When the Democrats lost control of the White House in 1968, 1980 and 2000, they moved left in the ensuing four years each time, because their egos wouldn’t let them believe it was their ideology that voters had rejected at the ballot box, but instead it was simply the packaging of the candidate that was a failure.
So the ’68 loss by Humphrey begat George McGovern in 1972, and Carter’s loss in ’80 produced Mondale in ’84 and his DNC convention promise to raise everyone’s taxes, because he had to pander to what his base of the moment demanded. Kerry was chosen in 2004 as the furthest left candidate the party thought it could get away with in the wake of 9/11, due to his military record, where they somehow believed his actions during the Vietnam era would be enough of an asset to carry they over the top.
So for 2020, while they might not run Bernie due to his age, they will run someone to the left of Hillary (my guess is Kamala Harris, who checks three special interest group identity boxes for the party all by herself). The main question is whether or not they’ll demand that candidate run as a out-and-proud socialist, or if they’ll be allowed to hide their most liberal positions, as Bill Clinton did in 1992 and Obama did by continually voting ‘present’ on the most contentious issues in the run-up to the 2008 election.
I’m not sure that being decentralized is so obviously beneficial. Among other things, it’s important to remember that your analysis is through the prism of the last election, which was very close. Had a few votes gone the other way, Hillary would have won, and the take-home lessons from your (very thorough and engaging) observations might be the complete opposite.
In any case, I think there’s also a decent argument in favor of centralized power based precisely on the fact that the marketplace is limited to two competitors and one winner, so any splintering in one party automatically provides an advantage to the other. When presidential elections are repeatedly so close, but even 50%+1 is winner-take-all, unity takes on a much greater worth.
Of course, we’re focusing entirely on presidential elections here, and in the end I the outcomes of presidential elections are at least as much a factor of who happens to run in a given year and how talented they are (which is completely out of the hands of party structures) than how the inner workings of the party are structured.
You say unintentional. I don’t think so. Our founders, especially Washington, argued against “factions”, aka parties. But they clearly understood that it was inevitable to some extent. Plurality voting extinguishes fringe parties and forces major parties to stay near the political center to win. They didn’t want a dozens-of-parties system, so created a system that structurally promotes a two-party system, two centrist parties.
Jungle primaries and ranked voting are modern tools to thwart the founders’ intentions, and should be resisted.
Comparing to the private sector is meaningless. Politics is about who has control of the state’s use of force — the two-party system keeps such control centrist. Mostly.
Fair enough. I probably should have said “not explicit”, since many other countries enshrine parties into their constitution.
I’m certainly not as familiar with the Federalist papers or other writings on the Founders’ thinking to the degree that others are here, but I’ve never heard that they were aware that their system would inevitably lead to the formation of two parties and that this was intentional (or at least the desired outcome). Is there a source for this? Genuinely curious.
I did so because the first half of the OP dove into the structure of organizations using the private sector as the example.
Not explicit is what I recall.
Hmm. I can’t recall where I read this. I may have to dig around. It’s not a recent theme. I learned this back in the early 90’s when I was coming to grips with my own conservatism after growing up blue.
Fair enough.
FTFY.
Another problem for the Dems is that their party is not so much a battle of ideas, but a battle of virtue signaling and intersectionality. The power of virtue signaling is a like a ratchet that continues to restrict who is allowed to speak and fewer voices makes it hard to move to the center. All this while Dems physically relocate into ever denser urban clusters.
The GOP had a run of ratcheting, when the culture warriors and Neo-cons controlled the thinking. Anyone not onboard with the Bush war was “unpatriotic”. This eventually ran its course and the TEA party rose up to replace it. Ideas over dogma. The Dems can come back, but they need a lot more people to #walkaway–people with power and celebrity. Things will have to get pretty bad (40 red states?) before the coastal enclaves feel compelled to change.
This is partially right, but my observation of the left (I am regularly immersed in lefties) is that this causes less conflict then you imply. The degree to which they are willing to defer to other group identities that are considered more oppressed than they are is remarkable. It drives away fewer people than you’d predict.