Short and long paths to reform

and a Thanksgiving wish for you, dear reader!

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Here I review how short-term and long-term activities can combine to strengthen and rebuild our creaky democracy. I have written about broad questions of reform, as well as short-term questions focused on this year‘s political campaign. With strategic thinking, I believe the two form a harmonious whole.

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A Second Gilded Age

It is a tense time in U.S. politics. Separation of parties along lines of class and race, technological disruption, increasing economic inequality, and bitter and close national elections. This combination of problems is reminiscent of the original Gilded Age.

Here is one way to take the measure of political division then: popular-vote margins in Presidential elections (and therefore likely electoral disputes):

The red dots indicate exceptions to the general principle that the larger vote-getter was elected. These exceptions indicate times when political divisions were narrow enough to cause misfires: 1876, Rutherford Hayes; 1888, Benjamin Harrison; 2000, George W. Bush; 2016, Donald Trump.

One could also examine changes in control of the House of Representatives, which occurred half a dozen times in just two decades. Sound familiar? We’re up to five such changes since the 1994 election.

In U.S. history curricula, the original Gilded Age has the approximate status of flyover territory. My exposure to the Gilded Age came later, via the podcast I used to co-host with my colleague Julian Zelizer. If you have time, I recommend our episodes with:

• Politics & Polls #75: Richard White, author of The Republic For Which It Stands, a history of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. I warmly recommend this book, as well as the classic Standing At Armageddon by Nell Irvin Painter.

• Politics & Polls 211: Jack Balkin, author of The Cycles of Constitutional Time, arguing that Constitutional interpretation swings back and forth on long time scales, and can influence whether the right or the left is interested in using court power to force change. Jack also invited me to write essays on the theme of his book at his blog, Balkinization. I wrote about the pendulum of electoral math, as well as the entrenchment of judicial power that can occur with lifetime Supreme Court terms.

Those interviews capture the brinksmanship and instability of that past time, with echoes and connections to our new Gilded Age.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the parallels make me optimistic about our future. We do have challenging problems: deep resentment of elites, the desperation of a shrinking majority ethnic group, information silos, and a lack of policy overlap between the major parties. But even the worst problems cannot continue forever, and the first Gilded Age did eventually end.

People then thought they were standing on the edge of Armageddon. But at some point one enters Armageddon…or one does not. They escaped, and entered the Progressive Era. I believe that with work and luck, we can do the same.

A dimensionality-based theory of our moment

Our existing mechanisms of government are ill-matched to current political problems. Those mechanisms depend on unspoken goodwill: Losers of elections should concede and wait to fight another day. Minority groups, whether a party or a racial community, deserve and require a means of being heard. And some form of majority rule should hold sway in least one branch of government.

Finding what caused our current polarization is challenging. Likely upstream causes include long-distance and modern communication which allow a consensus to develop within a group rapidly across long distances - but little communication between groups. These communities can be cultural or partisan. And when these groups have little or no overlap, conflict comes far more naturally than compromise.

This separation of groups can cause instability. I think of political polarization as reducing the dimensionality of society: everyone falls along a single axis. That’s far worse than a complex landscape of all the opinions and alliances that people form in a rich society.

The image above shows a simulated landscape of voters: one group on the left, one on the right, and a third smaller group. If all are forced to fall along a single axis, then the smallest group naturally forced to choose up sides. In a more complex landscape, they have more agency. For an example, see the recent Alaska Congressional race.

As my collaborators and I wrote in PNAS, low dimensional systems can become unstable. Whether it be heart attacks, avalanches, or political revolutions, complex systems dynamics tells us that if a system becomes polarized along a single dimension, it becomes easier for the system to go out of control.

Above: a simulation of cardiac dynamics by Kaboudian et al.

(Complexity scientist Peter Turchin has made an interesting attempt at modeling civilizational change - see his essay on cliodynamics and a article testing different models. That is a large topic for another day.)

In political dynamics, one contributor to such instability may be runaway feedback, in which a legislature or court maintains its own authority without external checks, decoupling from anything resembling popular opinion. Yet the popular opinion is still there. That creates two forces that work against another, with no easy way to resolve the tension.

In this light, a challenge in our democracy is how to restore the higher dimensionality that comes with a give-and-take between the many groups of our diverse society. Ranked-choice voting, non-partisan redistricting and primaries, and other reforms can help increase political dimensionality.

A fork in the road

We aren’t likely to stay at even balance between the parties forever. National elections have been close for 20 years, but it seems impossible that they will remain that way forever. If the past is any example, they won’t.

The first Gilded Age lasted from the Great Compromise of 1876 to the realigning election of 1896, and these two events are commonly regarded as bookends to that era. Indeed, the 1896 election was a choice between two visions of government offered by William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, a Trump-reminiscent populist of his time. Both wanted a strong national government, but they differed in their views of what it should look like. The outcome was the Progressive Era, a time of reform and future possibilities.

However, a darker outcome is possible. The Gilded Age came right after the Civil War. Many people of that time were trying to avoid returning to those bad old days and were willing to do whatever it took to maintain the Union. Today we don’t have that memory. It is certainly possible to imagine a worsening rift between red and blue America.

Part of the resolution of the Gilded Age involved taking huge steps backwards on racial rights. Forward movement restarted much later. Today, a major challenge to democracies around the world is how to manage a transition to a multicultural society. Has anyone ever succeeded at doing that?

My guess is that we have about a decade to shape that future. Demographic change makes it increasingly difficult for a shrinking majority ethnic group in the Republican Party to maintain power along the current ideological and racial lines, at least by modification of our current electoral institutions. So those lines can change, or our institutions of democracy can change.

The short term and the long term

I see a long goal of democracy reform as managing change in a peaceful manner. Reaching a good outcome requires working on different time scales. On an election-by-election basis, one should work on electing the best representatives available, and achieving reforms that are possible now, using current mechanisms. In the long term, it is necessary to lay the groundwork for lasting, deeper changes.

In October, I wrote about races that were critical for preventing democracy from backsliding. As most of you know by now, a number of those key races turned out well: election deniers in many states swing states failed to get in office, including Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The fundraising sites I created listed over 20 candidates in all. About half of them won, which is where one wants to be for maximum leverage. I have reviewed the logic of this at the Princeton Election Consortium, as well as how the elections turned out. The ActBlue and WinRed sites and raised several hundred thousand dollars for these candidates. If you gave, I thank you.

Back to the long term

With the 2022 election behind us, it is possible to turn back to the question of long-term repairs. These include state-by-state reforms, as well as building towards the 2024 election. Both are critical, and I look forward to writing about them - and hearing about your priorities.

Happy Thanksgiving!