However frustrated you may be that neither of the two institutional American political parties perfectly or even remotely reflects your values, you should at least understand that they are institutional. By this I mean that they run our political institutions, from Congress to the various agencies of the Federal Government to governors’ mansions, down to the state legislatures and local county executive offices. If they do well then our institutions do well. If they are bad at their jobs, then our institutions will not perform properly and the public and the nation will suffer.
The same is true of our media, which form a vital institution in our society. The media in some sense serve our institutions because they are a cog in the machine, but they serve it by critiquing it and holding it to account.
The Republican Party just doesn’t embrace its role in this process, and this can seen in no more complicated a way than that they spend most of their energy tearing down the very institutions they serve and rely upon to keep things honest. An institutional party that does all it can to win control of the federal government should not continually denigrate the effectiveness and legitimacy of the federal government. A party that wants a healthy established order, should not constantly make unwarranted and exaggerated accusations of media bias.
Taken as a whole, the Republican Party has, ever since its takeover by the conservative movement, done more than any foreign ideologues can ever hope to do to erode faith in the goodness of the American establishment. They’ve done this partly by being very bad at governing, but my focus here is on their messaging. During much of the latter Bush Era, the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, and they had a friendly Supreme Court. They ought to have been able to argue that under their leadership the federal government was finally functioning as it should. But, even if this had been plausible based on their record, they could never have done it because their whole machine is geared to deride the tyrannical inefficiency of government. What they did instead was to blame their own failures on the very institutions they controlled, and on the media for never giving them a fair shake.
The result of their messaging, which has been carried out for decades now, both when holding power and when in the minority, was that their followers lost faith in every aspect of our institutions. An institutional party destroyed faith in itself.
Again, part of this is based on the public’s unhappiness with their performance, either because the promised results never came or because what the Republican base thought they wanted resulted in a hollowing out of the middle class. But part of it is that we’ve had this cancer inside the system that feeds on spreading cynicism about the system.
All you have to do is consider Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. He’s the most powerful man outside of the White House in Washington DC, and he runs a party that is dedicated to arguing that he does a terrible job at everything. Whether he does a good job or a bad job, and no matter from whose perspective you try to answer that question, the message has to continue that the federal government screws up everything it touches.
There is no way for Ryan to succeed, (or to get any credit for succeeding, anyway). During the Obama Era, Ryan’s party has been demanding that the government be shut down, that it not pay its bills on time, that it have all its powers defanged. The GOP raises expectations that their party leaders can do things that they cannot actually do, but all of these things are about taking a club to the very institutions that the Republican Party controls or seeks to control.
To be sure, Trumpism is a populist revolt on trade and immigration and failure to deliver on promises, and part of the GOP’s current problems are that the interests of their elites have simply diverged from the interests of their rank-and-file. But that’s only part of their problem. They’ve been an institutional anti-institutional party for so long that the chickens finally came home to roost. They are incapable of running our institutions and don’t have the legitimacy (even among their own supporters) to run organizations that they’ve successfully delegitimized in the eyes of much of the public.
There’s even fallout on the left, because most people do not understand that the GOP has the power through intransigence and obstruction to make good institutions fail. During the first two years of Obama’s presidency, Congress was a hive of action and productivity, with important and useful hearings occurring with such frequency that it was hard to keep up on CSPAN. During the last six years, CSPAN might as well not have not existed because there was nothing of any consequence or benefit to the nation occurring in Congress. A million times, voices on the left have criticized the president and the Democrats with the same disillusioned cries of broken promises or critiques of half-measures and compromise that we hear so routinely from the right. In both cases, not enough credit is given to the opposing party for the having the capacity to say ‘no.’
There will always be genuine gridlock in a divided government on some issues where fundamental issues are at play, but it’s only when one institutional party takes the position that the institution it serves is rotten and evil that it becomes impossible to compromise on anything. With the Republicans, it’s grown so ridiculous that they can’t even agree with themselves on how to fund the government, let alone make some kind of deal with the opposition that can stick.
This is why Boehner and Cantor eventually had to go, because they could only fund the government by using Democratic votes, and the Democrats weren’t willing to give those votes endlessly without having a say in how the money is spent.
So, when people talk about Trumpism being here to stay regardless of the outcome of the election, they’re really missing the source of the problem.
Our institutions are not fatally flawed. They are good institutions that functioned well in the past and served as a model for others. But the public has lost faith in them, including the media, because the Republicans wanted them to lose faith in them. The public has lost faith in them because the Republicans have run these institutions so poorly, including their media organs.
Ultimately, you can be anti-establishment and you can be as cynical as is warranted, but we’ll always have institutions that we want to work, and work well. If you throw out one group of insiders, it won’t be two weeks before the newcomers are insiders, too, working on the same problems and overseeing the same institutions. We need our Establishment, both governmental and media, to be respectable so they can earn our respect. That doesn’t mean that you look the other way when they fail. It means that you don’t make it central to your institutional party’s ideology that our whole system is rotten, regardless of its performance at any given time.
We’ll always have elites. We’ll always have DC. But we don’t need a party that’s invested in their failure.
