We Must Break the Cycle of Pandering

A merica’s two major political parties have a contemptuous view of their voters. Their respective stewards don’t think you’re capable of holding two thoughts in your head at the same time. They believe you are allergic to the concepts of tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and delayed gratification. Populist Republicans congratulate themselves on cracking American democracy’s code by promising the public expensive new services and costly protectionist schemes that shield uncompetitive industries from the ravages of the market, all while reducing the tax burden on the majority of taxpayers. Democrats long ago perfected this irresponsible appeal to the electorate. So, an unquestioned consensus has now formed around the need to promise voters the world on credit.

What has this gotten the two parties? Parity. Neither party commands the affection of its voters. Each thrives on its constituents’ distaste for the other guys. This formula has failed to expand either party’s coalition, but it’s the only formula they’ve got. Thus, in the effort to cobble together the barest of possible majorities, our presidential aspirants are furiously improvising.

Donald Trump and his party codify whatever ideas pop into his head on the campaign trail as inviolable tenets of modern Republicanism. No taxes on tips? Sure. Erase the tax liability on overtime wages and Social Security benefits? Why not? Restore the state-and-local tax deduction which he himself repealed? If that’s what it takes. Republican efforts to outbid Democrats haven’t produced results because the GOP is only imitating a tactic its opponents have refined to an art.

Kamala Harris assumes the voters she needs won’t understand that a $25,000 credit to assist first-time homebuyers will just increase the price of housing. She hopes they are unacquainted with the scarcity and illicit markets encouraged by price-gouging restrictions. We can cap the cost of child care and boost domestic manufacturing through subsidization, she promises.

All of it will be financed either through the magic of tariffs or hiking corporate taxes to nearly the highest rate in the OECD (while somehow dissuading corporations from relocating to friendlier environments abroad). If you find any of that unconvincing, don’t overthink it! You’re not the intended audience.

The campaigns are treating the electorate like an algorithm they tweak with the goal of just barely getting to 50 percent plus one. You, too, can play this game from the comfort of your couch. Juice turnout on the margins among a key swing-state demographic here, depress the vote share there, and voilà! The narrowest of possible victories. Soon enough, those partisans loyal to the victor reason that squeaker into a broad mandate to reshape the political landscape. But no consensus exists for a broad revision of the status quo because the winning candidate never campaigned on such a revision. A backlash soon forms against the party in power, and the pandering begins anew.

Neither party seems to have the creativity or even the imagination to build a broader coalition that would liberate its candidates from this unrewarding cycle. And yet this game was, in many ways, a luxury underwritten by the more sober elected officials whose names were known only to political professionals and junkies. They kept the lights on while their more visible compatriots danced for votes. The ranks of the earnest and restrained are thinner now, but the need for sobriety in government is greater than ever.

As former secretary of defense Robert Gates warned this week, “our Army is shrinking, our Navy is decommissioning warships faster than new ones can be built, our Air Force has stagnated in size, and only a fraction of the force is available for combat on any given day.” The domestic defense-industrial base “cannot produce major weapons systems in the numbers we need in a timely way” to meet the needs of our allies on the front lines of an increasingly dangerous world, much less our own needs. And the international threat environment is deteriorating by the day.

Interest payments alone on America’s $35 trillion national debt will top $1 trillion next year, and they will continue to grow in perpetuity in the absence of reforms to the country’s nondiscretionary spending obligations. Early in the next decade, the Social Security trust fund will reach the point of insolvency, followed shortly thereafter by Medicare. Dramatic alterations to the structure of both programs, to say nothing of America’s discretionary spending, are necessary. But the political class has internalized the notion that anyone witless enough to propose such measures is reliably demagogued into retirement soon enough. Why give your opponents an opening and expose yourself to voters’ wrath? Better to indulge the comforting fictions the electorate prefers.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no appetite for the alteration of America’s doomed fiscal trajectory, no taste for the redoubling of our commitment to our own defense and that of our allies, because no one is making the case for it. The political class believes you’re too fragile to understand, much less support, the tough choice necessary to meet the challenges before us, and they think you’ll shoot the messenger. American voters haven’t been treated like adults by their representatives in a long while, but that will not go on forever. Events will intervene, whether we’re prepared for them or not.

Maybe Americans would bitterly reject the politician who eschews the temptation to tell the voting public that the only problem our country faces is the other party, but it has been quite some time since the public encountered a presidential aspirant willing to level with them. Americans do not shrink from challenges — certainly not those with stakes as high as the longevity of the national experiment. Honesty and circumspection could go a long way, if only because they are such rare and possibly refreshing qualities in seekers of high office. And yet, on the assumption that voters can’t handle the truth, the undifferentiated political-consultancy class strongly advises against telling it.

What we’re left with are presidential candidates who dare not alienate the raving lunatics, antisocial malcontents, and charlatans who gravitate toward their parties because every single vote is irreplaceable. To the cynical sort, it sounds fanciful to propose that an enterprising political entrepreneur might build a broader coalition, one that subsumes the fringes into a more heterogeneous whole, by telling voters what they must hear rather than just what they want to hear. But it’s hardly fantastical to imagine a circumstance in which a significant majority of voters rally to a cause in the national interest. Beyond the salubrious effect such an approach would have on the political discourse, a majority like that would free politicians from feeling like they have to cater to the narrowest of constituencies just to win this bellwether county in that must-win state.

To political professionals, this all sounds like an unrealizable dream. But our unenviable circumstances will demand some creativity from us, and soon. There may be real rewards available to a candidate with the courage to treat voters like grown-ups. Until we encounter one of those, we will never know.