When You're Way Out of the Money, You Don't Worry About Downside
I’m kind of bored by politics these days, but I’ll jump in briefly to say that Matt Yglesias knows better than this post would suggest about the relative risks to the two parties with respect to health insurance reform. The GOP really has no incentive to cooperate on this, which is why they are being so obstructionist.
If they cooperate, they will not share in the credit for success. I don’t think anyone really disputes this. This is a Democratic piece of legislation championed by a Democratic Administration that campaigned on the issue. On the other hand, they’d face real morale problems from a “base” that is motivated by all-out war. So cooperation has no real upside and real downside.
If they obstruct, then there are two possibilities: something passes, or it doesn’t.
If something passes over their obstruction, and it’s popular, the Democrats benefit. But it’s not obvious that they benefit substantially more than they would if they passed the legislation with GOP help. And voters have notoriously short memories and have not been conspicuous for their long-term gratitude towards either political party. So not much downside to obstruction here.
If legislation fails, the popularity of the legislation becomes irrelevant; what matters is whether failure is popular or unpopular, and who gets blamed for failure. If failure is popular, the GOP benefits enormously. If failure is unpopular, the GOP also benefits, because Democrats – with a big majority – will logically and correctly be blamed for failure.
Matt knows all of his. Ultimately, the argument he needs to make isn’t that the GOP could face downside from obstruction. It’s that moderate Democrats face real risk if no bill passes. Which, as it happens, is almost certainly true: failure would strengthen the GOP across the board, but that’s not going to cost Democrats in safe seats. Rather, it’s going to cost Democrats in marginal seats and, at the extreme, risks the loss of the majority, which hurts all Democratic legislators.
(As an aside: the above analysis is purely tactical. Across-the-board obstruction strikes me as a reasonable tactical approach given the GOP’s actual condition. But whether it’s a smart strategic approach is another story. I don’t think it is – but I don’t think it’s possible to talk about a smart strategic approach in any event when you have a party without leadership and without a willingness to thrash out real differences in public the way, say, the Democrats did in the 1980s.)
As an aside: the above analysis is purely tactical. Across-the-board obstruction strikes me as a reasonable tactical approach given the GOP’s actual condition.
OK. But is it good for the country?
— Freddie · Sep 14, 05:08 PM · #
Well, people who believe in free markets, free trade, low taxes, support for Israel, etc. believe that reducing Democrats’ political power is good for the country. Just as many Democrats argued that flat-out rejection and denunciation of any Bush proposal on Social Security was smart politics and ipso facto good for the country. I’m googling frantically to find where Freddie denounced that approach.
As for the strategy/tactics dichotomy, it’s not clear that any major political change is possible at present. Certainly the Democrats during the Bush II era did not re-think their approach to, say, national security. They waited until the accumulation of failures and disappointments which attend any governing coalition reached a point sufficient to bring them to power.
— y81 · Sep 14, 05:43 PM · #
Dr. Manzi explained to me that politics was about building coalitions and alliances, because no one faction in a democratic meritocracy can claim a majority.
But how does stone-walling on healthcare reform conform to your responsibilities to your allies and shield-comrades?
The “Red Seven”, the southern states that consistantly vote conservative, are some of the states that perform the most woefully in available quality of healthcare in the nation…..
Do you have no responsibility to the base except to scam them out of their votes while you do a head fake on socon issues that are intractible under cultural and demographic evolution?
— matoko_chan · Sep 14, 07:57 PM · #
Hey Noah:
Is there any chance that Republicans might be against this kind of health care reform on principle? Just askin…
Also, I don’t remember the Democrats thrashing out real differences in public in the 80’s. Care to refresh my memory?
— jd · Sep 14, 10:14 PM · #
Can you expand your comment about what the democrats did in the 1980s?
— cole porter · Sep 14, 10:46 PM · #
I wish I had read jds comment three minutes ago.
— cole porter · Sep 14, 10:48 PM · #
“Is there any chance that Republicans might be against this kind of health care reform on principle?”
All things are possible; some are just far less likely than others.
— Steven Donegal · Sep 14, 11:48 PM · #
“Also, I don’t remember the Democrats thrashing out real differences in public in the 80’s. Care to refresh my memory?”
My recollection is that the Democratic nominee in 1992 held positions on capital punishment and welfare that were considered somewhat to the right of the Democratic party in the 1970s. Maybe there were some other things as well.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 15, 12:09 AM · #
I’m googling frantically to find where Freddie denounced that approach.
Do you think it’s good for the country?
— Freddie · Sep 15, 01:46 AM · #
Can you expand your comment about what the democrats did in the 1980s?
You’ve never heard of neoliberalism?
— Freddie · Sep 15, 01:47 AM · #
You know, I used to think that neoliberalism referred to basically leftish political goals, but with the realization that markets are useful tools for reaching those goals. So people like Peter Beinhart, and, I guess, Mickey Kaus or Will Wilkinson. Then I tried digging up that definition, but the only definition of neoliberalism I could find was a resuscitation of classically liberal (i.e., free market) principles among conservatives. So WFB, Reagan, Goldwater, Thatcher.
This would be an excellent opportunity for clarification!
As for whether I think Republican “obstructionism” is good for the country, I think no plan is better than a bad plan. I do wish Republicans would do more to publicize and integrate the 30+ alternative plans that they have floated.
— Blar · Sep 15, 12:44 PM · #
The only odd note I see in this analysis is that you’re viewing the GOP as a monolithic entity while you’re viewing moderate Dems as distinct from Dems in general. Would there not be some districts and states in which voters would prefer a centrist deal-making Republican to a partisan ideologue? If that’s the case, then moderate Republicans, like moderate Democrats, would be motivated to make deals even though it hurt the GOP as a whole.
I haven’t counted state by state and maybe it’s just that the constituencies in which this would be true simply don’t have incumbent Republicans. Or maybe the Republicans just have more intra-party enforcement mechanisms to work as a party rather than as a bunch of legislators.
— Consumatopia · Sep 15, 01:28 PM · #
Freddie: health care is not a personal area of expertise, and it’s a very tough topic. So I’m not your best go-to guy on whether a given bill is good for the country. That’s why I haven’t blogged much about it.
I’m much more inclined to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt on this one than most folks on the right, for five reasons: (1) the right’s arguments against doing anything have mostly been terrible; (2) lots and lots of other countries have health-care systems that provide more universal coverage, and aggregate health outcomes are fairly similar to the U.S.; (3) while health care is not my area, I know too much about insurance companies and how they work generally to feel they make a substantial contribution to the national well-being; (4) I’m also pretty convinced that our system of tying health-care to employment makes our labor market more rigid, and thereby lowers national productivity (though this is equally well an argument for a more classical-liberal reform as it is for national health insurance of some sort); (5) we saw with the Bush drug plan what happens when the GOP tries to do this sort of thing themselves, and I’d much rather see the next GOP administration play the role of reforming whatever reform gets enacted by this administration than see the can kicked down the road and maybe get something actually worse when they take their first crack at it.
But that’s not really your question; your question is whether across-the-board obstructionism is good for the country.
On one level, the answer is clearly “no” because it sets a terrible precedent – if both parties play this way, then governance becomes impossible without an overwhelming majority.
On the other hand, nothing lasts forever. Maybe the next great GOP leader will succeed by running explicitly against this obstructionism, and so it’ll turn out to have been (inadvertently) good for the country. Maybe the obstructionism will backfire and lead to a more progressive set of bills, which will turn out to be good for the country. Maybe it’ll do the opposite – empower the moderates in the Democratic coalition, and lead to a less-progressive set of bills, which will turn out to be good for the country.
On balance, I’d have to say obstructionism for its own sake is bad for the country. But, you know, politicians of all stripes do all sorts of things for partisan and selfish reasons. It’s too high a standard to say, never do this unless it’s good for the country as a whole. Lots of times, it’s a legislator’s job to demand something that is, for example, good for the district but net-net bad for the country.
The real question is how bad. I think you can draw some red lines. Voting for a war one thinks is unwise and/or unjust – or, for that matter, voting against one that one thinks is truly necessary – for reasons of partisan or personal interest crosses a red line for me, for example. I also think the recent habit of holding up Presidential appointments for ridiculous reasons is wholly counterproductive. But total solidarity in opposition to the other party’s legislative agenda is not morally wrong even if it makes it harder to accomplish the people’s business. It’s just one of the things political parties do some time. It may or may not be a mistake, but it’s not a crime.
— Noah Millman · Sep 15, 02:33 PM · #
Blar: “neoliberal” has two meanings, one exclusively in a domestic context and one primarily in an international context.
Overseas, “neoliberal” refers to an agenda to liberate the economy from regulation and the influence of unions, and/or a “hard-money” approach to central banking. When you hear people equating neoliberalism with Thatcherism, they’re talking about the former; when you hear people talking about how the IMF has impoverished the people of the countries they are purportedly helping, they are talking about the latter. Neoliberalism in this sense is indeed about the revival and application of neo-classical economic ideas.
In a purely domestic context “neoliberalism” referred to a variety of efforts to reform liberalism and the Democratic Party – in particular, to make liberalism and the Democrats appeal more to (and work more for) the middle class and to help the Democratic Party transcend the kind of “interest-group liberalism” that plagued it in the 1970s and early 1980s. The term was supposed to be analogous in some way to “neoconservative” but the analogy doesn’t hold on any level – the original neocons were left-wingers like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz who moved rightward and wound up joining the GOP, as well as people like James Q. Wilson who accepted liberal premises about the nature of modern state and society (e.g., that policy should be based on objective social science research) but who came to conservative rather than liberal conclusions about actual policies, and who between them created a distinct variety of conservative thinking. The neoliberals were guys who were always liberals, and Democrats, who saw that both their ideology and their party had gotten stuck in a rut and was not responsive to either the politics or the problems that the country faced, and who tried to respond in a variety of ways that ranged from pure-marketing tactics to institutional innovations within the working of the Democratic party to incorporation of certain conservative ideas to creative rethinking of liberalism from the inside. The 1980s featured a number of big, public arguments over precisely how liberalism and the Democratic Party should change – Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge to Carter and Jesse Jackson’s 1988 primary campaign were both understood as campaigns of “old-time liberalism” against the neos, as was the effort to draft Mario Cuomo in 1992; Gary Hart’s 1984 primary campaign against front-runner Walter Mondale, Al Gore’s 1988 primary campaign, and Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 were all understood as campaigns by neos of different stripes against traditional liberalism.
I basically think the GOP needs to go through something analogous to what the Democrats went through if it is to become an effective party again. But the GOP is pretty far from that point; as evidenced by the 2008 primary campaign and the behavior of the party leadership since then, not only is there no willingness to have a principled fight in public, there’s a hostility to the idea of even admitting to the possibility of disagreement. There’s an interesting argument now happening on the right between so-called “reform conservatives” like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam and authentic “conservative fundamentalists” like Daniel Larison and Austin Bramwell. But this argument is almost entirely taking place between intellectuals outside the realm of actual politics, because the GOP is not, at this point, capable of strategic thinking of any kind.
— Noah Millman · Sep 15, 03:16 PM · #
Consumatopia: Will Rogers once said, “I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.” And that’s still true to a great extent: the Democratic Party’s legislators are subject to far less central control than are those of the GOP. One example: Democrats pick their committee chairs purely by signority; the GOP’s chairs are, I believe, selected by the leadership. That means a liberal Republican like Olympia Snowe is subject has more to lose (potentially) by bucking the party than does a conservative Democrat like Blanche Lincoln.
But it’s also true that the bigger your majority, the more diverse you must necessarily be. If there’s a big Democratic majority, there are more Democrats in vulnerable seats, pretty much by definition.
— Noah Millman · Sep 15, 03:36 PM · #
“lots and lots of other countries have health-care systems that provide more universal coverage, and aggregate health outcomes are fairly similar to the U.S.”
This seems to be saying that whatever is enacted will have no aggregate effect, which is probably true. So I have a hard time seeing how there could be a national interest in one outcome versus another. It’s like who wins the next Super Bowl.
But please don’t turn around and claim that health care reform along the lines of what is currently being debated will actually improve the economy, per Mr. Millman’s point (4). Those other countries that Mr. Millman so admires have, on average, substantially lower per capita GDPs and substantially lower growth rates than the U.S. Which is why Mr. Millman’s friends are constantly trying to make dishonest comparisons, like comparing hourly productivity (which covers up Europe’s monstrous unemployment rates) or comparing GDP using current exchange rates (which made Canada look really prosperous for a while in 2007).
— y81 · Sep 15, 03:42 PM · #
The only scenario where this doesn’t work is if Obama is Roosevelt. It is conceivable for the GOP to lose a generation of voters because the same voters view them as the other that doesn’t care about their type. On the other hand, the benefits of obstruction to the GOP don’t strike me as all that great. My sense is the do-something sympathy is very strong among the public.
— Badger · Sep 15, 09:11 PM · #
Oh, THAT neoliberalism. Oh yeah, I remember that. All that public thrashing that went on. All those public intellectuals doing all that strategic thinking which Republicans only wish they could do. Who doesn’t remember all that knockdown dragout—yet somehow intellectually invigorating and edifying—thrashing back in the 80s?
Noah, Freddie, what are you? About 30, 32? You’ve probably read about that time in books. The only thing going on back then was unity of liberal Dems in hatred of Ronald Reagan, who was going to blow up the world and eat more homeless people. I remember. I hated him, too. I thought he was stupid. I wonder where I got that idea?
No, wait. I didn’t hate Reagan. I couldn’t have hated him. I was liberal then. There weren’t any talk show hosts, so there couldn’t have been any hateful ignorance. It was all intellectually stimulating—(except for that stupid Reagan, and that bigot Falwell and that racist Jesse Helms). Ah, those were the days. When the neoliberals were publicly thrashing and the conservatives were…were…stupid racists, yeah, that’s it, stupid racists.
— jd · Sep 16, 01:44 AM · #
It’s probably worth saying, jd, that I am a much harsher critic of many neoliberals than I am of many conservatives.
— Freddie · Sep 16, 02:10 AM · #
I don’t find it hard to believe at all that you’re a critic of neo-liberals (if they are actually more free-market types as Noah described them), however, I find it hard to believe that you’re more harsh on them than conservatives.
— jd · Sep 16, 12:31 PM · #
Re: If they cooperate, they will not share in the credit for success.
True. But if the reform is successful then it’s no longer a millstone around their necks at election time, a reason for voters to vote Democrat; people will have other concerns in the voting booth and perhaps more of those concerns will favor the GOP. And if the reform is problem-ridden the GOP gains an issue to beat the Democrats up with in an I Told You So vein. The party really needs to look long-term on this one
— Jon · Sep 19, 02:55 PM · #