Gerrymandered illinois 4th district maP (www.publicmapping.org)

After the government shutdown, a congressional reboot?

Self Organized Governance Part 1

The congressional paralysis that has shutdown the government is a good example of systemic forces operating in a way where incentive mechanisms are rigged against the best interest of the people. It is also an example of a system that has Self Organized and reached a critical point where it is on the verge of collapse. Failing to increase the debt ceiling can be considered a catastrophic collapse of US governance.

Through multiple iterations (once every 10 years for hundreds of years) we have gerrymandered congressional districts re-organizing the voters into politically monolithic blocks. This has replaced electoral competitiveness with regional electoral “monopolies”. Congressional democracy depends on having competitive districts where victories and defeats are uncertain.

Today, most legislators don’t fear a threat from the other side of the aisle, and instead they fear an attack coming from their extremes.This naturally produces political extremism as the behavioral attractor moves away from the conciliatory center. While right now it is the so-called “tea party movement” who is capitalizing from this new condition by threatening more moderate GOP members with attacks during primary elections if they do not support their agenda, there is no reason why in the future this could not happen to the democratic left, as their districts are as heavily gerrymandered as the republican ones. It took centuries to evolve to this point because self-organization is often a slow process. The tea party movement is the first movement to clearly make the nuclear option of linking a government shutdown and debt default to a single issue, the cornerstone of their political activism. Expect more, as the understanding of this new systemic state propagates.

On the other hand, America’s constitutional design has always depended on a series of political ethics that made certain procedural tactics legal and constitutional, but unacceptable. The increase of the use of the filibuster is an example of how those formerly exceptional tactics become mainstream. Linking a government shutdown and a threatened debt default to defunding one particular program is another political innovation, unthinkable until now.

The systemic problem is that, unlike European parliamentary democracies, our constitutional model has no systemic conflict resolution mechanism to deal with this nuclear option.

When conflict makes governing under the results of the last election unsustainable in Germany, the UK, or Italy, for example, the result of the mexican standoff is simple; parliament is dissolved, new elections are called and the people settle the dispute (most of the time) through the ballot box.

Alas, our presidential system does not allow for that, and ethical politicians willing to compromise are the only tool available to exit this game of chicken on steroids. The problem is that compromise means that the party in control of the administration has to accept this nuclear option as a valid negotiation tool of the extreme right, henceforth, legitimizing the use of governmental shutdown as a weapon against any specific legislation the other side does not like (should the extreme left defund the government the next time a GOP president is in power, if gun control does not pass?)

For the opposition party that controls one house of the parliament, compromise and negotiation exposes its moderate congressmen who come from heavily gerrymandered congressional districts to an attack from the ideological extremes of their party, where a potential outcome is the election of a more radical congressman; not the opposite.

By changing the unwritten rules of parliamentary negotiation to make government shutdown and debt default valid tools to negotiate against the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare and decreasing competitiveness of congressional districts exposing moderates to the attack of ideological extremists, the rules of political conflict in DC reward irresponsible behavior at the individual congressman/woman scale, even if everybody hates that behavior when aggregated. This reward mechanism damages the whole. But sadly, today in Capitol Hill, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

In a later post I’ll discuss a possible solution, once I learn more from your feedback.