Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard and the author of five books, most recently "Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDRs Great Supreme Court Justices."
Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- John Chambers, chairman of Standard & Poor’s sovereign debt committee, talks about S&P;'s downgrade of its U.S. credit rating.
He speaks with Bloomberg's Adam Johnson. (Excerpt. Source: Bloomberg)
Imagine you are a senior official of
the Chinese Communist Party trying to figure out whether
democracy is a good idea. The brinkmanship over raising the debt
ceiling is a prime example for the argument that democracy is
irrational, right?
So say the commentators, one and all. Just think of the
relief you would feel as a Chinese official knowing that you
will never have to deal with anyone as crazy as the Tea Party --
except maybe by locking them up.
But you would be wrong. More significant than the Tea
Partiers’ willingness to push things to the edge was their
ultimate judgment not to go over it.
The real story of the debt-ceiling showdown is not that
democracy is pathological. It is, rather, that the electoral
system -- even when plagued by partisanship -- is the best ever
devised to defang angry citizens and the political movements
they form. Once again, U.S. democracy has demonstrated that it
is a machine for generating moderation and preserving the
ideological center.
You may be forgiven for thinking this sounds as crazy as,
well, a Tea Partier in a sweltering D.C. summer. After all, the
new congressmen elected as a result of the Tea Party insurgency
within the Republican Party brought the country -- and by
extension, the world -- scarily close to some sort of financial
meltdown.
Democrats and traditional Republicans in Congress
understood that maintaining the credit of the U.S. was serious
business. By contrast, until the very last moment, it seemed
possible that the Tea Party representatives just didn’t
understand the basics of financial economics. Their idea of
ending business as usual was starting to look like ending the
financial world as we know it.
Bad Presidential Advice
Had the Tea Party actually precipitated a crisis, the
lesson could well have been that democracy is too risky a form
of government to be charged with a serious responsibility like
stewarding the global economy.
Hints of this could be found among those who wanted the
president to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally. Some were
saying that the laws and the Constitution must be interpreted
flexibly to avoid self-inflicted democratic disaster. Others --
including one of my academic colleagues -- were going further,
calling for President Barack Obama to play the Prince (or the
Fuehrer) and save the republic by asserting that necessity
trumps the rule of law.
Fortunately, not everyone lost his head. The public
remained relatively confident of a deal. And the markets never
panicked. Why? What was the insight that preserved these wise
crowds from the dangerous errors of the eggheads?
The answer has everything to do with how politicians’
incentives work. Elected by angry constituents demanding change
in the form of spending cuts, the Tea Party congressmen had to
take the opportunity to show they meant business. This was
Democracy 101: If people elected you on a single issue, you had
better signal to them that you take their concerns seriously. If
not, you are an obvious hypocrite, and you deserve to lose your
next election.
Democracy 102 was the way the Tea Party representatives
managed their bargaining position. Their optimal strategy was to
convince the rest of Congress and the president that they might
just be crazy enough to block a deal unless they got enough of
what they wanted.
Stopping Speaker John Boehner’s first plan before it came
up for a vote, just a couple of days before D-Day, was the
perfect way of showing they might be that crazy. Do you recall
that little voice of doubt we all felt, wondering if they were
ignorant or foolish enough to take us into oblivion? That was
their negotiating power hitting its high point.
An Extreme Moment
But that extreme moment was also where the Tea Party
congressmen’s incentives shifted. After all, they and their
supporters also have pension plans. They, too, have savings (to
the extent anyone has savings anymore) and family members who
need jobs. The Tea Party actually doesn’t want the economy to
collapse -- much less be held responsible for it.
Once they were elected to Congress, the Tea Party
congressmen had a stake in the system. They wanted to please
their constituents -- but they also wanted to preserve their
positions as members of America’s (elected) ruling elite.
They were no longer radicals bent on breaking the system.
Now they wanted to change it from within. This was democracy at
a higher level: the kind of democracy that co-opts would-be
rebels by making them a part of, and dependent on, the system.
Once the Tea Party members of Congress reconceived
themselves as part of the governing elite, what they wanted was
for the debt ceiling to be raised -- without too many of them
having to vote for it. In this they were exactly like ordinary
politicians, who often find themselves to be in favor of bills
before they are against them.
The horse-trading of politics is set up so that a
compromise can be reached with as few elected officials as
possible voting in ways that will anger their own constituents.
All members of Congress know this. They all want to get re-
elected. Normally, none of them is going to run for re-election
against any other. Within some boundary, they accommodate each
other’s needs. (In the end, 32 of the 60 Tea Party Caucus
members voted for the compromise.)
The upshot was that the final deal, excoriated by hard-line
Republicans and Democrats alike as a tremendous concession to
the other side, is somewhere toward the median of American
public opinion. It may be incoherent. But in the most literal
sense it is undoubtedly centrist.
Behold the genius of democracy. Insurgent political forces
can be brought into the tent -- and domesticated. Whatever the
Tea Party congressmen might say to the television cameras, the
fact is that today they are just another bunch of politicians.
It’s something we should be grateful for. And it’s a lesson any
Chinese Communist Party official would do well to understand.
(Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University, is a
Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column:
Noah Feldman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at
noah.feldman@harvard.edu
To contact the editor responsible for this column:
Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net