Deadlock as Political Theatre

How a Parliamentary Democracy Dies

The Last Senate of Julius Caesar, Raffaele Giannetti, 1867

I’m going to be upfront here and just say that absolutely nothing I have to say on this topic is new. This is just something that has sufficiently annoyed me that I wanted to write about it, sort of like shouting pointlessly into the void.

The political theatre in our legislative branch has become actively poisonous to a well-functioning government.

I mean I’m not going to pretend I’m nonpartisan or anything—I’m obviously a pretty partisan liberal—but I really do care more about functional governance. I am genuinely someone who cares about my country and our ability to continue to bring about positive changes in the world.

Since the 1990s when Newt Gingrich found out that if you just act like an obstructionist, every single camera and every single newspaper will be pointed directly at you, we’ve been careening towards this moment. When you grind the government to a halt, everyone has no choice but to look directly at you.

Both congressional parties have actively nurtured this tendency into a well-calculated legislative cycle that works like this—there’s a budget crisis, then we engage in political grandstanding, and then we resolve it (or we have a brief shutdown and then resolve it.) House Republicans used a shutdown against the Obama Presidency to extract political concessions, and House Democrats used a shutdown to extract concessions from Trump. Neither party is blameless for getting us here.

The dynamic that really worries me though, is the emergence of an inter-GOP competition to see who gets to be the star of the moment. Instead of a well-rehearsed (if extremely toxic) cycle of edging toward a cliff to see who blinks first—it is now a game of individuals playing obstructionist for their self-interest. It isn’t even about the Democrats or GOP anymore. It’s about who in the GOP has the willpower to utilize the dozens of various mechanisms to grind over governmental processes to a halt.

Just look back at the travails of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership election. The whole thing was essentially just a stunt that revolved around one (Ultra-MAGA) flank of the GOP that was able to monopolize the national spotlight. Matt Gaetz despite being about as unlikeable as a politician can be, was the center of American political life and it paid a lot.

How about the star of the GOP, Marjorie Taylor Greene? Yeah sure, she seemingly can’t go a week without saying something to the effect that we need a Second American Civil War and it makes her millions.

What I’m trying to get at here is that we’ve created a set of structural incentives for an enduring problem to emerge in the ranks of the GOP. There’s a relatively vicious competition in these fundraising markets given how deterritorialized our national politics have become.

The fundraising game hasn’t been local for some time—and you need to compete with the whole party if you want to pull in the big numbers. In the era of constant coverage in social media, you can’t plan for your once-a-year budget standoff to get your moment in the sun either.

This gets me to Tubervilles’ months-long campaign to block hundreds of military nominations and the appointments of service chiefs. His single-handed campaign—despite being a problem for national security—is massively beneficial to the Senator himself. It gives him a direct national spotlight with endless news and social media coverage.

Fuck national security. Fuck legislation. Fuck the careers of hundreds of people that have faithfully served their country. It pays to make sure your base knows that you are fighting.

It’s not enough to just grandstand at some hearing that you might get a clip from to post on Twitter. You need to make sure that what you’re doing is going to dominate the discourse on a daily basis. You need to be visible all year long. The same set of structural forces that create stars on social media now creates our most notable legislators. It’s getting constant eyes on you no matter the cost.

You need to be Cato the Younger standing in front of the Senate every single day fighting off the 40 other Catos that are looking to steal your oxygen. You need to be worse, louder, and more vicious. If you’re not? Well, then good luck with those fundraising letters.

It’s a structural problem with how our political-media-fundraising ecosystem works. If you want to be the bigger man and step aside you’re just going to lose—elections are a zero-sum game.

I don’t really have much hope that we’re going to pull out of this anytime soon. There don’t seem to be any real breaks on the culture war that’s driving much of rhetorical ammunition for the worst offenders in this fight. We’re also so polarized as a nation I kind of fear that there’s not enough voters willing to defect to finally put an end to this. Even after a coup attempt, Trump is polling equal to Biden.

I guess what I’m saying here is that it’s only going to get worse and I’m just going to keep screaming into the void.