Is it progressives that can't govern?

Lately there's been a lot of understandable frustration over the various degrees of congressional Democratic bickering, stone-walling and foot-dragging over the administration's agenda, something I sympathize greatly with. As with the stimulus and the 11th-hour "centrist" watering down process, a lot of this stuff is hurting genuinely valuable progressive legislation for reasons that seem political and ideological rather than practical or justifiable. The Employee Free Choice Act, for example, which is designed to strengthen America's various ailing labour unions and fend off the predations of the more dickish employers out there, is looking like less and less passable by the day, especially now that Dianne Feinstein (!) has suggested that she may not support it in the senate. Beyond that, a lot of Democrats in both the House and the Senate are very loudly and ostentatiously pointing out their "centrist" credentials every chance they get, implying more or less that a) they stand far to the right of the Obama Administration and b) this is an inherently good thing, even as poll after poll comes back showing significantly higher approval ratings for Obama than for Congress.

So the congressional Democrats, at least the loudest ones, are making it difficult for a Democratic administration to pass a series of Democratic bills. Why? Jonathan Chait of the New Republic recently wrote an article (Why the Democrats Can't Govern) trying to get to the bottom of this (which is well worth reading in full), and its been circulating the blogosphere for the past couple of days. Chait argues that the Democrats have both a structural disadvantage in maintaining strong party discipline and a long tradition of standing athwart Democratic administrations. While I don't know how much I like the tradition argument, as it requires the assumption that Democrats learned nothing about partisan cohesion from Republicans in the last thirty years, the structural critique makes more sense. Basically, congressional representatives are disproportionately and overwhelmingly favourable to the rich. For the Republicans, who are explicitly pro-business, this is great, because it often means that their national legislative goals are closely in tune with those of the wealthy of the districts they came from (where they got their money and support). For Democrats, the influence of business is far more divisive: it means that a congressman from Michigan, for example, could be solidly pro-labour but have a terrible environmental record. Because many planks of the Democratic platform are good from a policy perspective but run up against business interests, and because business interests are the financial backbone of both major American parties, there will always be dissenters within the Democratic party to stand up for the poor old billionaires.

Responding to Chait's article, Ron Brownstein made another excellent point:

Democrats today are competing across a much wider terrain than Republicans--both demographically and geographically. On Election Day, that's a great asset. That broader reach is why Obama won nearly 80 more Electoral College votes than Bush did even in his 2004 highpoint, and why Democrats today enjoy larger majorities in both the House and Senate than Republicans did at any point during their 12 years of control. But for Democrats, the price of that broader electoral reach is more ideological diversity than Republicans operate with; that's the principal reason Democrats cannot expect to consistently match the level of uniformity that Republicans achieved during their years in the majority.

Even in the best of times, Republicans are typically coming to Washington from areas that look very similar - Southern, rural, evangelical, etc. This isn't to say that there isn't/wasn't diversity within the Republican super-caucuses of yore, but that they have, since Nixon, pursued a strategy of locking down Southern votes before moving outwards. Democrats never really had a stronghold like that, and so have worked to appeal across a wide range of districts, meaning a wider variety of voters that need to be heard and incorporated. Michael Barone, a conservative pundit, put it this way:

This is similar but not identical to a point I’ve often made: that the Republican Party is the party of people who are considered, by themselves and by others, as normal Americans—Northern white Protestants in the 19th century, married white Christians more recently—while the Democratic Party is the party of the out groups who are in some sense seen, by themselves and by others, as not normal—white Southerners and Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, blacks and white seculars more recently. Thus it’s natural for the Democrats to be more fissiparous.

Now, that's a very, very dumb way to say it, but the point is roughly the same: Democrats, when successful, draw from a wide range of voters. Republicans, when successful, appeal to a specific group of voters (one of their strategies, not coincidentally, is to offer this group the moniker of "normality", but that's off-topic). The Republican strategy works great for producing partisan discipline, because it's not hard to make the voting preferences of Republican congressmen align, but if the target "normal" group is shrinking (which it is), you're going to start losing elections. Many of the candidates for the RNC Chairmanship, like Saul Anuzis of Michigan, argued that Republican future successes were predicated on regionally funded and targeted campaigns, rather than attempts at broad national cohesion. The current Democratic 50-state plan, by contrast, is a far better electoral strategy than a governing one.

Finally, and sadly, the most interesting argument I've yet heard to explain this I can't actually find at the moment. A couple weeks back, in response to the perpetually resurfacing meme that "America is fundamentally a centre-right nation", Matt Yglesias argued that, fundamentally, all countries are politically right of centre, and that as a result no progressive coalition of governing party can stay in power for a long period of time. Because progressive coalitions unite and act to change specific things, while conservative coalitions unite to maintain the status quo, progressive coalitions are goal-oriented and therefore time-sensitive - to impel change, progressives must expend political capital, which means losing votes in the long run, which means they never get to stick around. As a result, success for a progressive government should not be measured in the length or girth of party dominance, but by whether the reforms they put in place stick around well after they're booted from power. If a progressive reform succeeds, it becomes status quo, and therefore removed from the political debate entirely. So if Democrats pass universal health care and a cap-and-trade bill this year, but lose their majorities and the presidency by 2012, they will have succeeded if these two things become broadly accepted as a given within the American population.

There some obvious oversimplifications here: Republicans, like Democrats, are interested in changing the status quo, and often in ways that are considered conservative but do not actually involve the removal of prior progressive legislation; all politicians of all stripes are self-preservationists and therefore will not expend all their political capital just to pass a few laws; this perspective paints conservative governments as impassive stewards who themselves have no agenda beyond stasis; and so on. The theory is useful, though, to point out that structurally democracies have a lot of political inertia that must be overcome to bring about change, and that there is no reason why this inertia wouldn't show up in a large and unruly coalition like the Democratic Party.