An America four years down the track in which the pop star Kanye West is the Democratic Party nominee for president, and Phil Robertson is the Republican nominee, might be difficult to envisage. But as political analyst Jonathan Rauch writes in a seminal article, What's Ailing American Politics, in this month's edition of The Atlantic, such an outcome would simply be a linear extrapolation of what's currently happening in America. Phil Robertson features in the reality TV show Duck Dynasty, about a family who hunt ducks.
Jeb Bush claimed Trump would be the "chaos candidate, and he'd be the chaos president". What Bush didn't appreciate is that's precisely why so many people voted for Trump in the primaries. For Rauch, though, "Trump, however, didn't cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump".
Rauch argues a number of developments have eroded the ability of Republicans and Democrats to compromise with each other. So for example, campaign finance reforms have made it more difficult for political parties to raise funds for themselves and instead money has flowed to third parties beyond the control of party officials. Likewise, measures reducing the financial "pork" delivered to electoral districts through budget bills have made it harder to buy off political opposition. Laws aimed at improving the transparency of the legislative process make it difficult to negotiate. "Smoke-filled rooms, whatever their disadvantages, were good for brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was settled; once gone, they turned out to be difficult to replace."
Such changes affecting the practice of politics, when combined with the rise of more overtly ideological actors within the Republican and Democratic parties, have produced the seeming chaos of the presidential primaries. Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton could be the next US president. Indeed the doyen of pollsters, Nate Silver, reckons if the election were held today Trump would win.
Some of what Rauch says about American politics applies to Australia. We have our own version of congressional deadlock. It's called the Senate. The paradox is that the more independent senators block the legislative initiatives of the major parties, the more the public's frustration with the political process grows — and this in turn increases support for non-major-party senators — which then only further increases the chances of initiatives being blocked in the Senate.
In both the United States and Australia, as lawmakers witness an ever-diminishing chance of their legislative proposals ever passing into law, their ambitions for change wither and eventually die. This happened in America with budget reform.
In Australia it's happened with industrial relations reform. The close-to-zero prospect of getting through the Senate even minimal changes to the Fair Work Act means there's a risk that eventually, the Coalition will stop bothering to think about industrial relations and will simply accept the status quo. The consequence of not even contemplating reform is that any change is ruled out forever. Eventually, political parties end up losing the capacity to mount an argument for change. Increasingly, even if a politician does propose change, they will be making an argument for merely a change they believe can get passed into law, rather than a change they actually believe in.
Which is what's occurring to the Turnbull government as it pursues its plan for higher taxes on self-funded retirees with a passion and zeal the Coalition is applying to no other policy area.
The Coalition knows the ALP and Greens won't support cutting government spending — but they will support higher taxes.
The problem is that when political parties and their leaders seek to achieve not what is desirable, but only what they think is feasible, they lose their followers.
As John Boehner, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives reflected: "A leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk."
No comments:
Post a Comment