And the book is making the case that this had some really broad social benefits. The kind of thing was safe. Progressive people in particular should care about that. Yglesias: It's particularly good for African Americans, for Latinos. It's particularly good for people who had criminal records or other kinds of social problems getting them into the labor market.
And their argument is essentially that it has been a mistake for progressive minded people to sort of leave these monetary issues off the table and to treat it as a nonpolitical, purely technical discussion that there were risks to what Greenspan spend in the late nineties, but there were also benefits to it. And that people who care about politics and people who care about the stuff of politics should take an interest in this and should be engaged on it.
I was very impressed by that book was not a timely or newsworthy kind of subject. But I always remembered it. And then when the financial crisis hit and suddenly the Fed was much more on everybody's cross hairs, it's unlit stuck with me.
And I remember asking in Obama administration officials, why aren't you filling these federal reserve vacancies? Yglesias: Like what do you think? And their answers were very It was like they had a lot of work to do.
They had a lot of stuff to get going and they didn't think it was that important. They didn't have the view that this was a pressing political matter. They thought Ben Bernanke was a very smart, very well qualified guy, that he was doing the best he could, that they had a lot of other problems on their plate and that they were going to work on those.
And that struck me as a mistake at the time. And the more I wrote about it, the more I came to think there was a big error being made there.
Beckworth: So the crisis kind of galvanized your interest, which was already founded on this book. Yglesias: Yeah, exactly. I think everybody started paying more attention to the Fed when it took such a central stage in sort of economic policy.
It had been sort of hiding in the background. I think people involved in financial markets and macro economists knew was important, but Ben Bernanke became a much more recognized figure all of a sudden.
But I felt, and I still feel that people really sort of misunderstood the role of the Fed in the economy and the role of the political system in generating those outcomes. Beckworth: Yes. And I completely agree with that. There's still a lot of learning and educating to do on monetary policy issues, both the left and the right.
A little bit later we'll talk about the right, but right now it's interesting to have you on the program because you can share some perspective based on some of the work you've done. You've worked for the American Prospect, the Center for American Progress, which I think I'm fair and calling progressive left leaning organization.
Is that fair? Given that's the case, you've kind of had an inside view on what the political left thinks about monetary policy. How important is it to them? So I know you've been beating the drums, we need to be on top of this, but what is your sense of the left in general, their interest in Fed policy since ? Yglesias: Yeah, I mean this was a striking thing to me. I was working for think progress, which is a project that center for American progress dies in , sort of crying crisis type years.
And they didn't think anything. As this is a big institution. They do a lot of stuff. Some stuff that's more political, some stuff that's more policy. But on the policy side, they didn't have anything cooking on monetary policy.
It wasn't that they had ideas that I thought were bad. They had no ideas. Nobody who was on staff as a policy expert focused on those topics. Even as really as a significant sideline, they had a clear agenda on climate change. They had a clear agenda on LGBT equality. They have a clear point of view on taxes, on education and all kinds of things.
Yglesias: On monetary issues absolutely not. It was just sort of not something that was considered important to them. I noticed conservative groups American enterprise Institute, Cato Institute tried to play in this realm a little bit more. And since the crisis we've seen Mercatus Institute get more involved and all support games has started at a significant program that focuses on monetary policy. But the more sort of ideological center left groups still really have, but just a kind of a programmatic void there.
I think they are just positively disposed toward Janet Yellen as a kind of a person. She's done one for up Obama but in there, but they don't have a strong viewpoint that they're trying to push. Beckworth: What about the Fed Up movement? Where did that originate in? Is it making any inroads? Yglesias: Yeah, I think that's very interesting. I mean it's good center for popular democracy, which is a progressive group, got some money put together to start a little program focused on monetary issues.
Very much an activist type organization that tries to get people interested in that as a drum up some attention. We're full employment policies. I find that to be very encouraging. But it still leaves actually at a gap between in a sort of full spectrum political movement. You need some level of just kind of like boring guys doing their white papers. We ought to queue and there hasn't been interest in creating that and there hasn't been a ton of take up of Fed-Up kind of issues.
It's also been interesting to see like any activists. They try to push or a variety of different things and they see what catches on with people. And I think their experience has been that when they talked about sort of diversity issues at the fed, they actually got a lot of people interested in that and they wound up leaning a little more on that. Yglesias: We had no African-American governors.
I believe that's changing now. And then there was a lot of interest in that. There's interest in bank regulation aspects getting that stuff right. I mean I do think having an appropriately diverse group of decision makers could ultimately improve monetary policy outcomes, but they were struggling to get constituents who were interested in that.
Just the kind of core topic of, is the Federal Reserve doing enough to promote a labor market recovery? And that was at a time when people had been really obsessed with the state of the labor market. As things improve, I think it's natural that attention has drifted off that kind of stuff. But in , mean people were still rightfully very alarmed about the state of the labor market but not that focused on the primary institution that we've created to be responsible for the health of the labor market.
Beckworth: Well that's interesting. So Fed Up is more of an activist group or the images I see a bit or like t-shirts that save what recovery question Matt kind of get in your face.
I know they were at the Jackson whole meeting, had a meeting with Janet Yellen. But what you're saying is there needs to be that kind of that back room, intellectual support, the arguments to be articulated and white papers and more thoughtful, not just get out and do the activism. Yglesias: I mean activism is important and the certain topics, it really is like the thing that you need.
But at this point, I do think that people on the left probably people on the right to have a real void at this knowledge and education. I mean if you are one of the 80 million people who are thinking about running for president in , and you want to have some meetings with smart people who are like, what should I talk about? If you're a Democrat, you will get people to give you innovative ideas about environmental policy, about civil rights policy, about taxes.
And I think you will really struggle to sit down meeting with someone who's credible, who's thought about this. And who can really say to you, this is what we need to be doing at the fed. Yglesias: This is where we need to be doing to ensure that we have a strong labor market. I thought it was telling, it was recently center for American progress again where I now haven't worked in years, but they came out with this sort of big proposal for what would they characterize as jobs guarantee program.
I wouldn't really call it that, but it was an effort to use public sector employment to really buffer labor market out bounds which shows they're interested in this general subject of like, what do we do to increase labor force participation? What do we do to make sure that we don't have these deep and severe downturns? I think you could make a case that something along the lines of what they're calling for is necessary or useful. Yglesias: But the Federal Reserve and monetary policy are operating in the background of all of that.
And it's completely missing from their report. But if you had a big effort to sort of boost employment through this kind of direct hiring, but the Fed wasn't sold on it, it would wind up purely crowding out. Potentially if you had a Fed that was more vehement about pursuing full funding and policies, this kind of public sector stuff would seem a lot less necessary.
It's the elephant in the room in these policy debates but it's often like no one could see it. Beckworth: Yeah it's a tough topic. And again, one of the reasons I would do this podcast is to hopefully broaden the discussions. So I'm wondering, like at Vox, when guys sit around and think about this issue, it's coming from a practical perspective, how do we make monetary policy interesting.
Did those conversations come up? I mean, do you wrestle with that yourself? Yglesias: Yeah, we do and it's very challenging, especially as we've moved into a more normalized kind of bays and I don't think there's a huge mass interest in exactly what will happen in this June meeting.
The other thing is that the arguments have gotten a little bit tired at this point. I mean, the sort of economics blogosphere in its heyday has a really great, really informative back and forth. Which is great. I love those days. But at a certain point it's like you've gone 80 million rounds with people who believe in monetary impotence and there's like nothing more you can really say about it.
I do think at a certain point, Jenny Yellen is going to have to be replaced. Yglesias: Trump has a bunch of vacancies to fill. Anything that Donald Trump touches suddenly becomes interesting, so people will pay some attention to that. I've been thinking myself about trying to write something, a good headline can change the game on this. And that's part of it is I just need to think like what's the headline for for an article on what we kind of need from a Fed that's in a recovery mode.
But how can we make that recovery being as good as it should be. Beckworth: Yeah. What would be these some counterfactual exercises with you? Let's have some fun. Let's say Hillary Clinton had won. I think we probably both would agree that if she'd won the Federal Reserve kind of would have stayed as it is kind of status quo.
No big changes. But what if Bernie had won? Bernie Sanders had won. That's a far scenario play along with me here. What would the Federal Reserve look like under a Bernie Sanders administration? Yglesias: I mean it's an interesting subject. I think the main focus Fed wise of sort of people in the Bernie orbit is on the bank regulatory side and he is very interested in that subject. It is possible that we would have found ourselves entirely consumed with some kind of controversies efforts to break up the banks.
I also think it's possible that with Bernie we would have gotten the kind of sort of regime change that Christina Wilmer has talked about that a left wing populist getting elected on a kind of big spending program plus making some appointments to back that up would have created some inflationary expectations in a way that I think it could've been helpful to the United States given its actual circumstances.
Yglesias: If you look at when Francois Mitterand took over in France in the early s, you had a financial market reaction that was very counterproductive to the problems that the French economy was actually facing. But if you'd had that same kind of panic in the United States and the winter of , slumping dollar capital outflows, I think people might've actually liked that outcome.
It would have boosted manufacturing employment, been going for the West belt, that kind of thing. I will say though that that Bernie too, I mean, Democrats disagree about a lot of things internally. One thing they all seem to agree on is sort of just neglecting monetary policy issues as significant. Which I think is unfortunate. Beckworth: Interesting. Yglesias: Paul Krugman his old line is that we need someone who could credibly promise to be irresponsible.
And I think Bernie was viewed as potentially irresponsible enough to pull that off. You saw some of that with Trump. It looks like it's faded, but when Trump first came in, it was this kind of Trump reflation where again, I don't want to say that in general, it's a good thing to have a president who people think doesn't know what he's doing. But you saw an inkling there, there was this Trump reflation moment that was actually what we needed at the time.
And it's a little bit unfortunate to see that it's faded away, although that at the same time, the Fed shows the system that we have working as intended. The Fed is meant to be independent from the white house. It appears to still be quite independent from the white house and they are doing what they want to do, which is this kind of very slow but steady recovery. Beckworth: The challenge from my perspective is you want someone in there who can do some regime change, but in an orderly rules-based, predictable manner.
So that's why as you know the arguments for a little targeting that many of us have made would have done that.
So very interesting though to think that Bernie could have come in and done that. Let me move to another area that tends to come up from folks who are either on the left or part of the group that doesn't think monetary policy has much effectiveness. And that is the downside to the Fed's policies of quantitative reason in particular.
Many of them will make the claim that the Fed has increased inequality, particularly wealth inequality. And I think there're some studies that lend support to that. What is your take on that argument? Yglesias: I do think this is a question where you have to say how important is that really? I mean if you could use quantitative easing to drastically reduce the unemployment rate even if wealth inequality went up, because the transition from joblessness to having the job does not actually alter the sort of overall distribution of financial assets that much, you're actually doing an enormous service to people.
I mean, it's important not to let the numbers and the flow of funds report sort of obscure the obvious, which is that the transition from joblessness to having a job is like a huge game changer in people's lives. And the increase in the value of a stock portfolio of someone who's already wealthy is not that big of a deal. You can address that kind of inequality through the tax system or not frankly. Yglesias: If everyone's living standards are rising, I'm not sure how much of a sort of ideological fanatic you have to be to worry too much about inequality under that circumstance.
The other thing is that we could do quantitative phasing in different ways. I agree that the Fed hit upon this strategy. It's an instrument and they say okay, interest rates are down to zero, but we want to do something.
So the thing that they came up with doing was quantitative easing and one of the goals in coming up with an instrument should be to come up with something that the public and the political system feels as legitimate and it seems like quantitative easing really failed at that. It's not rules-based. Nobody can understand exactly what's happening. Even the quantitative nature of it where you announce an amount of purchases rather than announcing a policy goal that you're trying to achieve.
Yglesias: It's always struck me as confusing. I don't know why they do it that way. And doing it through this kind of asset purchases, it seems like it frightens people. And it would be worth coming up with something that people like more. The traditional use of the federal funds rate, I think you could reasonably ask yourself like well, what difference does that make? I mean who even cares?
But it was routinized. It worked well enough. I think my view, and I think it's your view too, is that what's really happening here is that coordinating expectations and it sort of doesn't matter that much what the instrument is, but they should pick something that people either don't care about or feel like they understand what they sent him up with quantitative easing seemed to really, really frightened sort of average people.
It made politicians didn't know what to think about it. I think maybe increased inequality, it doesn't seem like a great choice all things considered.
I want to come back to that later. I think the use of QE, particularly QE two in light of the crisis was scary for many people and made things worse in terms of political capital being spent. But back to your points about the inequality.
I agree with you on them and I think maybe another way to frame it is do the counterfactual know QE. I mean, everyone would have been worse off arguably. I'd come around to the view that I don't think QE packs a lot of punch, but I do think it provided a floor on the economy.
Yglesias: I mean, if the unemployment rate had been way higher, would we be sitting around saying well, stock market's also bad. Beckworth: And that's the thing. And I think people fail to do the right counterfactual. They criticize QE, but they say they don't think about what the alternative would have been. Yglesias: The big problem with QE is that as far as I can tell, it was not that effective.
I think people will dispute this. Ben Bernanki seems to defend it, but there was a large amount of dollars involved, at least it sounded like a really big number. And the impact was not obvious that anyone's lives were improving. And that's always a problem for policymakers. You need to show people the goods.
Beckworth: Yeah, absolutely. I think QE did not live up to the hopes and expectations of Fed officials of many of us. I championed it. I thought it would do more than it did. But again, I think the counterfactual is if the Fed then nothing thinks might've been turned out worse.
Well, let's move on to some of your critiques. You've written quite a bit about the Fed. You had a Fox article, Obama's biggest economic policy mistake. So tell us about the arguments you make in that article. Yglesias: I think you can sum this up pretty quickly, but there was this apparently famous meeting where Obama was talking with his economic policy team and Christina Romer, who was the author of a number of great papers on the potency of monetary policy in these situations is there with him.
And Obama apparently says to her that the Fed has shot it's wide and there's nothing that can be done on that front. She I think said that in her view, that's not correct. But it seems like she was sidelined from future decision making inside the administration, which was very focused on fiscal policy solutions and then ultimately on structural reform type things.
When he came time to appoint a new chairman, it looked like the decision was being made exclusively on bank regulation concerns. Yglesias: Some of the people who Obama of eventually put up there, strike me as excessively focused on financial bubble type concerns. Some of them are good people. I think Lil Brainer has done a lot of good speeches. But it's clear that Obama was aware broadly speaking, of being an analogous to the situation that face Franklin Roosevelt in the 30s, but he did not attempt to really understand and replicate what Roosevelt did with taking the United States off the gold standard.
And we've laid in the economy. He instead operated with this stimulus mindset. He got it done. Once that was done, there wasn't more he actually couldn't do through the legislative channel.
So he did nothing. And I think in a weird way Obama has come in for People on the right nonetheless will want to say like, he made dozens and dozens and dozens of critical errors and he did this wrong and that wrong.
Yglesias: And I really think that's not right. But then there's this Obama kind of hate geography where people want to say that his fans on the center left, he was amazing, blah, blah blah. I really think he only made a couple mistakes. But if you look at the slow pace of recovery in his administration, the mistakes he made must've been really, really bad. And I think that's what happened. I mean, he made the right call on the majority of policy friends, but he got monetary policy wrong and millions of people suffered for it.
And his party suffered for it too. I mean, if you want to know why Democrats did so poorly in the midterms in particular, it's because the recovery policy was so slow and so ineffective and it's not single handedly on his shoulders, but he had an opportunity to push us forward, a much better outcome. And he didn't. Beckworth: The response you got to that article, you got some blow back from the readers and you actually had a second article that came out after that, if I remember correctly.
And the readers are like, no. It was the Republicans obstructionism by the GOP. And you had argued back the fact that he appointed Peter Diamond, that's the person that had ever shown us an example is that he doesn't get monetary policy what it can do.
But I think the response also speaks to the point you've made earlier that monetary policy is hard and a lot of people don't get it. And the fact that they've pushed back the way they did, your article speaks to that. I think there was a desire to Peter Diamond, great economist, somebody who liberal type people really like and respect where his work on pensions and other aspects of social insurance. But again, you need the right tool for the right job.
And you have never seen in successful or failed Obama appointments to the fed, a real effort to drive a more rapid recovery in the bad years or to cement a new full employment consensus as things got better.
Instead, it's a mixed bag. People were getting up there but it seemed like Obama's main concern was always with the Fed is a bank regulator, which I think is an important thing that the Fed does. But of the two things that it does, it's clearly the less important one. Beckworth: So one of your critique is then Obama's, I guess the core critique in that article then is Obama did not have a great monetary theory or a good theory of monetary policy and that was manifested in his inattention to filling the seats.
And some other articles, I think it was in your Fed up article and democracy, you've also were concerned about who he appointed. I know you weren't thrilled about him reappointing Ben Bernanke back the second time. But even Janet Yellen, when you mentioned somewhere I read your improving for the show, you think Janet Yellen hit did not live up to her billing as being this dove.
So I guess here's my question. I wonder to what extent is it that the bureaucracy, the Federal Reserve itself, that when people go into it, they can't be who they want to be? I mean Ben Bernanke, the academic version of Ben Bernanke what he is able to do at the Fed seem to be two very different things.
So I wonder, even if Obama could have understood monetary economics like you do, would he have still facing challenges from the Federal Reserve as an institution? Yglesias: I do think it's true. There is clearly institutional reluctance at the Fed to take certain kinds of actions. That's it. These are the kind of problems that political leaders deal with. I don't fully know exactly what the move would have been, whether it would have been not reappointing Bernanke and putting someone else in, putting someone other than Yellen filling seats earlier, listening to Christina world more, but there was no sign to me.
I'm someone who I live by, I'm working in DC. I spoke to a lot of Obama administration officials many times over the course of the years deleting congressional Democrats. And there is a difference between things that you try to do and fail to achieve, and things that you didn't really try to do.
And moving the Fed toward a more pro-growth, faster recovery, full employment economy is not something that they tried to do. Yglesias: It would be hard to do it, but I think you could have made real meaningful progress.
They just didn't try. The president does not think that it's important. His key economic policy people who he liked and he listened to very smart people, but their focus is elsewhere. You have a limited amount of political capital as a president, there's only so many fights are going to take on. This is somebody he chose to say look, then Bernanke is well-qualified. He's doing good enough. Janet Yellen, she's solid candidate, she's doing good enough and didn't make a big deal about it.
And he got reelected, he left office with a high approval rating. To some extent, there's only so much second guessing you can do. But I think you look at any kind of chart of the state of the labor market under Obama. And that was not a great recovery. He inherited a very bad situation that he had not caused, but we did not get the kind of snap back that even his team initially thought we would get.
Beckworth: Absolutely. I wonder sometimes if this is also a generational thing Janet Yellen, I wanted her FOMC press meeting scientist's conversation with Paul Krugman recently on the podcast, but she mentioned after one of the FOMC meetings, a reporter asked her about the possibility of overshooting.
And she said, there's no way we're going to do that. We're not going to risk or jeopardize return to the s. So there is this fear that, inflation will suddenly take off front away.
And I wonder if it kind of pervades an older generation of economists and maybe it's just going to take time for those who live through this crisis will be less worried about the s inflation than people the age of Janet Yellen. Yglesias: I mean, there's this extremely elegant theory, right about time consistency and monetary policy, which says that a democracy should have a systematic bias toward too much a inflation and to people who lived through the seventies. I think that theoretical literature feels very real.
And I agree that it's actually a very compelling theoretical literature. It just looking around the world, I mean, at the United States, but also Japan, European union, even countries like Israel and UK who've been a little more flexible.
It just doesn't seem to be true that democratic political systems naturally generate too much inflation and that monetary policy makers need to be living to this state of paranoia all the time. I do think at some point, we'll get people born in the late seventies, early eighties, people who lived through the great recession. But it's remarkable to me how little impact the actual lived experience of the years.
Yglesias: through have made on people. I mean, that was, that was really bad. It was a really bad time for America and for the world. And you see with Donald Trump in office, you see Brexit significant destabilization of the political system, occurred as a result. And honestly I don't understand it. I mean, I would not be thrilled if the price of stuff went up a little bit faster.
Now I'm like anyone else? I like cheap stuff. But long-term unemployment, like it's terrible. People's lives are ruined. The British economy I think it's going to take a permanent wound from populism who knows what's going to happen in the United States. You have these technocratic institutions and they're entrusted with a very serious responsibility. And the… it did better than it could have, but not as well as it should.
Beckworth: That's a nice segue into another critique. I want to read an extra per quote I got of yours. It's really fascinating. The idea of a central bank that's independent of day to day politics is a good one. But too often that comes to me and a central bank that's immune from criticism or meaningful supervision. The Federal Reserve systems, current vague mandate needs to be replaced with a specific target to find in law, the public and politicians we like it need to be prepared to hold the system accountable for achieving a target….
Beckworth: …and Congress needs to accept responsibility for picking a target. The dual mandate bag and second, so Congress needs to shore up some responsibility and in sharpen that focus, a second point you make there is independence can run amok. You can actually abuse that privilege as well. So can you speak to those? Yglesias: Yeah, I mean the mandate is stable crisis and maximum unemployment and low interest rates and whatever. It's all very qualitative.
So then the Fed sort of makes up for itself. But that's their own sort of self-generated mandate. Yglesias: Which they're not hitting. And it's a breakdown of independence to me is to say, look, we don't want, like Congress is weird. It's slow, it's confusing. The staff, is very young and underpaid. We don't want like the banking committee making interest rate decisions on a monthly basis. At the same time, they are the Congress, they decide what the government should do.
To me, a reasonable thing would be for Congress to say, here's what we want. Yglesias: I mean, they would have to talk to experts. But comp was something, so we would have a target in law then the central bank would be independent in its conduct of monetary policy. But we could look back at the Humphrey Hawkins testimony and say, ah, okay, so are you guys hitting the target? And if you keep missing the target, then we would say, you guys are screwing up and something could happen.
Or if they are the target. But the public is very upset with macro economic outcomes. The Fed officials could say, look man, it's not our fault. You told us to hit this target. We are hitting the target.
If people don't like the outcomes, we either need to change the target or our problem has nothing to do with monetary policy. Instead, you would always have, would you think it would Bernanke was there these kind of very frustrating back and forth where it seemed like both the members of Congress and the Fed officials themselves were primarily focused on dodging blame.
Yglesias: Everybody agreed that the macroeconomic outcome was bad, but nobody wanted to say, why it was bad? So members of Congress wanted to suggest that the Fed was doing something wrong, but they didn't want to order it to do anything. Bernanke wanted to say, well, no, actually we're doing fine, but your fiscal policy isn't that great. And that's pointless to me. I mean, that's not a good way to sort of structure the government.
And I think it's set up during the crisis years in particular, bad incentives for the Fed where, they never wanted to except sort of ultimate responsibility for macroeconomic outcomes because the outcomes might be bad.
But so consequently they always kind of talk themselves down. The United States, of course, is a long way from a coup. His lead example is from the George W. Bush administration, when liberals were concerned about the president taking power away from Congress.
At the time, of course, Democrats found the view that Republicans might simply ban the use of filibusters for this purpose outrageous. Meanwhile, Republicans who had supported the effort to weaken the filibuster executed a perfect flip-flop in the other direction. During the Bush years, Democratic senators sporadically employed a variety of unusual delaying tactics to stymie his agenda. Suddenly filibustering went from something a Senate minority could do to something it did on pretty much all motions.
Say you want to break a filibuster. On Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on Wednesday. Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. Republicans in Congress subsequently moved beyond unusual acts of obstruction to an unprecedented use of the statutory debt ceiling into a vehicle for policymaking.
Traditionally a bit of oddball American political theater immortalized in a funny West Wing scene , in the GOP threatened to provoke an unfathomable financial and constitutional crisis unless the Obama administration agreed to sweeping spending cuts. Again, there was nothing illegal about what Republicans in Congress did here — it was just, in its intent and its scope, unprecedented. In , Public Policy Polling found that congress was less popular than Genghis Khan, traffic jams, cockroaches, or Nickelback.
In a less joking spirit, Gallup finds that the voters have less confidence in Congress than any other American institution, including big business, organized labor, banks, or television news.
As relations with Congress have worsened, the Obama administration has set about expanding executive authority over domestic policy to match Bush-era unilateralism in the national security domain. The George W. Since Congress no longer really functions, there has been no reauthorization of the law. So the Obama administration has issued waivers — but only to states that implement policy changes ordered by the Department of Education.
Those who like these actions on their merits comfort themselves with the thought that these uses of executive power are pretty clearly allowed by the terms of the existing laws. This is true as far as it goes. This would be considerably more legal than a Zelaya-style effort to use a plebiscite to circumvent congressional obstruction — just a lot more morally outrageous. In either case, however, the practical issue would be not so much what is legal, but what people, including the people with guns, would actually tolerate.
Obama has made his share of mistakes, but the fundamental causes of hardball politics are structural, not personal. Personality-minded journalists often argue that a warmer executive would do a better job of building bridges to congress. Likewise, George W. In a democratic society, elected officials are most directly accountable to the people who support them. They are more ideological, more partisan, and they want to see the policies they support passed into law.
The amateur ideological activists who eroded the power of the party professionals in the s are now running the show. While Gilded Age activists traded support for patronage jobs, modern-day activists demand policy results in exchange for support. Presidents need to do everything within their legal ability to deliver the results that their supporters expect, and their opponents in Congress need to do everything possible to stop them.
At one point, Republican congressional leaders were highly amenable to passing an immigration reform bill and the Obama administration insisted it had no means of circumventing the legislative process. But under pressure from their respective bases, Republicans found it impossible to compromise and Obama decided he had better find a way to go around Congress. It is true that the mass public is not nearly as ideological as members of Congress.
But the mass public is not necessarily active in democratic politics, either. This rise in ideological activism has a number of genuinely positive impacts. It makes politics less corrupt. The least-polarized state legislatures in America are in places like Rhode Island and Louisiana , bastions of corruption rather than good government. But it heightened executive-legislative conflict and leads to what Linz termed the zero-sum character of presidential elections.
The general presumption among elites at the time was that Democrats should accept this with good manners, and Bush would respond to the weak mandate with moderate, consensus-oriented governance. This was not in the cards. A future Republican administration could not only turn back these executive actions, but substantially erode the Affordable Care Act.
The stakes of presidential elections are sky-high. And the constitutional system provides no means for a compromise solution. There can be only one president. In the event of another disputed election, it would be natural for both sides to push for victory with every legal or extra-legal means at their disposal. Indeed, we ought to consider possibilities more disastrous than a repeat of the vote.
What if a disputed presidential election coincided with a Supreme Court vacancy? What if the simultaneous deaths of the president and vice president brought to power a House Speaker from the opposite party?
What if neither party secured a majority of electoral votes and a presidential election wound up being decided by a vote of the lame duck House of Representatives? What if highly partisan state legislatures start using their constitutional authority to rig the presidential contest? A system of undisciplined or non-ideological political parties has many flaws, but it is at least robust to a variety of shocks. Our current party alignment makes for a much more brittle situation, in which one of any number of crises where democratic norms and constitutional procedures diverge could bring us to a state of emergency.
But the reality is that despite its durability, it has rarely functioned well by the standards of a modern democracy. The party system of the Gilded Age operated through systematic corruption. The less polarized era that followed was built on the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans.
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