There has been much discussion this week about the launch of No Labels and its significant attempt to organize the cause of political moderation and bipartisan compromise into a movement. I hope it can succeed. But it’s worth reflecting for a moment on why political compromise is so hard these days, and the obstacles that a movement organized around the ideal of a politics of consent and compromise faces.

Fortunately, two very smart political thinkers have done exactly this, so my work in this post is merely to summarize and reflect a little on their arguments. In an important essay entitled “Mindsets of Political Compromise,” UPenn President Amy Gutmann and Harvard Political Theorist Dennis Thompson have made what strikes me as a very trenchant observation: “The more that campaigning comes to dominate governing in democratic politics, the harder compromise becomes.”

Gutmann and Thompson argue that there are two primary mindsets in politics – the uncompromising mindset and the compromising mindset.

The uncompromising mindset is the mindset of the modern campaign, which “favors candidates who stand firmly on their positions.” Campaigning is about drawing distinctions and standing by principles, as it should be – voters need to know the difference between two candidates to make informed choices.

In their conception, this uncompromising mindset has two elements: “principled tenacity” and “mutual mistrust.”

Principled tenacity rests on the widely-held assumption that politicians are supposed to have deeply felt moral principles about things like justice and fairness, and they should fight for them.

Mutual mistrust is “the assumption that their opponents are motivated mainly by a desire to defeat them and their principles.” This often leads to cynicism, and they write that, “as the cynicism about the motives of politicians spreads to cynicism about the process of compromising, particular compromises become easier to resist and condemn.”

By contrast, the compromising mindset is, or should be, the mindset of governing, since reaching solutions in a democracy almost always requires some compromise. It also has two elements: “principled prudence” and “mutual respect.”

Principled prudence is based on “a pragmatic recognition that compromise is usually necessary in a democracy to accomplish anything of significance.” But it does not amount to mere compromise for the sake of compromise. It is instead a recognition that even if politics is the art of the possible, sometimes nothing is still better than the possible.

Mutual respect is the assumption that even if political opponents may have ulterior motives, they are still capable of negotiating in good faith and for what they think is right and that they are acting on principle.

Gutmann and Thompson argue that, “to reach a compromise, then, politicians must adjust their wills as much as their reason. They must be able to turn a will to oppose into a will to cooperate. That involves a psychological shift as much as a policy change.” They spend some time in their piece tracing out procedural ways to encourage politicians to find more common ground and be more aware of these different mindsets. (You can read the whole piece here)

Thinking in terms of mindsets is useful, because it clarifies just how different and incompatible the processes of getting elected and governing have become.

What this implies is that political moderates who care about the process of governing ought to get serious about campaign reform issues. Put simply, the permanent campaign increasingly means a permanent incapacity of elected officials to collectively solve problems. If politicians are spending all their time bashing their opponents and standing firm for their principles, that doesn’t leave them much time to get together to actually govern productively.

A slight caveat to this is that, as I’ve written in a recent op-ed for Politico, there is good evidence that the voting public, especially Democrats and Independents, do like compromise. And voters may even reward politicians who are seen as being willing to compromise. However, I’m aware of few campaigns organized around the claim of “I’m willing to compromise with the opposing party, so elect me.” All campaigns, as far as I can tell, are about drawing distinctions, even if it’s between a candidate who’s post-partisan and independent and one who’s not.

Photo Credit: Trebor Sholtz

Today, the latest Gallup poll finds that 66 percent of Americans support both extending  tax cuts on all Americans for two years and an equal 66 percent support extending unemployment benefits for two years. This is very good news for Obama and a good sign this could be a turning point as he attempts to rebuild his popularity and the bargaining power that comes with it. It’s been a long time since two-thirds of voters approved of anything so high profile that Obama supported.

Moreover, as much as the liberal base may carp about the deal (as they should), the fact that Obama was able to broker a major compromise in and of itself should give him a bounce. As I wrote in a recent Politico op-ed, Americans, especially Democrats and those fickle independents, like leaders who are willing and able to compromise.

Another recent Gallup poll underscores this point. By a 47-27 percent margins, Americans say it is more important for political leaders to compromise to get things done than to stick to their beliefs, with Democrats and Independents much more inclined to prefer compromise. This Gallup poll also found that 36 percent of voters thought Obama was willing to compromise but Republicans were not, whereas 17 percent thought Republicans were the compromisers and Obama was the obstacle. (Another 25 percent thought both sides were willing, and 16 percent thought neither side was willing.)

The President is presumably most interested right now in rebuilding his popularity, which is hovering around 46 percent these days.  Presumably the calculus in the Oval Office is (I think correctly) that the frustrated swing voters who will decide the 2012 elections want a leader who is pragmatic and is not going to hold up their tax cuts or their neighbor’s unemployment benefits for that ubiquitous epithet of a justification, “political purposes.”

By playing the role of compromiser, he’s: a) playing to his political strength, since voters are much more likely to see Obama as the leader in brokering compromise than his Republican counterparts; and b) playing to the voters most likely to vote Democratic in November 2012, since Democrats and Independents genuinely prefer compromise to sticking to strong positions.

Meanwhile, the lefties have every right to complain and they should. To the extent that Obama can have a few public fights with his liberal base, this will probably help him to regain some popularity among swing independent voters, and with it, the political capital that will allow him to start future negotiations with Republicans in a stronger position. Which should ultimately lead to more progressive outcomes.

Those who think it’s some sort of partisan exaggeration to say that today’s Republican Party has moved into some pretty extreme ideological territory should pay some attention to the latest conservative craze in state capitols and even in Washington: the so-called Repeal Amendment.

The bright idea here is to amend the U.S. Constitution–if necessary by a state-called Constitutional Convention–to allow two-thirds of state legislatures to nullify federal legislation whenever it pleases them.

Here’s how Dahlia Lithwick and Jeff Sesol of Slate characterize the Repeal Amendment:

There is so much wrong with the Repeal Amendment that it’s difficult to know how to begin to respond. The Constitution is–by design–a nationalist document. It is also–again by design–an anti-democratic document. American history reveals precisely what happens when state or regional interests are allowed to trump national ones, and the Constitution has been at its best (for example, the Reconstruction Amendments) when it has addressed (and, better yet, resolved) that tension.

They don’t even get into the potential issues with a constitutional convention, which according to some scholars, cannot be limited to any one issue and could fundamentally rewrite the Constitution.

But crazy as it is, the Repeal Amendment is getting some real momentum, not least because it’s been embraced by the number two Republican in the U.S. House, Eric Cantor:

[J]ust two months after the proposal was a twinkle in a Virginia legislator’s eye, the leadership of nine states is showing interest, and the popularity of the amendment’s Web site (they have them nowadays) has “mushroomed.” And this week, completing the proposal’s rapid march from the margins to the mainstream, Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah introduced the amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives, pledging to put “an arrow in the quiver of states.” The soon-to-be House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, said this week that “the Repeal Amendment would provide a check on the ever-expanding federal government, protect against Congressional overreach, and get the government working for the people again, not the other way around.” Fawning editorials in the Wall Street Journal and chest-heaving Fox News interviews quickly followed.

This is just nuts, and defenders of the sweet reasonableness of the GOP need to acknowledge it.

This article is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Photo credit: Kim Davies

As the new Republican House majority settles in and tries to figure out exactly which issues and positions to take, a new poll from Gallup highlights just how difficult it will be to keep the coalition of swing independents, old-fashioned Republicans, and tea partiers together.

The problem, in short, is this: Both Republicans and Independents prefer Tea Party-backed Republicans to old-fashioned Republican leaders in Congress. But at the same time, by a 51-to-39 percent margin, Independents are concerned that Republicans will go too far in trying to reverse the Democrats’ policies. In other words, good luck, Speaker Boehner: If you aren’t aggressive enough, you will lose the mad-as-hell Tea Party voters. But if you are too aggressive, you will lose the majority of independents who are worried you are going too far. And you’ll need to please both to keep your majority.

As we know, Independents broke 56-to-38 percent for Republicans in the Mid-Term Election after breaking strongly for Democrats in the prior two elections, giving Republicans the keys to the House and tightening the balance in the Senate. Looking at the Independents’ preferences for who they say they want as the key policy player, we can see that those who voted Republican prefer Tea Party-backed Republicans by a 32-23 margin, an even more sizable balance than registered Republicans. (I’m admittedly interpolating here a bit, assuming (safely, I think) that those who voted Republican want Republicans to be in charge)

However, things get a little more complicated when we consider the next result of the poll: Independents, by a sizeable majority (51-to-39) are more worried that Republicans will go too far in reversing Democrats’ policies than that they will not go far enough.  In other words, the majority of Independents are not radicals, even if the plurality supports the Tea Party.

At first this seems like a bit of a puzzle. One possibility is that the except for the third of Independents who want the Tea Party to be in charge, almost all the rest are worried about Republicans going to far.

But here’s what I see as the more likely explanation: swing Independents are frustrated with the state of the economy, and see Washington politics-as-usual as a reasonable culprit. The Tea Party brand has tapped into that frustration. But swing Independents, who abandoned Republicans in 2006 and 2008, are not exactly running back to the Republican Party with open, loving arms. To them, the Tea Party taps into the “we don’t like either party, but we’re not happy, so we’ll vote out the incumbent” rationale.

As a recent Pew poll demonstrated, only 48 percent of respondents felt happy about the Republicans’ victory the day after the election, and only 41 percent of respondents approved of the Republican’s policies and plans for the future – significantly lower numbers than both 1994 Republican victory or the 2006 Democratic victory.

I see a mixed message from the angry swing vote: we’re mad as hell, but we’re also kind of moderate. We’re not happy with the way things are going, but we’re not sure we want a dramatic change either. We want to send a message, but we hope you don’t take that message too seriously.

Just as Democrats found these voters impossible to satisfy after winning their support in 2006/2008, my prediction is that Republicans will find them equally difficult to satisfy.  Once Republican leadership has to make choices and register votes, they will learn that you can’t please all the people all the time, and these days, it’s increasingly hard to even please some of the people, some of the time.

In the wake of the mid-term elections, it makes sense that those on the political right would try to claim that there has been a fundamental “right turn” among voters, just as many on the left claimed but two short years ago that there had been a fundamental “left turn” among voters.

Those on the right predictably have seized on the fact that now 42 percent of the U.S. population identifies as conservative, a 20-year high, and that conservatives in 2010 broke 86-14 percent for Republicans, a 30-year high.

Consider the Gallup political ideology poll, which shows an uptick in the number of self-identified conservatives in the electorate:

Over at The Democratic Strategist, Ed Kilgore and Ruy Teixeira have counter-argued that what we are seeing is not so much a shift to the right, but rather more Republicans and Republican leaners choosing to identify as “conservative” rather than moderate.  I think this is largely right, though not the whole story.

The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost, however, has some problems with the Kilgore/Teixeira analysis:

If we follow Gallup, we’d draw two conclusions: (a) the increase in self-identified conservatives in the broader public has increased more than Teixeira and Kilgore acknowledge; (b) conservatives were not over-represented as a share of the electorate in 2010, but rather were under-represented in previous cycles.

Cost’s argument is slippery for a number of reasons. First, it’s not that Kilgore/Teixeira don’t acknowledge the increase in self-identified conservatives. It’s just that they ascribe it mostly to Republicans becoming more conservative, which, again, I think is probably the case.

Second, the claim that conservatives were under-represented in previous cycles seems to rely on an assumption that only now, in 2010, did many voters wake up to the fact that they indeed were conservative, after thinking for all these years that they were moderate. At last, perhaps thinks Cost, the fog has lifted!

A couple of additional considerations:

First, when you look at the balance of responses over 20 years, the balance is remarkably stable. Sure, it goes up and down, but “liberal” stays between 16 and 22 percent, conservative stays between 36 and 42 percent, and moderate (with the exception of its high point of 43 in 1992) stays between 35 and 40 percent. As Prof. James Stimson has shown (see here), the mood of the public goes back and forth between liberal and conservative. And power oscillates back and forth between the two parties in semi-predictable patterns

And there is good reason for this. The public is fundamentally moderate, and any time our winner-take-all system of elections produces a result that gets too far away from the moderate public, the electorate produces a response within a few cycles.

So, if there is a rightward shift, it’s probably only going to be a short blip, no more permanent than the supposed left turn of 2006-2008. Cost, to his credit, recognizes that the bump-up is more of a blip than a turning point. He also puts a good deal of hope (probably fairly placed) in the fact that Republicans will now be in charge of redistricting and Republican voters are better spread out while Democrats are more concentrated in urban districts

The second caveat is about the meaning of the word “conservative”

According to research by Chris Ellis and James Stimson, some people genuinely know what it means to a conservative in the current political debate, and indeed express matching preferences across all issues. But these “constrained conservatives” (as Ellis and Stimson call them) account for only 26 percent of all self-identified conservatives.

More common are the “moral conservatives” (34 percent), who think of themselves as conservative in terms of their own personal values, be they social or religious. And they are indeed right leaning on social, cultural, and religious issues. But they also like government spending on a variety of programs and generally approve of government interventions in the marketplace, hardly making them true conservatives.

And still others, “conflicted conservatives”  (30 percent), are not conservative at all on the issues. But they like identifying themselves as conservatives. To them, it somehow sounds better. Or at least, they like it better then their other choices in the traditional self-identification questionnaire: moderate and liberal.

A smaller group of self-identified “conservatives” (10 percent) could be classified as libertarian – conservative on economic issues, liberal on social issues.

In other words, just because people identify as conservatives doesn’t mean that they are actually true conservatives . There are numerous reasons why they might identify so. It has long been the case that that the American public, on average, is operationally liberal and symbolically conservative. That is, that when asked about specific “liberal” government programs – be they spending on education, environmental protections, regulation of business – the majority of voters consistently say they approve. But when asked to self-identify themselves as liberals, moderates, or conservatives, many of the same voters say they are “conservative.”

So here’s my guess, though we don’t have the data to prove it (yet): part of what appears to be a rightward shift is Republicans identifying more as conservatives and less as moderates, as Kilgore/Teixeira argue, and part of the shift is more people attaching themselves to the conservative label because they like the branding of conservative as sober and responsible, and at a time of growing deficits, like associating themselves with the brand.

The challenge for conservatives will be to resist interpretations  that assume America has made a rightward turn and is now (finally!) on the road to truly embracing real conservative values. It hasn’t. This election was far more a rejection of Democrats who failed to turn around the economy in short order and whose unified control of government made some moderate voters more uncomfortable than they expected in 2006 and 2008.

If I were a gambling man (and I’ve been known to make the occasional political bet), I would gamble that 42 percent marks a high-water mark for conservatives in the electorate. Simple reason: history shows that these things go up and down, and are pretty stable.

Finally, the demographics matter. According to a new study from Project Vote, turnout among key Democratic constituencies dropped off drastically between 2008 and 2010. Young voters, down 55 percent; African-Americans, down 43 percent. Hispanics down 40 percent. These groups, particularly young voters, and Hispanics, are the future of the electorate. When they come back and vote in 2012, it will be a whole different ballgame.

Brookings Institution congressional scholar Thomas Mann is hardly known as a partisan bomb-thrower. A frequent co-author of books and articles on Congress and American politics with the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein, Mann is a model of sober and intelligent commentary, calling things as he sees them.

That reputation makes his recent comments on the state of our politics particularly noteworthy. In an interview with Time’s Jay Newton-Small, here’s what Mann had to say:

There is simply no basis for meaningful bipartisan leadership meetings today. Republicans are determined to defeat Obama in 2012; they have no interest in negotiating with him in order to provide him any sort of victory. This is a partisan war and the Republicans are playing to win. The only question is how long it will take Obama to accept this reality and act accordingly.

To hear, say, bloggers vent this way would be expected; to hear Mann, a scholar ensconced in the establishment, speak so plainly underscores the enormity of the problem. Our politics is broken and Mann, correctly, identifies Republican cynicism as its primary cause. Today’s GOP has become slave to the Rush Limbaughs, Glenn Becks, and Sarah Palins. Where are the Olympia Snowes, the Susan Collinses, the George Voinoviches? Why aren’t they banding together with the moderates and liberals on the other side of the aisle to demand a restoration of reasonable discourse? Are the imperatives of electoral politics so strong as to short-circuit any attempt at good-faith governance? (The question, perhaps, answers itself.)

In a follow-up exchange with Greg Sargent, Mann offered a more specific vision of what Obama should do:

With no expectations of passing important new legislation or of garnering anything from Republicans in Congress but political bait, he should pursue his substantive agenda where he can act on his own and use Congress as a place to submit a genuinely serious set of proposals to deal with the country’s more serious challenges (with no expectation that any will pass) and couple them with high visibility straight talk to the American people about the course he is proposing.

If the last two years are any indication, the next two will bring only further distress and disappointment for that vanishing few in Washington who still believe in that old dream of deliberative democracy. But gridlock need not be inaction, and Mann’s advice is spot-on. For the President to regain control of his presidency, he needs to engage in that thing he seems to have been averse to thus far: politics. Use the bully pulpit. Engage in a bit of gamesmanship. Promote his vision of the good society – and make explicit why the conservative vision is the wrong one for the country. Shifting the dynamic between a feral House and a technocratic White House is one of two prerequisites (the other being an improved economy) if we are to preserve any hope of advancing progressive priorities in the time that remains in his first term.

Book Review: The Disappearing Center, By Alan Abramowitz

That our politics are now deeply polarized is a well-known fact. But do the polarized politics in Washington reflect the deep divides in the country between red and blue voters (and their respective desires for increasingly opposite policies on both sides)? Or do these elite divisions exist in spite of an essentially purple, moderate America?

Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, is on the side of Washington as mirror of a deeply fractured electorate rapidly losing its political middle. His new book, “The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy” is the story of how voters migrated to the extremes over the last five decades.

Essentially, four big, interlinked things happened. The first is that the parties “sorted” better. The second is that the number of safe districts and safe states increased. The third is that Americans as a whole became more educated. The fourth is that the engagement gap between strong partisans and political moderates widened.

In their 1960 plumage, Republicans and Democrats were both diverse species, loose-fitting labels that meant very different things depending on where you were from. Northern “liberal” Republicans and Southern “conservative” Democrats made up large minority factions, and both often found more common cause with their fellow “liberals” or “conservatives” across the aisle than their fellow partisans. In such an environment, bipartisanship was the norm, rather than the exception.

Then the tumultuous ‘60s shook the snow globe of American politics. The fight over civil rights broke the Democrats’ hold on the “Solid South,” turning Southern Democrats into Republicans. The Republican center of gravity gradually migrated deep below the Mason-Dixon line, taking on a much redder hue: much more socially conservative, more skeptical of government. Democrats, meanwhile, freed from the need to keep placate the conservative southerners, grew bluer: more socially liberal, and less skeptical of government.

Once upon a time, congressional districts were highly competitive, and a Democrat (or Republican) had to be sensitive to the concerns of voters in the competing party to maintain a seat. Even as late as the 95^th Congress (1977-1978), only 24 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of Republicans were in “safe” districts; By the 108^th Congress (2004-2005), 49 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans were in “safe” districts. The consequence: they were far more likely to be worried about fending off extreme challengers in their primaries than about winning the general election by moving to the center. Thus, more extreme politicians replaced more moderate ones.

In 1976, the eight most populous states were all battleground states in the presidential election, and the average winning margin among them was 3.1 percentage points. In 2004, only four of the eight most populous states were battlegrounds, and the average winning margin in the eight states was 9.3 percentage points. Thanks to both realignment and demographic change, Abramowitz writes, “Red states, counties, and congressional districts have been getting redder while blue states, counties, and congressional districts have been getting bluer.”

At the same time, the American public got a whole lot better educated. In 1956, 37 percent of Americans had only a grade school education, and just 19 percent had some college; in 2004, only three percent of Americans had just a grade school education, and 61 percent had at least some college.

This matters, Abramowitz argues, because “College-educated citizens are generally more interested in politics, more politically active, and better informed about candidates and issues than high school-educated citizens. This is especially true with regard to one important form of political engagement: ideological awareness.”

So: the parties got better sorted into distinct camps, districts became less competitive, and an increasingly educated electorate was better able to pick up on the differences and to respond accordingly, sorting themselves likewise into the appropriate categories. Abramowitz notes that especially among the better educated, there has been increased “partisan-ideological polarization” – that is, that high-information liberals are indeed reliably liberal across all issues, and high-information conservatives are reliably conservative across all issues.

All of this polarization has actually been good for political engagement generally. Abramowitz cites numerous measures of a public that now cares more about politics, follows it more closely, and talks about it more to their friends – partly because they are more educated, and partly because if the parties are highly polarized, the stakes of political victory are significantly greater (high stakes are a terrific motivator.)

But, at the same time, a certain slice of the electorate has been left behind: “The American public appears to be increasingly divided into two groups,” writes Abramowitz, “the politically engaged, who view politics in ideological terms, and the politically disengaged, who do not.”

For example, 56 percent of strong liberal or conservatives reported being politically engaged in 2004, as compared to 36 percent of those who “lean” liberal or conservative, and just 20 percent of those who say they are moderate, or of no ideology.  In the 1950s, this gap did not exist.

To Abramowitz, the story of the disengaged moderates is mostly a story about less-educated, less-engaged citizens who don’t know or care enough about politics to pick a side. Were they to get wealthy and educated, like the partisans, they would presumably then know enough to pick one of the two distinct teams in American politics. But lacking the means or the will to pick a side, they call themselves moderate, feel disengaged and disenchanted by politics, and try to get on with the business of making a living.

On the descriptives, The Disappearing Center is a terrific compendium to what’s happened. The parties have pulled apart, and in particular strong partisans on both sides are further apart than ever before. There are fewer competitive states, fewer competitive districts, and politicians who dare to compromise are increasingly punished.  Nor is this likely to change: “A coalition of moderates is no longer possible because the center is a shrunken remnant of what it was forty or fifty years ago,” concludes Abramowitz. The forecast is for more partisan rancor, far as the eye can see.

But the analysis lacks in a few areas. For one, Abramowitz doesn’t engage with the possibility that political moderates have become less engaged out of frustration with extremism; his preferred explanation is that they remain moderate only out of an ignorance of the stakes involved. More frustratingly, his analysis is based heavily on reported self-identifications, rather than actual issue positions, and the issues he choose to measure polarization tend to be particular hot-button issues, like abortion and the Iraq war. More thorough issue-based measuring of public opinion (see, for example, Morris Fiorina’s Disconnect, or Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron’s research on leapfrog representation) has found a much more moderate public on the issues, a public that has been left behind by two increasingly extreme parties.