Ch 1.7 | 🗳️How the 'system' really works today

One of my go-to sources for information on the political industrial complex is a thought-provoking book entitled: "The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save our Democracy." It’s absolutely worth a read. I cite it and its authors, Katherine Gehl (founder of the Institute for Political Innovation) and Michael Porter often when discussing the political system because they’ve figured out something truly insightful about competition in the political arena that is critical to understanding how we got here. Gehl and IPI are working to realign the incentives within the "political-industrial complex" to inject healthy competition and ensure politicians are held accountable for delivering results.

Here is an excerpt from the book that does a fantastic job providing the state of play from this narrative.

"Imagine you are a member of the US House of Representatives. You are deliberating over a bill that addresses a critical national challenge that should be handled on a bipartisan basis. As an elected representative, you should consider several seemingly obvious questions: Is this a good idea? Is this the right policy for the country? Is this what the majority of my constituents want? But as a participant in our current political system, you have only one question to answer:

Will I make it back through my party’s next primary election if I vote for this?

If the answer to that question is no, and it virtually always is for the tough problems, then the other questions are irrelevant because the rational incentive to get reelected—to keep your job—compels you to vote against this bill.

But perhaps this time you decide to put country over party. You take the risk and publicly endorse the bill’s artful compromise solution. You ignore the pleas of your party leadership. You weather threats and temptations from special interests. And you vote in favor of the bill.

You are in trouble. For the purposes of your upcoming reelection, it doesn’t matter if the bill passes or not. It doesn’t matter if you are lauded by pundits, good-government reformers, or local constituents for your bipartisan leadership. It doesn’t really matter if the bill is likely to produce good outcomes.

What does matter, assuming you want to keep your job, is how your side of the partisan system you just bucked is going to respond.

Here’s where one of the most powerful verbs in American politics comes into play: you’re about to get primaried.

In the next party primary election (or partisan primary), a contest for the party’s nomination dominated by special interests and sharply ideological voters, you can expect an überleft challenger if you’re a Democrat and a hard-right opponent if you’re a Republican.

You’ll probably lose, because rampant unhealthy competition in politics means that for an elected official there is virtually no intersection between acting in the public interest and the likelihood of getting reelected. In our current system of running for office and legislating, if you do your job the way we need you to, you’re likely to lose your job. Party primaries create an eye of the needle through which no problem-solving politician can pass. This is absurd.

Look at it from another perspective. Suppose you’re not an elected official. Instead, you’re a person who has made a successful career in business, and like the vast majority of citizens across America, you are deeply dissatisfied with Congress. Your success in business comes from your ability to identify opportunities in the marketplace, and when you look at politics, the demand for better options couldn’t be more obvious—particularly in your district, where another lesser-of-two-evils election is just around the corner. So, ever the entrepreneur, you throw your hat in the ring, perhaps as an independent, or maybe, quite boldly, you launch a startup: a new political party.

In the beginning, the race is promising. Your policy platform and solutions-oriented messaging strikes a chord. Despite your newcomer status, you gain ground quickly. Voters are paying attention to your candidacy, and, at the least, they want to see you on the debate stage. Most of your would-be constituents favor compromise over gridlock, so you pledge to work across the aisle on Capitol Hill. Perhaps most audaciously, you commit to a positive campaign, eschewing the demonization of your opponents in favor of talking about the issues. Your poll numbers rise. You’re beginning to seem competitive. But there’s a hitch. With your momentum building, local opinion makers, political insiders, and even close friends reach out and implore you: Drop out. Winning is a long shot, they say, and every vote you earn is a vote stolen from a major-party candidate—the candidate you would be resigned to support if you weren’t in the race yourself. If you don’t drop out now, you might spoil the election by stealing the votes that this major-party candidate needs to win. This argument strikes you as deeply unfair. How could fewer choices—fewer new ideas—be better for voters who are craving other options? The reality of American elections becomes clear: staying in the race might well mean handing a victory to the greater of two evils—the very candidate you were working so hard to defeat in the first place.

You ran for office because you spotted an opportunity to act in the public interest—to deliver solutions ignored by the current players. Your startup campaign was poised to fill a gap in the marketplace. But in American elections, plurality voting—the dominant, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting system—creates the spoiler phenomenon and dissuades would-be elected officials like you from running altogether. Frustrated and amazed by this truly un-American abuse of the free market, you do what any good, civic-minded citizen would do: you pursue legal action, believing you have a promising antitrust case. But you are quickly flummoxed yet again.

Ever so conveniently, and unlike in most industries, antitrust regulation doesn’t apply to politics—and no independent regulator is coming to the rescue. Welcome to the politics industry, where party primaries and plurality voting combine to punish the public interest. There are few incentives to solve problems. There is little accountability for results. And there are no countervailing forces to restore healthy competition … yet.”

This story has played out time and again. We must break this cycle.

Gehl and Porter remind us, as Walter Russell Mead wrote in Tablet, that:

"Our history and our institutions, whatever their flaws, prepare us to live with political and cultural dissonance better than most. American culture was born out of the firestorm of the British Reformation, when Protestants and Catholics struggled for supremacy before Britain’s Protestants turned on one another in the civil wars of the 17th century. The long struggle for religious and political freedom extending from the reign of Henry VIII through the Glorious Revolution left both Britain and America with the ability to manage religious diversity. Ideas like federalism and the separation of church and state can help us manage the conflicts of our time, just as they helped our predecessors deal with similar issues in the past"

So it’s time to do something about it.