The following is adapted from the Conclusion of Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, By Jay Cost.
The story told here is not a tale of right and wrong. There are no good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, in this account. American politics is regularly cast in such moralistic terms, but that has not been our approach here. Instead, our focus has been on the factions within American society, and how the Democratic party has transformed the interests of those factions into public policy.
That is the great challenge of a republican system of government such as ours—one in which the people are sovereign and the government operates on their behalf. Such governments are easy to envision in theory but hard to realize in practice. People are fundamentally self-interested, always ready to put themselves over the community, so it is very difficult to devise a government run by people that puts the whole community first.
Our two great political parties—the Democrats and the Republicans—regularly offer public-spirited platforms that are in keeping with those principles, at least on the surface. Even a casual observer of the political scene could not fail to note that both sides couch their arguments in communitarian language: what is good for our national defense, our prosperity, our shared sense of justice, and so on. In other words, both sides publicly argue that everybody would benefit from their particular programs.
Unfortunately, the public faces of both parties often mask some decidedly anti-republican tendencies. Governed only by the ambitions of politicians and a slender set of rules, parties are not constrained to act only on behalf of all the people, and they regularly do not. While the rhetoric of both sides may speak to the public good, behind the scenes Democrats and Republicans are often eager to make deals with various factions within society—if that is what it takes to win.
We have called this practice clientelism—the exchange of votes for governmental favors between a faction and a party. The great oversight of our Constitution was the framers’ failure to anticipate the inevitability of political parties, and thus to provide for better mechanisms to control their behavior. For if a political party is behaving in an anti-republican manner, and it controls the government, then the government—even with all of its checks and balances—will likewise behave in an anti-republican manner.
Opposition to clientelism brought the Democratic party into existence in the 1820s. Andrew Jackson and his allies formed it as a vehicle for their vengeance against the “corrupt bargain” of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, and more generally to fight the public venality of the “Era of Good Feelings,” wherein politicians in Washington and moneymen in New York and Philadelphia seemed to conspire for their own benefit rather than doing the work of the people.
As an alternative, Jackson and his Democrats would stand up for the “humble members of society”—the small farmers, the laborers, and the urban ethnics who did not have connections to get a special deal from the government. While the party lost this identity to the sectional grievances of the late nineteenth century, William Jennings Bryan reignited the old Jacksonian flame at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Later, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt implemented a new philosophy to secure equal treatment for the downtrodden—an active, “progressive” federal government that would reshape society to make it more just. To this day, this remains the public-spirited message of the Democratic party: that the whole country will be better off if all its people are treated equally.
Yet the Democrats wasted little time before committing the very errors they had pledged to rectify. Andrew Jackson’s principle of “rotation in office” evolved from a leveling, democratic institution into the crooked “spoils system” of rewarding political cronies. In time, the spoils system became the foundation for morally bankrupt political machines like Tammany Hall, whose only purpose in winning office was to pay off the supporters who had put it there. The nineteenth-century patronage regime was modernized in the twentieth century by the liberal Democrats who expanded the size and scope of the government with the New Deal. The Democratic party would no longer use mere patronage to reward a few thousand loyalists; now it would take advantage of the massive new regulatory and redistributive powers of Washington to reward millions of new party clients—not only with federal jobs but with beneficial laws that reshaped society to advance their particular interests. The party could take care of whole classes in society—farmers, union workers, urban ethnics—with a single stroke of the presidential pen.
Of course, most voters are not clients of the Democratic party, or of the Republican party for that matter. Most voters expect no special favors after Election Day, and the parties compete for their support only by offering broad-based programs ostensibly designed to benefit all (or, at least, most) Americans. It’s always been this way—even at the height of the New Deal majority, the Democrats could never claim half-plus-one of the public as their clients.
Thus, the political challenge facing modern Democratic leaders is to keep the party clients happy while simultaneously governing for the whole nation. Franklin Roosevelt was the master of this balancing act, and to varying degrees, FDR ’s early successors—Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson—were more or less able to juggle the party’s clients with the public interest in a similar fashion.
However, the tumult of the 1960s interrupted the party’s ability to tend to the clients and the public interest. The major problem was the addition of new clients, all of whom had their own power bases within the party and their own unique set of demands. African Americans entered the electorate as Democrats in the 1960s, demanding increased social welfare spending. Feminist groups demanded regulations to secure equal treatment in the workplace, more generous welfare benefits for poor women, and greater access to abortions. The environmental and consumer rights movements wanted new layers of government regulations to protect the quality of life. Finally, the rise of public sector labor unions consistently pushed the Democrats to expand the scope of government at all levels and inhibited its ability to reform the federal bureaucracy.
Add these groups to industrial and craft unions, which had belonged to the party more or less since the 1930s, and the Democrats suddenly had too many clients with too many demands. No longer, it seemed, could Democratic leaders tend to their interests while focusing on public concerns.
The Obama Administration has seen the consequences of this logic play itself out fully. Unlike Carter and Clinton before him, who at least tried to tame the party clients, President Obama has time and again acceded to their demands, at the expense of the public good. The stimulus bill, designed by congressional Democrats with Obama’s blessing, pumped $800 billion into the economy, largely through Democratic clients like labor, environmental groups, and African Americans. Obama followed that up with a bailout of the auto industry that gave the United Auto Workers much more than they would have won in bankruptcy court, then proceeded as if the economic crisis had passed. His financial reform legislation was highly preferential to his big-money donors on Wall Street; his cap-and-trade bill tried to award environmentalists, well-heeled businesses, and the poor in one fell swoop; and his health care bill is the apogee of anti-republican, liberal clientelism, a sprawling, trillion-dollar payoff to an array of groups that leaves the average American in no better shape.
The 2010 midterms saw the worst drubbing for the Democratic party since 1938 as the GOP won control of the House of Representatives—due punishment for Obama’s focus on the party clients at the expense of the national interest
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In his veto of the Bank of the United States, Democratic party founder Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory,” as he was known, declared, “There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.”
It is ironic that Jackson’s heirs would come to stand for exactly what he opposed. But above all it is tragic. It is tragic because the United States needs a healthy, two-party system, and more to the point it needs the Democratic party. There is a reason, after all, that the party survived the disastrous presidencies of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, both of which contributed mightily to the onset of the Civil War; survived Grover Cleveland’s handling of the Panic of 1893; survived the rebuke suffered by the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1920; survived the “credibility gap” of the LBJ administration; and survived the incompetence of the Carter administration. It is in part because the party’s core message—as articulated by Jackson nearly two centuries ago—still resonates to this day. America is a radically egalitarian country, at least in its outlook; the people are inherently skeptical about special privileges and always ready to listen to a political party that promises an equal playing field.
Today’s Democratic leaders talk a lot about equality, but their actions speak louder than their words. The party has come to play a double game—complaining loudly about inequality in society while enacting policies to advance the interests of its own clients. This has created a void in the body politic—one that the Republican party, which has long been the party of economic expansion rather than the ideal of social equality, is simply not able to fill.
With the exception of the Tea Party, there is no real faction out there making the case for an end to special privilege.
What would Old Hickory have to say about that?
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/05/25/how_big_government_patronage_ruined_the_democratic_party_114238-full.html at May 28, 2012 - 06:07:11 AM PDT
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