Winner Take All

One of the hallmarks of the modern GOP, the party of Nixon, is that it consistently pushes the ethical envelope with a drive to win by any means necessary. This has been well documented over the years, but seems to have accelerated in the last decade to the point where it is now a sort of ritualistic compulsion. I suppose it's reflective of the "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" characteristic of American culture, but it's become so fetishized among professional Republicans that they aren't even pretending to follow the rules anymore.

A good case in point is this move on the part of certain people associated with the Swift Boat smear operation of 2004 [1] to put an initiative on the ballot to apportion California's electoral college votes according to the percentages won by the candidates in the state.

Two small states already do this, but all 48 of the others grant the electoral college on a winner take all basis. Theoretically, it's perfectly defensible to believe that the votes should be apportioned according to who won, but in practice unless all the states do it at the same time, Democratic California will effectively be giving the Republicans 20 or more votes they would not get otherwise, and it could very well determine the next presidential election.

The people who are backing this scheme are all Republicans and they are even associated with previous election shenannigans. They aren't even trying to hide their partisan intent. They are simply doing it and don't seem to honestly care if anyone thinks this might be a shady way to win an election.

But it isn't unprecedented. It naturally follows a long line of GOP actions in recent years that challenge the many traditions and unspoken agreements and understandings that make up our political system. These things do not rely on legalisms, but rather on a certain underlying set of beliefs about what comprises the social contract. Assumptions, to be sure, but so widely held as to normally go unquestioned. In this case, the idea that is being challenged is the fundamental spirit of democracy. I think most people in America agree that elections aren't truly legitimate if they don't accurately reflect the will of the electorate and if the rules are rigged in favor of one candidate or another they think it is wrong, even if it might be strictly legal.

But over the course of the last decade we have seen several rather dramatic assaults on those assumptions. They all operated (loosely) within the law, but violated the spirit of democracy and the rules under which we had all operated. There was the partisan impeachment of 1998, the Florida recount of 2000, the Texas gerrymandering and the California recall of 2002, just to name four. (I would add the U.S. Attorney scandals and the vote suppression efforts of both 2000 and 2004, but they are of a slightly different character which I will discuss in another post.)

Those four partisan efforts are emblematic of a philosophical turn away from a certain reverence for the vote and the will of the people (or at least a healthy respect for the power it conveys.) Perhaps it was always a romantic notion, but it did keep craven opportunists from simply changing the rules in mid-game with no more explanation than because they wanted to. It took a compliant press, of course, which covered politics as if it were a series of "Survivor" episodes, showing deep, cynical appreciation for the most ruthless players as if their schemes bore some positive relationship to governance. And the cumulative effect of these actions have created a new set of social and cultural assumptions. There is no longer the expectation that the rules governing elections will be predictable from one to the next.

In the impeachment case in 1998, it was recognized among most experts, citizens and even the politicians arguing for it that the president had not committed a crime worthy of impeachment. The arguments were all fairly absurd, reeking of rank hypocrisy among this men's club of adulterers, voyeurs and perverts known as the U.S. Congress. But they were meant to be. This was an exercise in trying to force a president from office by holding the government hostage to a scandal. It almost required that the sanctimony be phony and the operatic religiosity be nearly tongue in cheek. Raw exercise of power requires that everyone knows, at least on some level, that what is being done is a pure act of aggression. What good is power if people aren't afraid of it?

A president had resigned in disgrace before, of course. Richard Nixon was forced from office after a series of revelations about his unethical abuses of power lost him the support of the congress and the people. It had unfolded naturally, mostly because of earnest investigative journalism. The Clinton impeachment, by contrast, was engineered solely through partisan institutional power. It didn't work entirely because the charges were so personal and puny and the nation, while titillated, was in no mood to upset the party.

But it put the nation on notice that the rules were changing. One could see impeachment from that moment forward was less nuclear than it had been before. And yet it had the perverse effect of making it harder in some respects to impeach on more serious charges in the future, as we have seen with this administration. The partisan nature of the Clinton impeachment had turned it into a math problem rather than a wrenching act of conscience or a challenge of personal integrity. It was on the political menu now. The Republicans had made it a rough tool which would be even more difficult to decouple from partisan politics than it had been in the past, which was fine with them.

That possibility had always been there, of course. It had just not been used this way before. Previous generations had been unwilling to do it because it could lead to political instability or invite a string of retributions, the outcome of which can never be accurately predicted. But they were also at least a little bit afraid of the people. After all, impeachment against the will of the people is a direct assault on the sacred foundation of democracy --- the vote. Using parliamentary tricks and partisan maneuvers to try to force a popular, duly elected president (with a limited term, no less) from office was something new in American politics. We believed in fixed terms and regularly scheduled elections. (And polling!) It was how we defined our system. With no mechanism for calling new elections if a government fell, as in a parliamentary system, our long held faith in continuous, uninterrupted government handed off peacefully from one administration to the next suddenly felt a little bit tenuous.

But I don't think any of us knew just how jarring that assault would be until the election of 2000, when an attack on the vote became quite direct. Al Gore was the winner of the popular vote and the intended winner of Florida's electoral college vote. It was close. But regardless of the Republican mantras about hanging chads and "divining the will of the voters," from the first moments of the election controversy there was no doubt that the butterfly ballot in Miami caused people to vote in error and if that hadn't happened, Al Gore would have been the clear winner in Florida. The intention of the voters was clear, even if the technical difficulties in rectifying it weren't. We know who the voters chose.

But the Republicans cared nothing for the intention of the voters and didn't even want to count the votes that might have legitimized their own man's victory. They used every mechanism and lever of power at their disposalin spite of the fact that they knew they hadn't really won. And they knew we knew they hadn't really won. That a strictly partisan 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court ratified that maneuver was perhaps one of the most shocking attacks on the spirit of American democracy yet. Supreme Court Justice Scalia even made a point of saying that there was no right to vote in the constitution, which is true. But I don't think many Americans believed before that day that a Supreme Court justice would use that fact as a way to justify installing a man in the presidency who hadn't been the people's choice. Now we know.

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this episode is that in the days leading up to the election, the Republicans had anticipated this scenario [2] --- but with George W. Bush winning the popular vote and Al Gore winning the electoral college. They schemed to take such a result directly to the people with calls for a popular uprising. They planned to find Democrats who would support their effort --- and there would have likely been many. They were going to call them "Democrats for democracy." (Privately, they would almost certainly call them "dupes for Republicans.")

The dubious election of 2000 was followed in short order by things like Tom DeLay's partisan gerrymandering in Texas in which he simply ignored all precedent and tradition and created new districts favoring Republicans eight years before the normal schedule allowed. It wasn't illegal, but it was a blatant attempt to change the rules in mid-game. He simply didn't care that half the country felt he was cheating. In fact, he seemed to revel in the reputation as someone who would stop at nothing.

California followed with a GOP-financed recall election of the Democratic governor, a radical departure from the past where recalls had been understood to be used only to remove criminals from office, not truncate the term of a duly elected executive simply because the political conditions allowed you to do it. Interestingly, this sort of radical direct democracy had been endorsed by that old rock-ribbed conservative Karl Marx, when he wrote favorably about the recall provisions of the Paris Commune [3]. One would say this was a matter of strange bedfellows, but these modern Republicans studied communism with fervor and came to admire many of its adherents' political tactics. And in any case, it was a matter of political opportunity rather than philosophy. They would just as easily argue the opposite case. Their philosophy is to take power, period.

All of these things were legal. There may have been no case law at all about them, or what there was would have been sketchy because these are the kinds of things you can't really legislate or which would possibly precipitate a constitutional crisis, which responsible leaders try to avoid. After all, outcomes are unpredictable. The prohibitions against them were assumptions and givens, woven into what we would have once been considered honorable behavior. The modern Republicans discovered that one could do many things if one didn't care about such an old-fashioned conservative notion.

As I will discuss in my next post, there is precedent for a certain kind of political hardball that changes the rules of the game. But the difference between then and now, is that those game changing tactics were in response to crisis or were in the early, unstable years of the nation. These actions by the modern Republican party are the only time it's been strategized purely as a partisan exercise in gaining and maintaining power.

The playing field may be changed forever. It's hard to know. But the fact is that this last decade has been characterized by more than just the standard Nixonian political dirty tricks and character assassination. It's been a political experiment on a grand scale. In Josh Green's article about Karl Rove in The Atlantic [4], he explains how Rove sought to engineer a realignment through sheer political tactics alone and some of these activities would certainly have helped him do that if things had gone his way. But these undemocratic actions are not Karl Rove's ideas alone or a result of his wetdream. He is but one of his generation's conservative warriors who have spent decades building a movement that seeks power for its own sake. If they can win with a good marketing message, they are happy to do so. But they have also felt unconstrained by law, tradition or mutual agreement to follow the norms of American politics. Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.

So we see them today carrying on even in the face of a massive failure of governance that may end up being considered by history to be a combination of the worst characteristics of the Hoover, Johnson and Nixon administrations. In California they are unabashedly attempting to game the system and hold the presidency in 2008 through a dishonest, partisan maneuver that they will try to sell to the public as a political reform. It's bold and in some ways brilliant. They have become so focused on winning at all costs, and have so lost their ethical moorings, that they have reduced themselves to a partisan warfare machine. It's all they do.

But it isn't just about elections. Over the past decade of shared power and then total dominance, they have laid legal, philosophical and constitutional land mines all over the government that are going to be exploding unexpectedly for some time to come. They have learned how to gain and wield power using undemocratic means in a number of different ways. I'll discuss more about that in the next post.

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