Afterword and Foreword

This post is both an afterword to my last post and a foreword to a series I want to post in a very slow and meandering fashion.  I been obsessed for some time with how democratically elected governments fail. I only know much detail about two examples -- Germany and the United States.  (And let's face it.  When democratic politics fail to resolve the foremost issue of the day, resulting in a civil war with 600,000 dead, that has to be considered a failure of democracy).

At the same time, it is inspired in large party by a comment to a prior post in which I measured the traits professional historians associate with fascism against the Tea Party to see how they match up.  My conclusion:  The Tea Party has several of fascism's mobilizing passions but lacks a charismatic leader.  If it adopts charismatic leader like Ted Cruz, it would meet most of the mobilizing passions.  It has two out of three fascist negations, i.e., it is anti-radical and anti-liberal, but not anti-conservative.*  But it is not fascistic in its methods (although its methods are alarming in other ways) and it shares none of fascism's ideology and goals.  My commenter believed that the Tea Party, although not classically fascist, was still alarming, and that American fascism might not take the same form as classical European fascism.

This brought to my mind my earlier analysis of the Ku Klux Klan and its resemblance to fascism.  My conclusion:  The Klan shared most of fascism's mobilizing passions except for lacking a charismatic leader; it was also anti-radical and anti-liberal, but not anti-conservative; it was fascistic in its methods except that it lacked a charismatic leader; but it had none of the classical fascist ideology and goals.

Going by my very cursory knowledge about the failure of democracy in countries other than the US and Germany, I have several preliminary hypotheses:

1. Democracies fail as a result of extreme, out-of-control polarization and strife;
2. Simultaneous a cause and a symptom of such polarization are parties that abandon all respect for the rules of the game and democratic fair play and pursue victor at all costs;
3. Political violence is a very bad sign;
4. Although violent revolution from the Left is a real danger under authoritarian governments, the danger to democracy is usually from the Right.

Qualifying this last statement, I would add that a radical anti-democratic Left can certainly exist and add to the polarization, but it is usually the Right that emerges dominant.  I would further add that one sign that a right-wing party is dangerous is that it loses its ability to distinguish between the radical Left and the moderate Left that respects democratic fair play.  I will further add that sometimes the radical Left does bring down democracy, but most examples I know of fall under two main categories.  One is Eastern Europe following WWII, when democratically elective governments fell to the Communists.  But whether that would have happened in the absence of the Red Army is an open question.  The other is that governments that are formally democratically elective, but have informally degenerated into cozy little oligarchies are vulnerable to left wing, populist dictators, like Julius Caesar, Huey Long, or Hugo Chavez.

Looking at the two examples I know most about, I would say that both the secessionists and the Nazis are properly characterized as right wing.  But they are right wing in very different ways.  The secessionist of the 1850's (or the Tea Party today) are right wing in the sense of being reactionaries, standing athwart history, yelling stop!  The Fascists and Nazis were something different altogether -- right wing, but emphatically not conservative.  They won the alliance of conservatives with a promise to crush the Left, but they also aspired to major changes and transformations of society that were not conservative (the fascist ideology and goals).  

So I want to look at various democracies that have failed and see both what went wrong and how well the various fascist traits apply to democracy's enemies.  It may turn out that the mobilizing passions, negations, and methods of fascism are common among enemies of democracy, but the fascist ideology and goals are an anomaly.  Or it may turn out that fascism is more widespread than we realize.  I don't know.  But I hope to learn a lot.

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*I imagine some conservatives would disagree with me and say that making opposition and conflict ends in themselves, shutting down government, and threatening a debt default with untold consequences are not conservative at all.  Point taken.

Tea Party Today: Democrats in the 1850's?

Let me start by stating the obvious.  I do not believe that the Tea Party wants to secede, or that there is any danger of secession by red states, or any threat of civil war.  So in that sense, the Tea Party is nothing like the Democrats of the 1850's.  But in an attempt to find some sort of parallel in our history, I have been looking at books about that fateful decade that was the countdown to the Civil War, and I see a dynamic in Southern Democrats that bears a certain resemblance to the Tea Party today.

To understand the 1850's, one must go back at least to the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

The northern state dominated the House of Representatives because of their larger population, but Congress made a habit of admitting slave and free states in equal numbers to maintain the balance in the Senate.  In 1820, Missouri applied for admission as a slave state, threatening to tip the balance.  Some northern Congressmen sought to require Missouri to phase out slavery as a condition of admission.  In the end, the sides compromised.  They admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, but barred slavery in the Louisiana Purchase south of Missouri's southern border (the 36th parallel).*  A look at the map above shows why this could not possibly have been the basis for a stable compromise.  The territory closed to slavery was much larger than the territory open to it. Indeed, the only slave state subsequently admitted from the Louisiana Purchase was Arkansas.  But the Southern states on the whole expanded territorially faster than the northern states and were always eager to add more territory to the US.  The addition of Florida and Texas (and the possibility of breaking Texas into as many as five different slave states) maintained the balance in the Senate for a surprising thirty years.

The Union threatened to fray again in 1850 when California applied for admission as a free state, including the portions the were south of the Missouri Compromise Line.  This set off a crisis because it would tilt the balance of the Senate permanently in favor of the North.  After much wrangling, Congress reached a compromise.  California would be admitted as a free state, including the portions south of the 36th parallel.  In return, Utah Territory, though north of the line, would be allowed to adopt slavery if it chose.  There was not too much resistance to this proposal in the North for at least three reasons: (1) The Missouri Compromise technically only applied to the Louisiana Purchase, so it was not technically violated by allowing slavery north of the line in other territory.  (2) No one expected slavery to be established in Utah.  (3) Even if by some miracle, slavery were to be established in Utah, Utah was much poorer and less populous than California so the North got decidedly the better end of the bargain.  In fact, the Utah for California bargain was so lopsided that the Compromise of 1850 added a tougher fugitive slave act as a sweetener to bring the South along.

The next crisis occurred in 1854, when Kansas and Nebraska were opened up for settlement and territorial status.  Since both territories lay in the Louisiana Purchase north of the Missouri Compromise line, both would normally be closed to slavery, but the South was in no mood to tolerate the admission of any more free states.  Stephen Douglas in the Senate therefore cut a deal with the South to repeal the Missouri Compromise line and open these territories to popular sovereignty, i.e., to let the inhabitants decide whether or not to allow slavery.  Opening Kansas and Nebraska to slavery set off a much greater uproar in the north than opening Utah to slavery.  The Missouri Compromise was widely seen in the north as a sacred compact and its repeal as something monstrous.  It was in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act that the Republican Party was formed, dedicated to preventing any further expansion of slavery.  No one expected slavery to have any success in Nebraska, Kansas was right across the border from the slave state of Missouri, and parts of eastern Kansas might have been adaptable to raising tobacco.  Many Southerners saw an implied bargain -- Nebraska as a free state for Kansas as a slave state.  There was a huge rush of Northern settlers into Kansas -- a minority, mostly from New England, moving there specifically to keep slavery out, and a majority, mostly from the Midwest, seeking a better future, indifferent to slavery as a moral issue, but not wanting slaves as competition.  "Border ruffians" crossed over from Missouri to vote in Kansas elections and intimidate settlers, but few who became permanent settlers.

This raises an interesting question.  Why did California seek admission as a wholly free state?  And why couldn't pro-slavery settlers keep up with the anti-slavery settlers in Kansas?  It is commonly said that by 1850, slavery had reached its natural limit because all new land acquired by the US was simply too dry to be good for plantation agriculture.  But California today is the US capital of plantation agriculture (in the sense of large-scale, labor-intensive cultivation of cash crops), and at least parts of Kansas were hospitable to tobacco.  The answer appears to be that decades of rapid expansion had spread the South thin.  It had an abundance of uncultivated land and a shortage of (slave) labor. It simply did not have enough people to keep expanding.  The North, by contrast, had a more rapidly growing population because the bulk of immigrants were going there.  Parts of its growing population were building cities and industrial development, but other parts were heading west -- and did not want to compete with slaves.  In short, slavery had reached its limits, not just because of geography, but because of demography.  Much of the South's actions throughout the 1850's might be seen as an attempt to legislate away basic geographic and demographic facts.  Needless to say, the attempt was not successful.

At the same time, the South held surprising domination of the federal government by a sort of 19th Century version of the Hastert Rule -- government by the majority of the majority.  The South was a minority region, but it held the majority of the Democratic Party, which, in turn, was the majority party.  Nonetheless, Northern Democrats were increasingly beginning to chafe under Southern domination.  They might not care about slavery as a moral issue, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act had hurt them, and they were becoming restive.  This was clearly born out in the Democratic Convention of 1856.  Initially, Southerners' favorite candidate was the incumbent President, Franklin Pierce.  But Pierce proved unacceptable in the North because of his support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  Southerners then swung their support to Douglas, who was also widely unacceptable in the North for the same reason.  All sides ultimately agreed on James Buchanan, who had played no part in the controversy, and who went on to win the election.

The next crisis occurred almost immediately after Buchanan's inauguration, when the Supreme Court came out with the Dred Scott decision, holding (among other things) that Congress could not exclude slavery from the territories, making the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.  The effect of the ruling was to hold the Republican Party unconstitutional and call for it to disband itself, although of course the decision did not say so in so many words.  Needless to say, Republicans were outraged at this overreach and showed no disposition whatever to disband, or to abandon their goals.  Dred Scott also posed a potential threat to popular sovereignty because it hinted that a territorial legislature, as a mere creation of the federal government, could not exclude slavery either.  This threatened to raise a major rift between northern and southern Democrats, but at the time they were able to paper over the distinction.  Douglas -- and many Southern Democrats as well -- argued that, although a territorial legislature could not ban slavery outright, it had no obligation to give any support to slavery and could therefore effectively exclude it.

The potential rift came to head in 1858, when the Missouri-controlled Kansas legislature applied for admission of Kansas as a slave state against the clear wishes of the population.  That was a bridge too far for Douglas.  He was willing to ignore slavery as a moral issue and treat it as simply another thing to be decided by majority vote, but imposing slavery on the people of Kansas against their will was going too far.  Besides, he was up for election later that year, and to admit Kansas as a slave state against the wishes of the population would have been political suicide.  Douglas led the fight in Congress to block the admission of Kansas as a slave state (ultimately successful) and thereby made himself as hated in the South as any Republican -- indeed, more, because he was seen as a traitor.

Congress' refusal to admit Kansas as a slave state was followed shortly by the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.  Lincoln pressed Douglas during the debates on how a territory could exclude slavery if Dred Scott forbade such an action.  Douglas gave the answer he had been giving for some time -- that a territorial legislature could not ban slavery outright, but it could exclude it by "unfriendly legislation."  At about the same time, Jefferson Davis (then a Senator from Mississippi) was giving a speech to New England's dwindling band of Democrats, and assured them that Dred Scott did not mean forcing slavery on a territory against the wishes of the inhabitants since they could always exclude it by failing to pass a slave code.  When Douglas learned of this speech, he quickly seized upon it to prove that his opinion was no different from the opinion of the most prominent Southern militant.  Wanting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the hated Douglas, Southern Democrats then began demanding that Congress pass a slave code for the territories -- a thing that was utterly unacceptable to northerners, Democratic or Republican, anti-slavery or indifferent, and which therefore stood no chance whatever of getting through Congress.**

During the 1860 Democratic Convention, the American public was treated to the sight of a major political party committing suicide by self-disembowlment.  Southern Democrats made clear that they would not accept Douglas as the nominee under any circumstances, and demanded that the party endorse a slave code for the territories.  This demand was utterly unacceptable to Northern Democrats, who rallied behind Douglas.  Vicious in-fighting followed, and the Southerners ended up walking out of the convention to nominate their own candidate.  The Northern remnant nominated Douglas.  The split sealed the Democrats' fate and guaranteed that Lincoln would win as the Republican candidate.  Southerners, unwilling to endure a Republican in the White House, seceded.

So what does this depressing story have to do with the Tea Party?  Quite simply, it shares the Tea Party's dynamic in several ways.  To take the most obvious similarity, the Democrats in the 1850's and the Republicans today were both examples of a party splitting.  In both cases, hard liners increasingly came to value combativeness for its own sake above an beyond achieving any sort of outcome.  And both came to value ideological purity above electoral success.  Of course, there are major differences as well.  Most obviously, secession and civil war are not in the cards this time.  Nor is the difference this time anything as simple as a sectional split.

But perhaps the most disturbing similarity, I believe, is that the underlying motive is one of fear and despair. Southerners in the 1850's were enjoying a period of unprecedented prosperity and political dominance, but they could read the handwriting on the wall.  Geography and demography were stacked against them.  They spent a futile decade trying to legislate these facts away.  Likewise, much attention has been paid to this survey and its emphasis on fear and despair as the Tea Party's great motives.  They, too, fear that their party is doomed and demographic is in hopeless decline.  I see despairing comments on blogs that there will never be another Republican President.  My response is to say that such fears are foolish of course there will be another Republican President.  He (or she) will just have to adapt to changing times.  But they Tea Party are people who do not want to adapt to changing times; they want times not to change and do not know how to achieve it.

And that is how the Tea Party is most like the secessionists -- they are both standing athwart history, shouting stop!

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*Actually, 36 degrees, 30 minutes.
**Many accounts today, wanting to maximize Lincoln's role, claim that it was Douglas' answer during the debates that made him unacceptable to the South.  I highly recommend Don Fehrenbacher's The Dred Scott Case and Stephen Oates' The Approaching Fury (and no doubt many other detailed histories of the period).  By giving a detailed chronology of events, they make clear the it was Douglas opposition to the admission of Kansas as a slave state that made him unacceptable in the South, and that anything he said in the Lincoln-Douglas debates was simply an excuse to hate him more.

Tea Party Today: Democrats in 1972?

Now that the shutdown and threat of default are over, I should be turning to Obamacare and its disastrous rollout and wondering if it is salvageable.  I do plan to get to that in the near future, but I would like to pause for a few thoughts on what is happening to the Republican Party.

A strong hint of it comes from the 2010 Senate election in Delaware, in which the Republicans threw away an easily winnable seat by nominating the certifiably crazy Christine O'Donnell over the moderate Mike Castle, of whom one observer said, "Mike Castle does not lose elections in Delaware."  The point is not simply that the Republicans threw away a winnable election by nominating a crazy candidate, but how their actions were perceived.  Because Castle had a distinguished political career in Delaware and was supported by most of the state's movers and shakers, O'Donnell's nomination was hailed as a victory for the grassroots over the Republican establishment.  Except, as a local observer noted, the Delaware Republican establishment is the grassroots.  The "establishment" includes "long-term GOP activists and loyal partisans who attend State conventions, show up to volunteer locally year after year, and know their state’s electorate and issues really well" and people "who knock on the doors and pass out the literature and pound the pavements.”  Much of O'Donnell's funding and manpower came from the Tea Party Express, based in California.

Something similar happened with Ted Cruz.  Though a Princeton and Harvard graduate with a longtime career in federal and state government and the backing of national conservative organizations, Cruz was able to portray himself as the outsider and insurgent against an "establishment" candidate because his opponent because his opponent got along with his fellow Texas politicians.

It reminds me of what I have heard about the Democrats in 1972.  I am personally too young to have first-hand understanding of the Democrats in 1972 and too old to study them as history, but this is my understanding.  Traditionally, the parties had chosen their Presidential candidates at nominating conventions. The nominating conventions were run by the party movers and shakers -- governors, mayors, party machine men, and political bosses.  Democratic activists scorned such people (justifiably) as corrupt and elitist and (less justifiably) as out of touch.  Proclaiming, "Power to the people!" they demanded an opening up of the nominating process, and they got it.  Except it turned out that most ordinary people had other things they wanted to do with their lives than nominating candidates, and that only hard core activists really wanted to put in the effort.  It further turned out that activists were considerably more hard-core in their ideology than ordinary people.  It further turned out that elected officials and party bosses, though often corrupt, got there by understanding their constituents and were often closer to ordinary voters than the activists.  "Power to the people" turned out simply to mean power to the activists and turn most people off.  The 1972 Democratic convention was such a freak show that it handed Richard Nixon -- easily our least charismatic and least personally likable President of all time -- a record landslide.  Democrats gradually changed their nominating rules to allow more establishment people and ensure that grownups were in charge.

So, is the same thing happening to Republicans now?  They do have the advantage of a larger and more entrenched activist base than the Democrats had in 1972.  And they seem solidly in power in the South, the Great Plains and (possibly) parts of the Mountain West.  But these regions are not the whole country.  They are not even the whole "flyover country."  And the Tea Party really does seem to be making the same mistake as activists on the left made back then -- mistaking themselves for the American people.

Post Script

I got a painful lesson today in how much counter cyclical is counter intuitive.  I had expressed my worries about the shutdown and debt ceiling to someone who never paid much attention to news and current events. Curious, he decided to look into it.  He came away just about ready to join the Tea Party, terrified of all the borrowing going on, and certain that we had to stop it, no matter what.  Sigh!

Doomsday Averted! (Or, I Truly Don't Understand Republicans)

Well, apparently we will not get to find out just how long after October 17 it would take for the US government to start missing payments.  Apparently Congress can act fast if it really wants to.  The Senate passed its bill at 7:56 p.m. and the House followed in short order.  Obama will sign either tonight or first thing tomorrow.  The vote was not even close, 81-18 in the Senate and 285-144 in the House, indicating at least 85 Republican votes in favor.

And given how calmly they seem to be accepting defeat, I can well and truly say that I don't understand Republicans at all. Ted Cruz made no attempt to block the bill.  John Boehner, after caving, got a standing ovation, and Republicans across the board vowed to stand by him.  Hard liners said that he did the best he could, and only succumbed to political reality when it became clear the moderates would not back him. What are we to make of that?  I don't know, but I can throw out a few speculations.

The whole thing was a show.  Republicans knew from the start that when a debt ceiling breach became a real danger, they would have to back down.  The whole shutdown and negotiations was just so much theater for the benefit of the base and/or the mainstream media.  This does not rule out future debt ceiling threats, but makes any future threats less credible.

We are in a short term post-crisis honeymoon.  After Obama won reelection in 2012, Republicans briefly made nice with him and promised to accept him as our legitimate President.  The phase did not last long.  Soon they simply doubled down on the crazy.  They may react to this defeat in the same way.  John Kenneth Galbraith, in his novel The Triumph says:

A political crisis has this in common with a sex orgy or a drunken bat.  Everyone enjoys it immensely, although they feel they shouldn't.  It so exhausts the participants that once it is over, an immediate repetition is unlikely.  But as time goes by and memory improves on past delights, the chances of a repeat grow.

(Taken from memory, may not be entirely accurate).  I have no idea whether this is true.  But every time there is a political crisis, I remember the quote and worry.

Republicans are attempting to mend a major fracture in their party.  The pro-Boehner love fest is part of the attempt.  We will see how it goes as time unfolds.

Republicans are putting on a facade of unity.  The knives will come out when people stop looking.  This one is actually closely related to the above.  The difference is that an attempt to repair the fracture may succeed; if this one is right, they have already given up.

They just had to do it once and get it out of their system.  If so, it is now well and truly out of their system and we can reasonably hope to avoid a repeat performance.

Republicans don't care about results, just taking maximalist stances.  This would tie in with their strong roots in Evangelical Christianity, which encourages members to focus on doing what is right (often defined as maximalism against evil) and leaving the results to God.  But then again, this does tend to come with the assumption that if you do right, God will reward you with good results.  And certainly many analyses of the Tea Party suggest that it grows largely out of frustration that Republicans have failed to bring about much in the way of results when the base elects them.  If so, then going home and telling the base, "Well, we did our best but it failed, let's move on," is unlikely to placate them.

The right wing of the Republicans are so out of touch that the somehow see this as a victory.  What can I say?

I guess over time we will know.

PS:  Obama has now signed the act into law.  I guess now we know how quickly it can be done.

Two Days (Maybe) and Counting

Following Congress has become really nerve racking.  The differences between the sides by now are so minimal that in a less highly charged atmosphere they could easily be resolved.  But ultimately, the Republicans are determined to get something in exchange for reopening the government and not defaulting and the Democrats are determined not to treat opening the government and raising the debt ceiling as any sort of concession requiring an quid pro quo.

The latest news is that the parties agree to keep the government open until January 15, extend the debt ceiling until February 7, and make some sort of minor change to Obamacare.  The only controversies are what minor change, and whether the Treasury may use "extraordinary measures" to extend the debt ceiling.
Senate attempt at mutual concessions on Obamacare has failed, and the House failed to extract slightly more, including a ban on extraordinary measures.  The Senate is expected to come out with a deal that allows extraordinary measure and makes only one change to Obamacare -- more income verification.

The question next question (assuming a deal is struck) is whether this will pass before the presumed doomsday.  The answer is almost certainly no.  Theoretically, one house could pass the bill tomorrow and one the next day and President Obama have it inscribed at emergency speed so he could sign it.  But no one expects that to happen.  That would require all Senators to give unanimous consent to passing the bill in one day, a measure that any one (cough, Cruz, cough) could block.  Apparently the best anyone can hope for is for Boehner to send a "message" to the Senate, which will prevent, ahem, anyone in the Senate from delaying the bill for more than 30 hours.  But even then, the Senate is expected to pass it no sooner than Saturday, and the House would have to act on Sunday.  Now, the best guess is that an actual default will not occur when the clock strikes midnight on October 18, but closer to October 22 (the following Tuesday).  The Tea Party crowd will no doubt claim vindication when raising the debt ceiling is delayed several days past doomsday and doom does not strike.  This will raise the likelihood of a future showdown and default.  Sigh!

Three Days (Maybe) and Counting

Okay, Congress.  This is it.  We're down the the wire now.  You need to come up with something, and you need to come up with it today.  Even if  you do come up with it today Ted Cruz will probably delay it until after the technical deadline and we will (theoretically) breach the debt ceiling.  In fact, doomsday has probably been postponed till the end of the month.  And I suspect that even if it hasn't, a short breach will be survivable, especially if the markets can see Congress working to end it.  The biggest danger may be to the credibility of the Treasury and others warning of doom, which will only make a future breach more likely.

So please, Congress.  This is it.  You've got to come up with something.