Getty Opinion The Self-fulfilling Prophecy of ‘Government Doesn’t Work’

Barney Frank is a POLITICO columnist and a former Democratic representative from Massachusetts.

It’s easy to see American politics as a situation in which voters are all innocent victims of mistreatment at the hands of elected officials — easy, but wrong. Sure, politicians often fall short, and I’m convinced that the negative bias of the media make it harder to govern responsibly. But the voters are no bargain either.

Voters themselves are a big part of the problem, for more than one reason. One, as I explained a couple of weeks ago, is that their habit of swinging back and forth from one election to the next might be the biggest cause of gridlock in Washington.


But there’s another, perhaps deeper reason, one that’s both a cause and an effect of the political dysfunction from which we now suffer: a sharp decline in the public’s belief that government works.

This unwarranted, excessive negativism has a real effect on the electorate’s behavior, and in turn creates a pattern of voting — and equally important, non-voting — that determines which efforts to improve things will succeed and which are very likely to fail.

I’m writing this not to defend my former colleagues in elected office, highly as I regard many of them, but to correct a widespread misperception that not only diverts attention from what needs to be done, but in fact exacerbates the situation. That mistake is assuming that the problem is too many ideological members of Congress, of both parties, who would rather shut things down rather than compromise.

There are two serious flaws in this description. First, it assumes a false equivalence between the parties. It is true that the center of political gravity in each party has moved further from the center. But not equally so. I believe that the recent speakership debacle and the current presidential nominating contest demonstrate that the Republicans have moved further right on the issues than the Democrats have gone left.

But even these who reject this point can’t deny that there’s a stark difference between the parties on the critical question of whether they’re willing to compromise to be sure government functions effectively. One major dividing line between the dominant factions in each party today is, literally, their commitment to government in general, over and above any specific set of policies. Perhaps the biggest shift over the past eight years is how far that commitment has fallen out of favor among those who now dominate Republican primary contests.

This explains, for example, why we Democrats gave George W. Bush much more support in coping with the financial crisis than the Republicans gave Barack Obama. As Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke document in their memoirs, I spent much of the first two years of my Financial Services Committee chairmanship defending them — and the President who appointed and supported them — against increasingly angry right-wing Republican attacks. In each presidency the congressional opposition had some partisan incentive to embarrass the President; but we, unlike them, also felt an obligation to keep government functioning in a manner appropriate to the need.

I also experienced in that period the sharp ideological shift to the right by House Republicans. One of our first legislative efforts as the majority was to pass a bill prohibiting financial institutions from making subprime mortgage loans to people who were highly unlikely to be able to repay them. The committee’s ranking member, Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), worked with us to pass the bill — which was, incidentally, denounced in a Nov. 6, 2007, editorial by The Wall Street Journal as an assault on the ability of low-income people, especially minorities, to become homeowners. The reaction of his party colleagues was to denounce him and ask Speaker Boehner to remove him from his leadership position. Bacchus fought back and survived, but only by agreeing to eschew any further bipartisan cooperation — an arrangement enforced by the addition to his staff of monitors selected by the leadership. We were never again to get cooperation from him — for example, he had to abstain from the process of shaping and adopting the Bush administration’s request for the Troubled Asset Relief Program and had to play the role of hard-line opponent to any significant financial reform.

As the example illustrates, this means the solution to gridlock isn’t just for members of both parties to try harder to get along. In fact the “get along” position has been held almost entirely by Democrats — like Joe Biden in his speech bowing out of a presidential run, or Democratic congressional candidates like Seth Moulton who won his primary by promising he could help end stalemate by setting the example of how to rise above partisanship. These efforts have produced negligible results, in part because the typical analysis of the problem actually reinforces the voter behavior that lies behind it.

As I’ve written before, bitter gridlock is the result of the alternation in power every two years since 2008 between a Democratic president with an activist agenda and very conservative congressional majorities so determined to prevent him from acting that they’re willing to cripple essential government functions to do it. There’s little even the most skillful negotiators can do to break this logjam, as long as the election outcomes dictate this result.

The more Americans tell themselves the problem lies with the politicians in office, and the less they admit it’s the responsibility of the voters who elect people unwilling to govern, the worse things will become. Blaming elected officials just deepens the degree of public unhappiness with the political system; this misplaced anger then depresses voter turnout and distorts voters’ choices when they get to the booth.

Once again there is an asymmetry when it comes to party behavior. Nonvoting is more often the response of the angry left than of the angry right. When the latter became increasingly dissatisfied with the response to the 2008 crash, they formed the tea party, the members of which actually increased their disciplined participation in elections. Meanwhile, the most militant on the left created the Occupy movement, with a focus on public displays of their personal rejection of the status quo. Not surprisingly, elected officials were more influenced by voting than by drum circles.

The more the prevailing narrative blames the failures of political insiders for gridlock, leading to voter alienation, the deeper the gridlock and the greater the advantage to the right. It is the people who voted for Barack Obama and then sat out the midterms of 2010 and 2014 who are primarily responsible for his inability to achieve his goals.

The tendency to blame all members of Congress together for the institution’s inability to function accounts for the largest reason that the no-compromise faction has been so successful. In past years, when a party went further to one side than most voters wanted — Republicans in 1964, Democrats in 1972 — it suffered at the polls and made corrections.

But if, as prevailing sophisticated opinion holds, both sides are equally guilty — not of ideological excess or refusal to negotiate, but of a willful refusal to get along with each other — there are no negative consequences for obstructive behavior. A failure caused by one side is blamed on both, discouraging voters who care about cooperation and motivating those who don’t mind shutting down what seems like a failed system.

For what it’s worth, I’m not just trying to encourage more Democrats to vote. Every public opinion poll I have seen indicates that the majority of self-identified Republicans disagree with the extreme conservative positions of the shutdown faction and really do want leaders like John Boehner who seek to combine conservatism with governance. But they, too, are turned off from voting, especially in primaries, by the prevailing distaste for politicians—and thus enable the triumph of the no-compromise crowd.

Some combination of three things will have to occur to break the logjam. Mainstream conservative Republicans will have to start voting more in primaries and take back their party; unhappy voters on the left will have to realize that being unhappy is a reason to vote, not to sulk; and all voters will have to demonstrate — by really showing up and voting for candidates actually willing to do the hard work of governing — that there is an electoral price to pay for those who believe that fealty to their ideology is the only relevant aspect of holding office.