Is it the system?

Let me take a shot at answering my own question from earlier:

Is there any other government that voluntarily shuts itself down every December because half of the freaking political system has a big old temper tantrum when it comes time to make the budgets? Usually when other governments shut down it’s because, I don’t know, rebel forces are swarming through the streets of the capital or something equally serious. Ours shuts down because the party controlling the House of Representatives thinks it’s great politics and good clean fun.

One reason why this keeps happening could be that our presidential system just isn’t built to accommodate the kind of highly ideological, highly unified political party that the GOP has become. When parliamentary governments — say, for no particular reason, Sweden’s — become so dysfunctional that they can’t even pass a budget, the government doesn’t shut down, it calls snap elections. Then you get a new parliament that either strengthens the majority’s hold on things or brings the opposition party to power; either way, in theory (and things can still break down in this scenario but not annually like they do here now), the discord and gridlock will be removed or lessened and governance is uninterrupted. Sometimes snap elections are called when normal governing becomes too difficult, even in the absence of an impending budgetary crisis; witness what’s happening right now in Israel. So maybe it’s the system.

Of course, political scientist Jonathan Bernstein considered the parliamentary-presidential question last year and actually came to the conclusion that, no, it’s not the system, the Republican Party is just broken:

Perhaps the biggest cause is the perverse incentives created by the conservative marketplace. Simply put, a large portion of the party, including the GOP-aligned partisan press and even many politicians, profit from having Democrats in office. Typically, democracies “work” in part because political parties have strong incentives to hold office, which causes them once they win to try hard to enact public policy that keeps people satisfied with their government. That appears to be undermined for today’s Republicans.

A second and related cause has to do with a spiraling insistence on ever-more-pure candidates in party primaries. To some extent, this is perfectly healthy. Party actors are able to use nominations to fight for their interests and for their preferred positions on public policy; in a healthy party, those fights are one of the best sources of real democracy in the political system. The danger in even the healthiest parties is that participation in nomination contests tends to be highest among those with the most extreme views, which can leave a party too far from median voters. In the GOP, however, there are strong incentives to constantly create new levels of purity, in many cases by creating purely symbolic differences and attempting to exploit them. Knowing of that threat, candidates don’t even need direct threats in many cases to make themselves easy marks for cranks attempting to pressure them.

In both of these causes, what seems to be at the root of it is a fairly enormous amount of money available to those who are willing to exploit it, whether it’s selling books or funding rogue candidates, as long as they present themselves as more-radical-than-thou.

The third cause is different, since as far as I can tell it’s simply caused by bad luck. Winning parties have a tendency to overlearn the lessons of their campaigns; winning candidates become role models for the party in the future. And the Republican Party, which has produced many impressive and honorable politicians over the years, has been unlucky in its winners — especially Richard Nixon and Newt Gingrich, but also in many ways Ronald Reagan. The lessons they learned from those politicians and from the 1968, 1980 and 1994 victories have reinforced the worst instincts of party actors (even though the victories actually mainly had to do with economic and other fundamentals that had nothing to do with the lessons “learned”).

The result? A massively dysfunctional party, as they amply demonstrated over the last decade —think Iraq, Congressional corruption, economic collapse, and on and on. Just to give the basics:

• An aversion to normal bargaining and compromise

• An inability to banish fringe people and views from the mainstream of the party

• An almost comical lack of interest in substantive policy formation

• A willingness to ignore established norms and play “Constitutional hardball”

• A belief that when out of office, the best play is always all-out obstruction

So, yeah, maybe it really is just America, and just the one party at that.