William A. Niskanen - The Godfather of Divided Government Voting Strategy

Bill Niskanen, long-time member and chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute passed away last October. This tribute video was presented  at a Cato Institute memorial service last week.

Gridlock is really good. Really.

The Dividist has complained in the past about the propensity of pundits and bloggers to conflate the concepts of "divided government" and legislative "gridlock". The terms are often used erroneously as interchangeable synonyms. Yet, even the Dividist has occasionally employed this semantic shortcut, such as in the July, 2010 post "Gridlock is Good." In that post the beneficial aspects of partisan legislative gridlock was presented in the form of gridlock preventing a negative outcome - specifically stopping bad bills from being passed into law (see legislative abominations - Porkulus and Obamacare as examples of the damage done when one party has the power to pass legislation on pure partisan votes). The underlying common sense notion is that divided government and partisan gridlock prevent the worst instincts of either party from becoming law. When the moderating influence of legislative gridlock is bypassed, we get legislation no one really understands, except the special interests that helped craft it. So we are treated to the spectacle of our legislative leaders explaining that we won't know what sweeping legislation will accomplish until after it is signed into law. Our legislators may not know what they are passing, but once it gets to the agencies administering the law, the special interests do.

In a recent Cato Institute Policy Analysis, Marcus E. Ethridge (University of Wisconsin Political Science Professor) outlines a new positive argument for the inefficient, constitutionally divided, and often gridlocked legislative process. Ethridge offers a compelling case that our inefficient checked, balanced, and divided government is far less susceptible to special interest influence than the more efficient executive branch agency rule-making process preferred by Progressives impatient for rapid change.

Cato Institute Policy Analysis #672 - The Case for Gridlock:

"In the wake of the 2010 elections, President Obama declared that voters did not give a mandate to gridlock. His statement reflects over a century of Progressive hostility to the inefficient and slow system of government created by the American Framers. Convinced that the government created by the Constitution frustrates their goals, Progressives have long sought ways around its checks and balances. Perhaps the most important of their methods is delegating power to administrative agencies, an arrangement that greatly transformed U.S. government during and after the New Deal. For generations, Progressives have supported the false premise that administrative action in the hands of experts will realize the public interest more effectively than the constitutional system and its multiple vetoes over policy changes. The political effect of empowering the administrative state has been quite different: it fosters policies that reflect the interests of those with well organized power. A large and growing body of evidence makes it clear that the public interest is most secure when governmental institutions are inefficient decisionmakers. An arrangement that brings diverse interests into a complex, sluggish decisionmaking process is generally unattractive to special interests. Gridlock also neutralizes some political benefits that producer groups and other well-heeled interests inherently enjoy. By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups."

This is an important read but not an easy one. Etheridge challenges conventional thinking about why special interests hold such sway over public policy. He explores the mechanism by which their financial and lobbying muscle are applied to maximum effect influencing public policy and resources in direct contradiction to the public interest and even legislative intent. Distilling his 20 page argument into a blog post is difficult if not impossible. We will instead excerpt a few representative paragraphs, comment briefly on salient points introduced in his analysis and encourage you to read the whole thing.

The question facing libertarians...

...is not the question debated in the August-September issue of Reason - "Where do Libertarians Belong?".

That debate featured Cato Kauffman Foundation scholar Brink Lindsey, Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg and Tea Party organizer Matt Kibbe. An interesting read, but more than a little frustrating. They re-litigate the same hand-wringing debate I first noted and commented on at the beginning of this blog, over four years ago. In particular, Jonah delights in beating Brink about the head and shoulders with the "Liberaltarian" trope that Brink enthusiastically supported a few years ago. Brink is decidedly less enthusiastic now. Perhaps he read this sad account of my own failed liberaltarian affair.

For those who don't have the time or inclination to read the entire article, I offer this debate summary:

• Shorter Brink Lindsey: Libertarians should forget the right and aim for the center. BTW the Tea Party also sucks.
• Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Libertarians should forget the left, and stick with the right.
• Shorter Matt Kibbe: Libertarians should forget the right and left, and work with the Tea Party to find a new path. BTW - Fuck you Lindsey and the horse you rode in on.

Brian Moore has an even shorter version. No real conclusions were either expected or found by the paticipants. But at least there was one amusing answer to the question offered by a commenter at Reason.com: "Where Do Libertarians Belong? - In the camps, silly."

More interesting than yet another futile attempt to answer this unresolvable question, are the questions that the debate spawned around the blogosphere -

Clive Crook thinks the question should be phrased "What Use Is a Libertarian?" Nick Gillespie answers his question with another question - "Are Libertarians Really as Useless as a Bucket of Armpits? Or Do They Just Smell That Way?" Black Jesus worries "Is Libertarianism Dead?" Ilya Somin wonders if Brink is moving "From 'Liberaltarianism' to Libertarian Centrism?" Noah Millman asks "Whither Libertarians?" Mollie Hemingway invokes the "The death of liberaltarianism?" Stackiii wants to know "Can These Groups Win Without Each Other? Heather Horn finds even more posts with even more questions and finally asks one herself "Should Libertarians Ditch the Republican Party?

So many questions. And yet, no one is asking the right question:

How can libertarians become politically relevant?

Back to Clive Crook:

"I cannot see what purpose is served by worrying about which of these unappeasable opponents would make the better partner."

Exactly. Aiming for the middle does not cut it. Nor aiming to shoot the right as Lindsey advocates, nor aiming to shoot the left as Goldberg advocates, nor aiming at both as Kibbe advocates.

From a practical perspective, asking rhetorically whether libertarians have a "use" or "where they belong" is less important than understanding how they can be politically relevant. One key to political relevance is simple - a predictable centrist libertarian swing vote. The rub - for a swing vote to be predictable it has to be organized. And nobody yet has figured out how to herd these cats. This is sometimes referred to as the "Hot Tub Libertarian" problem.

There is an answer. There is a way to herd these cats. There is a path to imbuing libertarians with policy shifting power and political relevance. Paraphrasing from an earlier post "Curing Libertarian Electile Dysfunction":

A libertarian swing vote organization is going to have to look different than traditional political organization. After all, it is something we will have to accomplish while sitting in the hot-tub. What is needed, is an organizing principle. Ideally, a principle that is so obvious, so logical, and so clear-cut, that no leadership is needed, no parties are needed, no candidates are needed, and no infrastructure is needed. Ideally it is this easy: You think about the principle, and you know how to vote.

That organizing principle exists. It is voting for Divided Government. It is absolutely clear-cut and easy to understand. Divided Government is documented by Niskanen et.al. to work in a practical real-world manner to restrain spending and the growth of the state. As a voting strategy it can be implemented immediately. More importantly, it can collectively be implemented individually as we sit in our hot tubs and ponder the sorry state of the world. Whatever the percentage of the electorate that a libertarian/Tea Party represents, whether it is 6% or 20%, if they vote as a block for divided government, they immediately become the brokers of an evenly split partisan electorate. They arguably become the single most most potent voting block in the country, specifically because they are willing to vote either Democratic or Republican as a block. Specifically because they are not fused to one party or the other. Specifically because they are not trying to figure out "where they belong".

If a libertarian/Tea Party divided government vote is shown to swing elections for two or three cycles, then libertarians will no longer be inchoate, their message no longer diffused, and their political clout no longer flaccid. As long as the bulk of the electorate remain polarized and balanced, even a small percentage libertarian (or Tea Party) swing vote organized around divided government will be enough for those Tea Party libertarians to proudly display the biggest swinging political "hammer" in town.

It could happen.

Addendum:
The Reason cover has an image of some of our favorite pols on a Nolan Chart. This quick quiz plots your political proclivity on such a two dimensional political chart, with the four corners defined as liberal (L), conservative (R), libertarian (U), statist (D). I hadn't taken the test in a while, and the result is unsurprising - this is where The Dividist belongs...

As a libertarian dividist, I'll be voting straight Republican for federal office this year. Should the GOP take the majority in either house of Congress, I'll be voting for the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012.

Divided and Balanced.™
Now that is fair.

Curing libertarian political impotence - a prescription for Electile Dysfunction

Brink Lindsey (not pictured above) of the Cato Institute kicked off this month's Cato Unbound series with an essay seeking to locate and describe The Libertarian Center in the American political landscape. He weaves two themes into the essay, the first positing the existence of this libertarian political center, while making the case that it is growing as a natural outcome of American economic abundance:

"American society has become more libertarian because, more than any other country on the planet, it has successfully adapted to the novel conditions of economic abundance. And because of the way this adaptation took place, a broadly defined libertarianism now occupies the center of the American political spectrum."

This theme is explored more broadly in Lindsey's recent book The Age of Abundance (a book I have yet to read, but have queued up for my next Amazon order) and inspired the masthead and headline for the monthly Cato Unbound theme. Others around the blogosphere are debating the merits of his basic thesis, including Atlantician Matthew Yglesias , Michael van der Galiën and Angry Blogger Brian Moore. I am more interested in exploring a secondary theme in Lindsey's essay, libertarian political impotence and what to do about it.

While making the case for the libertarian center, Lindsey does a credible contortionist impression, bending over backwards to make absolutely certain no one would mistake his thesis for the belief that libertarians have or are about to exercise any meaningful political power. It starts with his very first paragraph...

"There is no organized libertarian movement of any significance in American politics. To be sure, libertarian academics and intellectuals occupy some prominent positions and exert real influence on the public debate. But they do not speak on behalf of any politically mobilized mass constituency. Only about 2 percent of Americans describe themselves as libertarian, according to a 2000 Rasmussen poll. And the Libertarian Party is a fringe operation that, at best, occasionally plays the spoiler...."

...continues in the middle, with a twisting, gravity defying move where he pulls his own legs out from under his own argument...

"There are some obvious objections to the idea of a libertarian center. First, as I stated at the outset, there is no libertarian political movement to speak of. Accordingly, there is no organized libertarian-leaning constituency that could ally with either conservatives or liberals to alter the balance of power. Rather, at best libertarianism exists as a diffuse, inchoate set of impulses that operate, not as an independent force, but as tendencies within the left and right and a check on how far each can stray in illiberal directions."

... and finishes with this definitive rubber-spine capitulation:

"I hope that nothing in this essay has conveyed even a hint of libertarian triumphalism. That would be just plain silly, as even the rosiest of tinted glasses cannot hide Leviathan’s many and egregious blunders and injustices. And in all too many cases, the foreseeable prospects for remedying those blunders and injustices are dim to nonexistent."

I'll come back to what we can do now to begin cutting Leviathan down to size. But first I have a quibble about his notion of a Libertarian center:

" ...conflict is still with us today, in the form of the polarized politics of Red America vs. Blue America. The good news, though, is that this polarization mostly concerns minorities of true believers and their media talking heads rather the bulk of ordinary Americans. Most Americans, it turns out, have moved on since the ’60s toward a common ground whose coloration is not recognizably red or blue – call it a purplish, libertarianish centrism."

Fine and good, but the problem occurs when we try to quantify these purplish, libertarianish centrishts as a predictable voting block. Shortly before the mid-terms, the Cato Institute published a prescient policy analysis by David Boaz and Divid Kirby that documents the existence of a libertarian swing vote, predicted the outcome of the midterms based on trends in that block, and (as long as we are little fuzzy about the definition of these "libertarianish voters") quantifies the potential size of the libertarianish block as 9-13% of the vote.

Ignoring the actual size of the libertarianish center, lets just stipulate Lindsey's whole argument and agree that it exists. A number of questions are left begging: If there is a vibrant growing "libertarian center", why does it not translate into a recognizable, self-aware political constituency? Why do libertarian ideas "exert real influence on the public debate" but remain "a diffuse, inchoate set of impulses" with "no libertarian political movement to speak of"?

Lets get back to basics. Libertarian ideas have intellectual power. But simply sharing common ideas and values (good or bad) while a necessary condition, is not sufficient for a constituency to wield political power. Political power is never granted to a constituency just because they have good ideas. Political power is earned when a constituency can be shown to vote in a predictable way.

Predictable voting blocks can organize themselves around a party, a personality, or a specific issue. The operative word is organize. As Lindsey points out, the Libertarian Party has failed as a vehicle to organize the libertarian center into a meaningful voting block and is, as a result, relegated to a "fringe operation." Constituencies can also organize around personalities (Wallace, Perot, Nader et.al.) and these "cults of personality" can indeed secure some political clout, even if it is temporally limited until such time a major party sufficiently panders and co-opts their base. The best that libertarians have been able to muster as an organizing "cult of personality" is Ron Paul, which um... seems a bit self limiting. Constituencies that have organized around single issues (abortion, gay rights, war) have wielded real voting power. Problem being, that to a large degree these issues are already "owned" by one major party or the other. Rationalizing drug policy qualifies as a single issue championed primarily by libertarians, but does not, as yet, seem to be a sufficiently important issue to the electorate to attract and organize real political power. If it does, it will certainly be subsumed by one party or the other, and lost as an organizing principle for libertarians and the libertarian leaning. So what and where is the organizing principle for a libertarian voting block?

Ryan Sager's (author of The Elephant in the Room) relevant observations about this very question a year ago helped shape my answer. These quotes from "Hot-Tub Libertarians" and "Out of the Hot Tub, Into the Frying Pan":

"As the Republican Party abandons its commitment to small government, how politically impotent are libertarians? ...no one ever said that libertarians were organized -- or that, when it comes to politics, they have much in the way of brains... But what if they did? How powerful a voting bloc could they be? It's a tough question, and one libertarians have spent far too little time effort researching, but there's a quick and dirty answer: somewhere between 9 percent and 20 percent of the electorate.

"Libertarians need to get serious. And getting serious means organizing. And organizing means within one of the two major parties. I believe that can only be done within the GOP, that there is still a natural logic to fusionism. But I'm happy to hear arguments otherwise."

DWSUWF responded to Ryan's invitation for counter-argument, prompting this reply. Net-net, while I agreed with Sager that libertarians need to get organized and that it should be within the context of the two major parties, I disagreed that meant working exclusively within the GOP:

"Libertarian organization is going to have to look different than traditional politics, after all, it is something we will have to be able to accomplish while sitting in the hot-tub. What is needed, is an organizing principle. Ideally, a principle that is so obvious, so logical, and so clear-cut, that no leadership is needed, no parties are needed, no candidates are needed, and no infrastructure is needed. Ideally it is this easy: You think about the principle, and you know how to vote. That organizing principle exists. It is Divided Government. It is absolutely clear-cut and easy to understand. Divided Government is documented by Niskanen et.al. to work in a practical real-world manner to restrain the growth of the state. As a voting strategy it can be implemented immediately. More importantly, it can collectively be implemented individually as we sit in our hot tubs and ponder the sorry state of the world. Whatever the percentage of the electorate that libertarians represent, whether it is 9% or 20%, if they vote as a block for divided government, they immediately become the brokers of an evenly split partisan electorate. They arguably become the single most most potent voting block in the country, specifically because they are willing to vote either Democratic or Republican as a block. Specifically because they are not fused to one party or the other.

When I wrote that, I was advocating a straight Democratic ticket vote on the federal level to break single party Republican control in the 2006 mid-terms. This blog was one of many "libertarian leaning" voices to call for that divided government vote, including, Jacob Sullum, Jon Henke, Stephen Slivinski, Ron Bailey, Nick Gillespie, Doug Bandow, Warren Meyer, Alex Knapp, Bruce McQuain, Bruce Bartlett, Jane Galt and, of course, the godfather of Divided Government politics - William Niskanen. I could go on, there were plenty more. That drumbeat beget mainstream media attention, like here, here, here and here. And... It worked. Even better, our shiny new divided government is delivering on exactly the libertarian objectives that we hoped it would. Unlike Brink Lindsey, I'm practically giddy with optimism. If it worked once, it can work twice. As clear as it was in 2006 that the only way to secure divided government was voting Democratic, it is just as clear that the only way to maintain divided government in 2009 is to elect a Republican president in 2008. So that is the plan. We just need libertarians to get back on the bandwagon and start beating the divided government drum again.

Lets be clear. We are not proposing some grand socio-economic political theory for analyzing libertarian attitudes and constituencies while laying out a strategy to infuse those ideas into body politic. I'll leave that to the big brains at Cato. This is an outline for a very simple (as it must be) tactical voting heuristic that, if promoted and executed, will effectively slap both major parties upside the head and say "pay attention!" With that attention, we can expect pandering. With pandering, comes policy. With policy, comes change. Leviathan will not be brought down with this single small step. But it can and will be slowed down with by this voting strategy. The tactic also offers a promise of investing libertarian principles with real political clout. With that clout, Lindsey's "recrafting" of Republican and Democratic messages and programs ...

"The idea of a libertarian center is about the core of American political culture, not the margins of political change. What I’m saying is that partisans on both sides need to recraft their messages and programs to better reflect the entrepreneurial, tolerant spirit of contemporary America."

...will happen sooner rather than later.

Shaping an election outcome one time can be dismissed as a rogue political wave. Shaping two consecutive federal elections is a sea change that cannot be ignored. If the libertarian "divided government vote" is shown to swing the 2008 presidential election as it did the Congressional outcome in 2006, then libertarians will no longer be inchoate, their message no longer diffused, and their political clout no longer flaccid. As long as the bulk of the electorate remain polarized and balanced, even a small percentage libertarian swing vote organized around divided government will be enough for libertarians to display the biggest swinging political "hammer" in town.

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.

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