(Democrats, as noted, did not raise the issue of “broken government” during the 2006 midterm campaigns.) Mrs. Cheney insisted that the reporting included “terrible distortions of the president’s and vice president’s positions on many issues.”26 (She was vague about these distortions, and showed remarkable denial, or blind hubris, with asserting that the CNN series was off base for being critical of the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.)
The information assembled by the CNN series did not, in fact, support the conclusion that our system of government is broken beyond repair. But CNN did not structure the programs to prove that point, for they were not intended as a polemic. By and large viewers were left to draw their own conclusions regarding the functioning of the national government. The network provided information voters wanted, even when candidates ignored it.
Why Political Process Matters
In groundbreaking studies little noticed outside the political science academic community, University of Nebraska (Lincoln) political scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse have examined the question of how Americans feel about process. In doing so, they challenged accepted truths about process, although that was not the reason for their research. Nonetheless, they found that for a significant percentage of Americans process is more important than any other factor in their consideration of government and politics. In their books Congress as Public Enemy:
“Political scientists have all but ignored the study of process,” Hibbing and Theiss-Morse wrote, explaining that their professional peers, when studying voting and why people vote as they do, or not vote at all, they have focused on “candidate image, issue, and party.”28 Their research was not directed at establishing the concept of a broken government, yet their findings about process help understand it, as well as what can and cannot be done to fix it.
In their research on public attitudes of Americans toward government institutions (like the Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), Hibbing and Theiss-Morse gathered information from “more than 1,400 thirty-minute telephone interviews with a nationwide sample of voting-age residents,” plus “eight two-hour focus-group sessions conducted at locales across the country and consisting of approximately ten participants each.”29 They were taken aback by what they discovered.
They had assumed, as do most political scientists, that Americans are “confused by governmental processes while retaining at least a few clear policy desires.”30 In fact, they had it backward: People do not find process complicated, but rather find policy to be so. Their research revealed that Americans are “influenced at least as much by the processes employed in the political system as by the particular outputs emanating from the process.” They offered a striking example in public disgust with Congress after the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings.
While very few Americans cared whether or not Thomas was confirmed for the Supreme Court, they did have very clear negative feelings about “the process leading to that decision: the way things looked; the way the hearings were run and how they unfolded; and the institution’s [referring to the Senate’s] structure, rules, and norms.”31 In short, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse discovered that average Americans have no trouble whatsoever judging institutions of government by how their key processes are carried out.32 Process “is what they relate to,” because most people “have understandable difficulties comprehending the substantive complexities of [policy] issues,” while they “often have a gut reaction to process.”
Needless to say, these studies also found that process is not for everyone.
For example, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found that of the 1,433 people in their survey just over half, 53 percent, were inclined to view politics and government through one of three well-known political propensities (or inclination by which the public perceives these activities in the public square): people, party affiliation, policy, or process. More specifically, within the 53 percent they found the following breakdown of propensities: 10 percent viewed politics primarily by the people or person involved; 5 percent looked first at the party involved; 25 percent were primarily interested in policy; and 14 percent viewed politics and government by looking first at process.* Within the group that had a process propensity, which is of particular interest to me, they reported that 31 percent of their respondents interested in process were Democrats, 43 percent were independents, and 27 percent were Republicans.
Most important, 74 percent of the process-oriented group was politically active.34 Not only are these the people that candidates should want to reach, but they are also news and information consumers whom journalists should not ignore, as well as a ready audience for bloggers who will give them what the mainstream news will not. By my reading of this data, process issues are important to not less than 20 million voters. As I will explain, such issues should be important to all voters.
It is difficult to imagine a more cricital process issue than whether our system of government is broken beyond repair. By way of further introduction, however, a brief note about the outlook of contemporary conservative Republicans may help set the stage to view what they have done to the processes of the three branches.
Republican Governing Philosophy Leaders of the current Republican Party have shown that they have mastered the art of winning elections, notwithstanding a few miscalculations about 2006. Democrats did not exactly beat Republicans that year, but instead did a superb job of running aggressive campaigns, which placed them in a perfect position once Republicans began imploding.
Republicans are also very good at raising money, not to mention the fact that those in the rank and file were until recently far more affluent than the Democrats; while their ranks have recently thinned, the GOP remains well-heeled.** Republican corporate connections have given the party cutting-edge marketing and advertising skills in local, state, and national campaigns. The party’s highly committed core membership is willing to undertake the thankless tasks of elective politics, grunt work they perform with a zeal that cannot be bought. Once elected, Republicans are extremely inclined toward opposing Democratic programs, not only because their philosophy is inherently antigovernment but because they are instinctively contrarian to anything and everything liberal or progressive. When campaigning or when opposing Democrats, Republicans are unmatched in modern politics for their willingness to play dirty, to go negative and nasty, and to play hardball, a ruthlessness well matched to their uncompromising competitiveness.
Today’s conservative-based Republican Party in fact excels at everything in modern politics except governing the nation. Given conservatism’s fundamentally antigovernment attitude, the inability of Republicans to govern successfully is to be expected. Conservatives have few guiding principles relating to effective governance. Just as conservatism itself defies definition by conservatives, so does its governing philosophy.
Nonetheless, conservatives clearly believe that Ronald Reagan’s statements about government in his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981, are gospel: “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by selfrule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
He provided the answer to that question himself, and it was not the federal government: “It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.”
Former Reagan aide Michael Deaver later assembled a collection of brief essays from prominent contemporary conservatives entitled Why I Am a Reagan Conservative. A notable recurring theme runs through these pieces, as shown by a few typical examples:
The information assembled by the CNN series did not, in fact, support the conclusion that our system of government is broken beyond repair. But CNN did not structure the programs to prove that point, for they were not intended as a polemic. By and large viewers were left to draw their own conclusions regarding the functioning of the national government. The network provided information voters wanted, even when candidates ignored it.
Why Political Process Matters
In groundbreaking studies little noticed outside the political science academic community, University of Nebraska (Lincoln) political scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse have examined the question of how Americans feel about process. In doing so, they challenged accepted truths about process, although that was not the reason for their research. Nonetheless, they found that for a significant percentage of Americans process is more important than any other factor in their consideration of government and politics. In their books Congress as Public Enemy:
Public Attitudes Toward American Political Institutions (1995) and Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government Should Work (2002), and in a number of related papers presented at scholarly conferences and published in professional journals, they have demonstrated the significance of process to Americans.
In their research on public attitudes of Americans toward government institutions (like the Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), Hibbing and Theiss-Morse gathered information from “more than 1,400 thirty-minute telephone interviews with a nationwide sample of voting-age residents,” plus “eight two-hour focus-group sessions conducted at locales across the country and consisting of approximately ten participants each.”29 They were taken aback by what they discovered.
They had assumed, as do most political scientists, that Americans are “confused by governmental processes while retaining at least a few clear policy desires.”30 In fact, they had it backward: People do not find process complicated, but rather find policy to be so. Their research revealed that Americans are “influenced at least as much by the processes employed in the political system as by the particular outputs emanating from the process.” They offered a striking example in public disgust with Congress after the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings.
While very few Americans cared whether or not Thomas was confirmed for the Supreme Court, they did have very clear negative feelings about “the process leading to that decision: the way things looked; the way the hearings were run and how they unfolded; and the institution’s [referring to the Senate’s] structure, rules, and norms.”31 In short, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse discovered that average Americans have no trouble whatsoever judging institutions of government by how their key processes are carried out.32 Process “is what they relate to,” because most people “have understandable difficulties comprehending the substantive complexities of [policy] issues,” while they “often have a gut reaction to process.”
Needless to say, these studies also found that process is not for everyone.
For example, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found that of the 1,433 people in their survey just over half, 53 percent, were inclined to view politics and government through one of three well-known political propensities (or inclination by which the public perceives these activities in the public square): people, party affiliation, policy, or process. More specifically, within the 53 percent they found the following breakdown of propensities: 10 percent viewed politics primarily by the people or person involved; 5 percent looked first at the party involved; 25 percent were primarily interested in policy; and 14 percent viewed politics and government by looking first at process.* Within the group that had a process propensity, which is of particular interest to me, they reported that 31 percent of their respondents interested in process were Democrats, 43 percent were independents, and 27 percent were Republicans.
Most important, 74 percent of the process-oriented group was politically active.34 Not only are these the people that candidates should want to reach, but they are also news and information consumers whom journalists should not ignore, as well as a ready audience for bloggers who will give them what the mainstream news will not. By my reading of this data, process issues are important to not less than 20 million voters. As I will explain, such issues should be important to all voters.
It is difficult to imagine a more cricital process issue than whether our system of government is broken beyond repair. By way of further introduction, however, a brief note about the outlook of contemporary conservative Republicans may help set the stage to view what they have done to the processes of the three branches.
Republican Governing Philosophy Leaders of the current Republican Party have shown that they have mastered the art of winning elections, notwithstanding a few miscalculations about 2006. Democrats did not exactly beat Republicans that year, but instead did a superb job of running aggressive campaigns, which placed them in a perfect position once Republicans began imploding.
Republicans are also very good at raising money, not to mention the fact that those in the rank and file were until recently far more affluent than the Democrats; while their ranks have recently thinned, the GOP remains well-heeled.** Republican corporate connections have given the party cutting-edge marketing and advertising skills in local, state, and national campaigns. The party’s highly committed core membership is willing to undertake the thankless tasks of elective politics, grunt work they perform with a zeal that cannot be bought. Once elected, Republicans are extremely inclined toward opposing Democratic programs, not only because their philosophy is inherently antigovernment but because they are instinctively contrarian to anything and everything liberal or progressive. When campaigning or when opposing Democrats, Republicans are unmatched in modern politics for their willingness to play dirty, to go negative and nasty, and to play hardball, a ruthlessness well matched to their uncompromising competitiveness.
Today’s conservative-based Republican Party in fact excels at everything in modern politics except governing the nation. Given conservatism’s fundamentally antigovernment attitude, the inability of Republicans to govern successfully is to be expected. Conservatives have few guiding principles relating to effective governance. Just as conservatism itself defies definition by conservatives, so does its governing philosophy.
Nonetheless, conservatives clearly believe that Ronald Reagan’s statements about government in his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981, are gospel: “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by selfrule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
He provided the answer to that question himself, and it was not the federal government: “It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.”
Former Reagan aide Michael Deaver later assembled a collection of brief essays from prominent contemporary conservatives entitled Why I Am a Reagan Conservative. A notable recurring theme runs through these pieces, as shown by a few typical examples:
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