The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

  CONTEMPT FOR THE POLITICAL CLASS

  A fourth explanation for the degraded state of American politics, which follows from the first three, has to do with the practical failures of politicians and the political elite, individuals who are office holders and their staffs, those who comment on politics and who design and implement public policy.

  The indictment against the establishment includes a detachment from and an indifference toward the hardships facing tens of millions of Americans over the last several years: lost jobs; people dropping out of the labor force; stagnant wages; lack of upward mobility; rising hopelessness and addiction; growing income inequality; soaring health-care costs; failing schools, particularly in our rural communities and urban centers; and an erosion of family and community life.

  Some of that disconnection is the result of callousness, but much more of it is the result of cultural separation and living in a world that is walled off from many of the hardships facing working-class Americans.

  The social scientist Charles Murray refers to the “SuperZIPS,” zip codes that are home to the hyperwealthy and hyperelite. He reports that if you rank all the zip codes in the country on an index of education and income and group them by percentiles, you will find that eleven of thirteen Washington, DC–area zip codes are in the ninety-ninth percentile and the other two in the ninety-eighth. Ten of them are in the top half of the ninety-ninth percentile.26 Translation: lawmakers and their staffs work and live in some of the most elite, rarified air in America. That world is profoundly different from most of the rest of the country and certainly from those parts of the country that are struggling, vulnerable, and in some cases simply dying away.

  To be sure, there has always been an elite in America that was overrepresented in our political institutions, but this tended to happen in eras when public life often brought forward people of exceptional skill and ability. For example, the years immediately following World War II surfaced men like Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state who was the architect of the Truman Doctrine and a proponent of NATO; General George C. Marshall, chief of staff for the army in World War II, secretary of state and defense, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his role in promoting the sweeping economic recovery program for Europe; and George Kennan, American diplomat, historian, advocate for the containment of the Soviet Union, and intellectual darling of the Washington establishment. All were men who were reckoned, even by those who disagreed with them, to be extraordinary doers and thinkers.

  Perhaps the main difference between the elite then and now is competence. The postwar generation achieved extraordinary successes and built institutions and alliances that helped shape the world for generations. People will accept political leaders being out of touch with their everyday concerns so long as they improve their everyday lives. The old elite frequently did; the current elite, much less so.

  I’m not saying the current governing class doesn’t have any successes to their credit; they do. Nor am I saying the problems we face today are simple to solve. They’re not. We’re confronting economic and cultural changes comparable to those that characterized the Industrial Revolution. But the establishment hasn’t found effective ways to assist people through these wrenching transitions. It has barely done a thing to address one of the worst public health crises in American history: the opioid epidemic. (It accounted for more than 47,000 deaths in 2017, while the total number of drug overdose deaths in the US exceeded 70,000.)27 Nor has the governing class reformed and modernized our badly outdated and inefficient institutions—our tax code; our entitlement programs; or our immigration, criminal justice, financial, and education systems.

  To compound matters, both major political parties in America are exhausted and devoid of ideas, often speaking as if the very same solutions they offered a generation or more ago would work equally well today. They won’t.

  It has been said that for Republicans, every day is January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated; and for Democrats, every day is January 20, 1965, when Lyndon Johnson was inaugurated. Those were their halcyon days. But they are gone, and they aren’t coming back.

  Each party is caught in a time warp, in important ways disconnected from the problems of ordinary Americans and so far unable to do much about them. So it’s little wonder that confidence in politics has collapsed.

  KEEPING PERSPECTIVE

  Think of the four factors I’ve identified—rapid demographic and cultural changes, middle-class economic anxiety, polarization, and the failures of our governing class—as tributaries of a roiling river. We’re at the confluence. People are rightfully frustrated that problems are not getting addressed; that the issues provoking stress, fear, and hardship are hotly debated but never resolved or fixed; that the political elites are out of touch with the issues facing most Americans and focus too much on getting reelected at the expense of solving problems. And so it is certainly understandable why the political mood in the country has shifted from long-term frustration and anger to despair and cynicism about the political process.

  But I’d ask you to consider another question: What if those responsible for the problems we face today are not only politicians but also the people who elect them?

  In a self-governing nation, blame for the failures of our politics, just like praise for its successes, doesn’t fall entirely on elected officials. It’s all well and good to bash the political establishment, so long as we bear in mind that “average” Americans—pharmacists and high school teachers, accountants and auto mechanics, police officers and pastors living in Birmingham and Seattle, Salt Lake City and San Francisco, New Orleans and Boulder—have played a part in creating this political system. This is part of what it means to live in a democracy.

  “We assume we are better people than we seem to be,” according to the historian Wilfred McClay, “and we assume that our politics should therefore be an endlessly uplifting pursuit, full of joy and inspiration and self-actualization rather than endless wrangling, head-butting, and petty self-interest.”28

  Don’t forget that “ordinary” Americans elected both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren to the Senate and Jim Jordan of the Freedom Caucus and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, to the House. It’s no surprise they clash; and many Americans want them to clash, to confront the opposition, to fight for their values.

  Moreover, majorities of partisans have deeply unfavorable views of people in the other party. As William Galston points out in his book Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy, recent survey data show that members of each party increasingly see the other party as immoral and closed minded, not just misguided but an actual threat.29

  Our politics is deeply divided because we the people are deeply divided.

  But even as we marvel at the challenges we face, we must also be careful about overstating our problems by romanticizing the past. The United States has faced political crises and polarization well beyond what we’re experiencing, the most obvious example being a brutal Civil War that claimed 700,000 lives in a nation of just over 30 million (the equivalent of 7 million Americans dying today).

  And there have been other periods of turbulence, including the late 1960s, which was marked by widespread race riots and the Vietnam War, by Kent State and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, by the bloody 1968 Democratic Convention and the trial of the Chicago Seven, by the counterculture revolution and the sexual revolution. The United States experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in just eighteen months in 1971 and 1972, almost five a day.30 And when it comes to political scandals, let’s not forget Watergate, which in 1974 brought down a president and, in the process, deeply divided the nation.

  As for the rancor in our elections, it has been a feature of American politics for as long as we’ve been a nation. The first real political campaign in American history, between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1800, is regarded by scholars as among the nastiest campaigns in Ame
rican history. According to Kerwin Swint, author of Mudslingers, “It reached a level of personal animosity that almost tore apart the young republic and has rarely been equaled in two hundred years of presidential politics.”31

  The 1872 election between Ulysses S. Grant and Horace Greeley is a race the New York Sun said deteriorated into “a shower of mud.” It wasn’t much better a dozen years later, during the 1884 race between Grover Cleveland and James Blaine, when Cleveland was accused of fathering a child out of wedlock. This led supporters of Blaine, who was himself something of an ethical mess, to chant what became a national slogan: “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” (After Cleveland won the election, his supporters answered: “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”) And despite the deep differences between political figures today, they don’t settle their differences the way Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr did, by duels at ten paces with flintlock pistols. Nor have we seen anything like the bloodshed in 1856 on the floor of the US Senate, where a Southern congressman beat a Northern senator to within an inch of his life—and for his crime was lauded as a hero throughout the South.

  THE WAY FORWARD

  We shouldn’t assume, then, that we’re in wholly uncharted territory. The problems we’re facing are nowhere near the worst we’ve faced. And truth be told, politics has been more corrupt in the past than it is today, if only because things are more open and transparent than before.

  “I’ve studied American political corruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and, if anything, corruption was much more common in much of those centuries than today,” according to Larry J. Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.32 What has skyrocketed, he argues, is the public perception that politicians are corrupt.

  That kind of perspective tells us things could be worse. But that doesn’t mean our problems are not grave and getting more so. Our political culture is sick. And some of the challenges that characterize this particular moment—the cacophonous, zero-sum nature of our debates; the rampant political tribalism; the fragmentation of the media; the fact that our politics seems to be increasingly trapped in a post-truth world—are worse than I’ve witnessed in my thirty-five-year career in politics. If they don’t change, if we don’t first rapidly decelerate and shift course, we may well be involved in a ferocious collision. Today’s cycle of recriminations and bitterness, instead of abating, will give way to even greater animosity and spreading violence. That is what I am describing as the death of American politics, when the traditions that have kept us moving forward through past crises have been so undermined that they can no longer function. That is what gives urgency to thinking straight about politics. Because even great countries can decay and hollow out.

  This may be the hardest moment, but it is therefore the best time, to be reminded of our past and to make the case that politics is a necessary activity and a moral enterprise. We have a history of many good and able politicians who dedicated themselves to improving people’s lives. Yes, politics is part of our problem—but the tradition of American politics can also be part of the solution. The idea that politics will always be as it currently is—that what we’re experiencing today is the new and enduring normal, that things can’t get better and will only get worse—is a fatalistic trap. We have to avoid it. We must get reacquainted with our history and tradition and find ways to renew and reapply them.

  So the task before us, which we will explore in this book, is how we can rediscover, refine, and recalibrate—and in some cases, reenvision and rethink—how we understand politics; to disentangle what politics has become from what it can be, to clear away some of the misconceptions, and to sketch a road map for recovery.

  The solution to what ails us lies in large part with changes in attitude, in unlearning some things and in relearning others. We have to reestablish certain fundamentals and be willing to accept that politics is a difficult and sometimes messy business.

  “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men,” George Orwell said. Certain things about politics and citizenship that were once obvious no longer are.

  Politics is an imperfect profession in an imperfect world. It will never be as good as we want, but it can surely be better than it is. Right now our politics is not equal to the challenges we face. For America to get better, its politics needs to get better. And, yes, for politics to get better, America must get better, too. That’s where citizenship comes in.

  To be a citizen means to be a participant in civic life, not just a spectator. It means taking the time to be informed and voting in local, state, and national elections. It means seeing the problems America faces for what they are, apportioning in a fair-minded way responsibility for what has gone wrong, and taking ownership of our nation. To be a public-spirited citizen means knowing our history and our stories, the foundations of our political system, and being civically literate.

  But that’s not all. Responsible citizenship means rewarding leaders who demonstrate integrity and appeal to our better angels rather than our worst impulses, and caring enough about truth to reject propaganda and lies from politicians, pundits, and presidents who spew them.

  Being a good citizen means appreciating how our system works, accepting the inherent messiness and difficulty of the process, and engaging the system so that its focus is on solving the problems before us. It also means treating others with whom you have political disagreements as something other than enemies of the state. Being a good citizen means showing some understanding and empathy for those who hold views different than our own, and venturing out of our ideological bubble. And it means becoming a healing agent in our communities and in individual lives.

  If our passions are running too high, they can be cooled. If we’ve become too indifferent to politics at the local and national levels, we can reengage. If we want to learn how those from the past have overcome circumstances more difficult than our own, we can consult history. We can also, in our daily lives, do more to cultivate a sense of gratitude. People who are grateful are more able to dispense grace to others. Gratitude finds ways to express itself; the result is a more humane, decent, and merciful society and political culture.

  All of that is easy to say, of course, and harder to do. But it can be done—beginning with understanding the key ideas that have helped shape our politics.

  Chapter 3

  What Politics Is

  Before we can repair the state of politics in America, we must first grasp not only what we mean by politics but also what is distinctive of its expression in the United States. Contempt for our political practices, even if it is unintentional, denigrates the historical efforts that went into their formation. Much sweat and blood (literally) went into how we developed our traditions; we therefore have a responsibility not to throw away their contributions or our inheritance quite so casually.

  My first foray into the nitty-gritty of American politics came early in my career. In 1986, at the tender age of twenty-five, I got an unexpected invitation from the US secretary of education. Bill Bennett, one of the more imposing figures in the conservative movement, wanted me to write speeches for him. I happily agreed. I started at the Department of Education a few months later, and so began my career in government and a close personal relationship with Bennett.

  But it was by following him to his next job that I saw more vividly the horror of what can happen when politics fails. During Bennett’s tenure as education secretary under President Reagan, Bennett showed a special interest in the harmful effects of drug use on students, and so it was no surprise that in 1989 he was appointed by the newly elected president, George H. W. Bush, to be the first director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy—or “drug czar,” as he was better known. Then, as now, America was facing a drug epidemic.

  When President Bush offered him the post of director of the drug policy office, Bennett agreed, and I tagged along with him in the role of special assistant—speechwr
iter, advisor, traveling companion.

  Bennett’s tenure didn’t last long—less than two years—but during that period he traveled to dozens and dozens of communities, many of them ravaged by drug use. He visited drug treatment facilities, schools in drug-infested neighborhoods, and neonatal intensive care units where “cocaine babies”—born to addicted mothers—struggled to survive. Many of those infants suffered low birth weight, severe and often permanent mental and physical dysfunction or impairment, or signs of drug dependence. Many other such babies—born many weeks or months premature—did not survive past infancy. Experts on child abuse told us time and again that drugs caused a dramatic increase in child abuse and neglect, as crack cocaine turned parents violent and paranoid. Neighborhoods were turned to battle zones.

  This was the dark underside of American life, the one most wealthy, upper-middle-class, and middle-class people never saw or wanted to ignore. But life for the less fortunate was sometimes lived in conditions reminiscent of what the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called a “state of nature”—the “natural condition of mankind” that would exist if there were no government, no laws, no order. In Hobbes’s state of nature, life is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.”

  From this I not only learned about the complexity and real suffering behind the problems making their way into our headlines, but I also witnessed something else: what life is like when society breaks down and politics fails, even in a nation as rich and stable as America. Drug epidemics are not fundamentally a function of bad public policy or poor decisions by politicians, yet their emergence and the damage they cause pose challenges that only a society with a functional politics can hope to address. Like many of our society’s deepest troubles, they offer reminders of why politics matters.